Overview
There is little doubt that molecular and cellular alterations drive the physiological manifestations observed in ageing organisms. But why then does the average laboratory mouse have a median lifespan of only 2.5 years, whereas its human handler can optimistically look forward to living 30 times longer? Humans are not simply made of better physical material or encounter orders of magnitude fewer stressors. Instead, such phenomena suggest that ageing and breakdown in living organisms is clearly distinct in some ways from the entropic degradation observed in inanimate objects.
Unlike a car or a machine, living systems have acquired intrinsic strategies that can modulate the rate of breakdown to varying degrees across species. Rationally, the way in which these traits are hypothesized to have been distributed is via natural selection. The evolutionary theories of ageing have a long-standing history, dating back more than half a century. While most of the papers on the topic are purely theoretical, in 1981, Rose and Charlesworth provided some of the best direct evidence that differential ageing rates may be under the control of natural selection, and what’s more, share pleiotropic effects with other key life history traits that have an impact on fitness.
This is the reference of the article regarding the above mentioned topic
Rose, M. R. & Charlesworth, B. Genetics of life history in Drosophila melanogaster. II. Exploratory selection experiments. Genetics 97, 187–196 (1981)
Carefully revise the article and try to answer to the question about lifespam of humans.