In the classic formulation of Darwinism, evolution follows from the survival of the fittest to live and repro

The classical approach of evolutionism is based on the concept of the survival of the fittest individuals. More and more data indicate that natural selection often acts with supra individual mechanisms favoring genes and actions harmful for the individual. The most striking type of cases is when an individual kills himself or his offspring by actions genetically determined or favored. The neologism “phenoptosis” describes these events and implicates that they are not evolutionary anomalies but physiological phenomena determined by natural selection. The most important and familiar kind of phenop tosis, the “slow phenoptosis” or aging, which is currently considered an inevitable and scarcely changeable event, is trans formed by this different interpretation into a function, in principle modifiable and manageable. Perhaps, the neologism “phenoptosis” will represent, together with the term supra individual selection, the mark of a vital enrichment of evolu tionism, conceived in broader terms of which the individual selection is just a particular case, and will be referred to as the brand and the standard for the start of a new era. DOI: 10.1134/S0006297912070139