Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's a fallacy there: the joint assumptions that evolution has "already happened" and has produced fully optimized systems.

If we adopt a flawed "evolution as agent" model, there is zero evidence that it has tried everything, or even most things, in order to optimize species.

If we adopt a more accurate model, evolution doesn't optimize or produce optimized systems. It can (but does not always) produce reliable (as in reproduction/survival) systems. There are plenty of ways Klotho could be beneficial but not produced by selection: mutations which increase production of this chemical may have occurred but had negative effects on fitness, or may have happened to occur along with other mutations with negative effects; there may not be any mutations which increased production (it's tempting to think of e.g. hormone levels as "knobs" for which there are mutations that turn up/down output, but that metaphor completely fails in many cases); beneficial mutations to increase Klotho production may be possible but not have occurred in nature because of chance or complexity of changes required to actually manifest the "right" change.

The article mentions people who produce more Klotho, so clearly that variation has occurred:

> Some people carry a genetic variation that causes them to produce higher levels of Klotho than average in their bodies. Dr. Dubal and her colleagues identified a group of healthy old people with the variant and tested their cognition.

> They scored better than people who make an average level of Klotho. “It’s not like they didn’t undergo cognitive decline,” said Dr. Dubal. “It’s just that they started off higher.”

I'm a bit torn between your perspective and the parent comment. I accept the logic of your argument.

But that doesn't mean the parent comment couldn't be correct. Klotho could have side effects (doesn't everything have side effects?) and that could be why we (and mice) don't produce more of it. I don't think that's a bad hypothesis.

Of course it's just a hypothesis and, as you point out, it doesn't logically follow that our production of Klotho is perfectly optimized (Optimized for what? Fitness? Fitness is a moving target). But, on the whole, I'm skeptical of a hormone that makes us smarter and wards off brain degeneration but does nothing else.

There might also be a mob-reaction against beeing gambled too much, resulting in conspiracy theorys and goverments built to execute those framed in those in conspiracies.

In other word, hacking your fellow mens livelihood might shorten your longterm survival.

I am curious what you are on.

Maybe Klotho!

If you are smart, you do not work hard. Instead, it turns into a sort of competition, who has to work the least, to extract the most benefits and do the least amount of work. Hacking in that regard, is a competition of parasites.

My pet theory is, that having suffered for nearly 10.000 years under castes of priests and noble men unwilling to lift a finger, humanity has developed a near instinctive hatred for "parasitic" entitys, who ledge themselves to society extracting value without returning anything to society.

The moment, external circumstances in such a system create a down turn, the whole thing explodes, viciously attacking the non-contributors, trying to exterminate them and redistribute there ill gathered gains back to society.

Take a look at france during the revolution for example. Sometimes the parasites, manage to redirect the hatred towards internal or external outgroups, like the jews in germany during ww2, but in the end, the mobrule undoes most of the parasitic growth anyway by sheer brute force and endurance of turmoil.

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