There's a cool literature about the evolution of Daphnia aging. Since they're short-lived, and are found in ponds and lakes all over the world, you can see how in some environments they evolved to live longer, while in others, they evolved to live shorter.
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Vertebrates with exceptional longevity (tortoises and sharks can live centuries) are all cold-blooded; the naked mole rat (a mammal that appears not to senesce with age) is a rare example of a cold-blooded mammal; and mammals that hibernate age slower than mammals that don't.
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Also, inducing hypothyroidism in rats (which lowers their metabolic rate) makes them live 30% longer. http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-6374(86)90052-7 …
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Genetic differences between short- and long-lived strains of similar species could point the way towards mechanisms to delay aging in humans. I don't expect simply lowering metabolism to be a good trade-off, but there may be other resilience mechanisms that we could "borrow."
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The "bad" news is that humans are already pretty K-selected; we may already have most of the long-life adaptations we see in other animals. (Though it's worth doing a lot more comparative genomics to find out!)
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The "good" news is that evidence is accumulating all over the place that aging rates respond to evolutionary incentives. Any knob that Evolution can turn, Man can in principle learn to turn.
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