Mortality plateaus and directionality theory

Recent large scale studies of senescence in animals and humans have revealed mortality rates that levelled off at advanced ages. These empirical findings are now known to be inconsistent with evolutionary theories of senescence based on the Malthusian parameter as a measure of fitness. This article analyses the incidence of mortality plateaus in terms of directionality theory, a new class of models based on evolutionary entropy as a measure of fitness. We show that the intensity of selection, in the context of directionality theory, is a convex function of age, and we invoke this property to predict that in populations evolving under bounded growth constraints, evolutionarily stable mortality patterns will be described by rates which abate with age at extreme ages. The explanatory power of directionality theory, in contrast with the limitations of the Malthusian model, accords with the claim that evolutionary entropy, rather than the Malthusian parameter, constitutes the operationally valid measure of Darwinian fitness.