Mutation accumulation theory

[1] Starting at 0 at birth, the probability increases to its maximum in young adulthood once sexual maturity has been reached, before gradually decreasing with age.

In such cases deleterious mutations which are expressed early on are strongly selected against due to their major impact on the number of offspring produced by that individual.

[6] The implication that flight, and therefore lower predation, increases lifespan is further born out by the fact that bats live on average 3 times longer than similarly sized mammals with comparable metabolic rates.

As expected when applying the mutation accumulation theory, established queens are at almost no risk of predation or other forms of extrinsic mortality, and consequently age far more slowly than others of their species.

[8] In the interest of finding specific evidence for the mutation accumulation theory, separate from that which also supports the similar antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis, an experiment was conducted involving the breeding of successive generations of Drosophila Melanogaster.

This is because these variables are proportional to the equilibrium frequencies of deleterious alleles, which are expected to increase with age under mutation accumulation but not under the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis.

[10] Experimental populations of Drosophila Melanogaster, and other organisms, however, exhibit age-specific mortality rates that plateau well before reaching 100%, making mutation accumulation alone an insufficient explanation.