He has authored "The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging". If the effect on fitness of increase in mortality is zero, as is the case after the age when survival affects reproduction, then natural selection does not weed out the tendency for rates of mortality to accelerate with age. The idea that selection for reproduction in youth causes accumulating dysfunction in later adulthood is a commonly accepted explanation for aging. Protagonistic pleiotropy is the opposite effect: beneficial effects in later life as a result of selection for reproduction in earlier life. Rose contends that a correct understanding of Hamilton's equations through mathematical modeling show that protagonistic pleiotropy is plausible. Rose's most recent book is "Does Aging Stop?". W. D. Hamilton advanced the idea that any gene killing an organism before it reproduced would be weeded out by natural selection. However, genes that kill later in life, after reproduction ceases, can remain in the population. For Rose, this suggests that aging is a result of "declining forces of natural selection." He points to studies of the demographic data in large-scale fruit fly experiments and actuarial data for humans which he believes support the hypothesis that acceleration in death rates can halt in later life. According to Rose, mortality-rate plateaus have not often been noticed in humans because they are only seen in specific-age cohorts of the very old. His proposed explanation is that at a stage of life beyond the potential to reproduce, the effect of natural selection is no longer falling as it has 'bottomed out'. Rose suggests that if a decline in the effect of natural selection is responsible for aging, then when this decline finally ends, at post-reproductive age, aging could halt. He reasons it follows that aging is "not a cumulative process of progressive chemical damage, like rust, at late ages, aging can stop". According to Rose, relative to the age of reproductive maturity a transition to the late-life stage of life occurs much later in humans than in the populations of flies for which there are data. In humans, the 'late-life' stage of life is only reached at 90 years old, whereas the data for flies scaled to humans would predict a 'late-life' stage for humans at 40–50 years old. Rose suggests that human populations' adoption of agriculture led to more children surviving to adulthood, and to reproduction occurring later in life. Agriculture is also hypothesized by Rose to have resulted in high population density, thereby increasing the range of ages not under selection.