Somatic selection of poorly differentiating variant stem cell clones could be a key to human ageing

Abstract Any replicating system in which heritable variants with differing replicative potentials can arise is subject to a Darwinian evolutionary process. The continually replicating adult tissue stem cells that control the integrity of many tissues of long-lived, multicellular, complex vertebrate organisms, including humans, constitute such a replicating system. Our suggestion is that somatic selection for mutations (or stable epigenetic changes) that cause an increased rate of adult tissue stem cell proliferation, and their long-term persistence, at the expense of normal differentiation, is a major key to the ageing process. Once an organism has passed the reproductive age, there is no longer any significant counterselection at the organismal level to this inevitable cellular level Darwinian process.