Featuring extensive references, updated for this paperback edition, "Longevity, Senescence, and the Genome" constitutes a contribution to biomedicine and the evolutionary biology of ageing. To enhance gerontology's focus on human age-related dysfunctions, Caleb E. Finch provides a comparative review of all the phyla of organisms, broadening gerontology to intersect with behavioral, developmental, evolutionary, and molecular biology. By comparing species that have different developmental and life spans, Finch proposes a typology of senescence from rapid to gradual to negligible, and he provides the first multiphyletic calculations of mortality rate constants.