Environmental Change

Adding environmental change increased aging-species success in the simulations. Faster environmental decline made senescence much more competitive, with 23 of 50 runs favoring the aging species. Real environmental change is more complex than the model's constant decline assumption. The equal fitness decrement was an acknowledged simplification of real environmental change. The simulation modeled environmental change by subtracting a constant fitness value from every individual each time step. The article's central hypothesis is that changing conditions allow senescence to speed lineage adaptation.