# Reliability theory of aging

The reliability theory of aging borrows math from engineering to explain why you age. Leonid and Natalia Gavrilov advanced it in the early 1990s. It models an organism as a network of redundant parts that fail at random. Aging, in this view, is what happens as that redundancy gets used up. As backups run out, failure rate climbs, producing the familiar Gompertz mortality curve. The theory neatly explains why death rates plateau in very old age. And it gives a quantitative bridge from molecular damage to population survival data.

## Sources

- Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. (2001). The reliability theory of aging and longevity. Journal of Theoretical Biology. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2430

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