There is no such thing as ageing. Ageing has been defined as to grow or make old.

Editor—In an effort to delay my own ageing process, I have struggled to understand Peto and Doll’s argument that there is no such thing as ageing.1 Their case seems to be predicated on their second paragraph, where they assert: “What the major diseases of adult life have shared for tens of millions of years is a common set of evolutionary pressures tending to relegate them to old age.... Natural selection acts much more strongly against death in early adult life than against death in old age.”1 Apart from this being a circular argument, which in its conclusion is more of a description than an explanation, it fails to account for some facts. Thus, if the underlying mechanism is an evolutionary one acting over such a long time span, how are we to understand the dramatic changes in life expectancy that have occurred in industrial societies—even within the living memories of your older readers? Butler’s article in the same issue shows this clearly.2 Similarly, Peto and Doll’s case rests uneasily with that of Grimley Evans, who describes hale elderly men in biblical and Greek history.3 Perhaps those who survived to be octogenarians then were fitter than those today. Most would settle for Moses’s epitaph: he “was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.”4 These changes in life expectancy (possibly in both directions) are almost contemporary in an evolutionary time scale. They certainly can have had nothing to do with a postulated teleological pressure. Peto and Doll also engage in some diverting mathematical juggling between mice and men. While they admit that for their thesis the difference between a billion and a trillion does not matter, their extrapolations are likely to be equally immaterial. It is an old (you might say aged) trick to take a common, generally understood term and so hedge your definition of it with qualifications that it is robbed of its meaning. I would settle for the definition of age and ageing in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary of 1933—“to grow or make old.”