Is aging inevitable?
joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com
joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com
The author also believes that, "it is difficult to escape the inference that powerful people and organizations have engineered this pandemic with deadly intent," believing that Bill Gates' TED talk indicated that he knew that COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was coming. He thinks that the pandemic was planned to profit the pharmaceutical industry, and that vaccines are sometimes maliciously manufactured to induce infertility.
Take of that what you will.
Here is the article about the COVID-19 and Bill Gates on the same page: https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2021/05/10/unthinkabl...
And now the article is "flagged" and goodbye discussion about this topic in general.
If longevity research is important to you, you could help push the discussion by submitting something that is:
A) interesting
B) from a credible source
Please do. For what it's worth, I myself believe that increasing human lifespans is immensely important. I'd love to see a trillion dollar budget for it. I think you might be of similar disposition.
I'd suggest we're not helping our cause by throwing the spotlight on the people among us with conspiratorial delusions. There are plenty of legitimate and level-headed anti-aging scientists who would serve as better representatives.
There are so many entrenched beliefs that curb research in this field: 'Aging is "natural"', 'Who would want to live until they are xxx years old, anyway?', 'Aging keeps population levels down', 'Aging removes bad people (dictators etc.)', 'Death makes life scarce and therefore valuable', ... No, aging is fixable and all other problems, real or imagined, have more direct solutions. We have to realize this, as a society, immediately and stop all the nonsense prevarications. Parents should not have to outlive their children, and neither should children have to outlive their parents.
Mathematical models that claim to “prove” that aging is inevitable are trivial to construct by introducing assumptions that fit your narrative. The assumptions are biologically plausible in isolation but fail to account for the full complexity of biological life and, indeed, reality [1].
This class of models is a simple extrapolation of historical aggregate lifespan time-series, and thus cannot model non-trivial pharmacological and genetic manipulations even in principle, unless these are a part of a large smooth sub-trend that has already begun.
One wouldn't be able to predict that some random flavonoid molecule extends lifespan of lab mice by 10-15%[1], and if we took the [overstated] paper's title claim uncritically, this research wouldn't happen. And yet it happened, and more than a dozen clinical trials in humans are underway.
For context to other readers, I had the following phrasing at the end of my comment: "This research is extremely damaging and should not be allowed". I removed it shortly after posting before I had seen sinenomine's comment, since, ultimately, I'm not in favor of censoring research (as along as limitations are clearly stated). My original comment was mostly a knee-jerk reaction knowing the uphill battle that life-extension research faces in the public discourse.
The reason I'm asking is that you're invoking the 'death trance argument', rather than anything scientific or medical.
The article mentions both physical limits, and geneticly encoded aging, and argues for the latter. In reality it’s a combination of both. But it doesn’t matter, as we should theoretically be able to affect both.
But yes, I'm probably not the same person as child me and that person is effectively dead.
Some crabs or lobsters don't die from natural causes from what I have heard but eventually get eaten by pray or die due to some other reason.
Current understanding of amyloid diseases is improving due to race to find a treatment for Alzheimer's, so it's not inconceivable that a focused effort could find a therapy ameliorating this condition.
A "natural cause" if I ever heard of one!
https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2021/06/17/is-aging-i...
(There are plenty of other species whose reproductive cycles are inconsistent with this assumption -- most notably all those with members that only mate once.)
Even frailty and decreased brain function might be programmed if it means that other individuals take over related tasks to gain experience.
In our modern era I think most would benefit from having a healthier relationship with death as well. Death is inevitable to us all but modern life shields us from much of this. I know many people my age who are frightened by the concept and go through an existential crisis whenever they contemplate death.
Maximizing longevity is increasing the quality of the time we do have. More time available equals more time you are able to spend doing things you actually enjoy. I feel a great deal of pressure to accomplish certain things given the very little and limited time I have available to me. It's a source of stress that would be alleviated if there were more time available to me.
Another way to look at it would be -- How much more stressful would our lives be if the average lifespan was 40 years instead of 70+?
It’s tempting to say less, since they arguably had “simpler lives.” But it’s also easy to say “more,” since they had a much more present risk of death than we do.
My hunch is that stress is (mostly) relative, and that (outside of trauma) how much one experiences is determined more by ones worldview than ones circumstances.
If you lived longer, would you feel better or just feel the same pressure with different goals?
Accomplishing something is great, but it's not quality time. Quality time is the time spent working on the accomplishment, which doesn't depend on living to see the result.
Anti-aging, on the other hand, has basically no resources spent on it, and would benefit everyone if we could figure it out. It’s definitely worth putting way more effort into.
It’s also not zero sum. We can and should do both.
My intuition is that it would be worse for said species in the same way goats with no predators are worse for goats in the end (overpopulation followed by rapid consumption of the environment and the collapse).
Are they democratic, egalitarian, respectful of the environment and biodiversity, and long-term thinkers? Such humans might be better than the short-term, biased mortals we have now.
Of course, there's no indication it would turn out that way. Given the prevalence of fascism and monopolization of power, bad outcomes seem more probable. Selfish, egotistical, power-hungry immortals that feed off the backs of mortals sounds like a dystopia that could happen.
Should AGI or brain uploads happen before human body life extension becomes limitless, we'll probably see a rapid proliferation of a "monoclonal intelligence" that has a singular disposition towards the rest of us. Who can say what that will be?
History has already shown us that made bad ideas only went away bad we cause people died. It’s not exactly controversial to say immortality will lengthen the time in which bad ideas persist, environmental concerns aside.
This self-destruction mechanism is also a very important protection against cancer.
It seems the author is reasoning more in the philosophic realm than in evolutionary biology.
In this podcast [1] an evolutionary biologist goes into depth about telomeres, evolution and how cancer and longevity are two sides of the same coin.
Long story short, having cells die after a number of replications is a postive trade off. It means that when a cell replicates too fast it also dies fast. The opposite are cancer cells, which replicate too fast and don't die.
Also, IMHO conservatism is based on fear. Perhaps stability could help us resolve the fears people have, and much older people would see that many of their previous fears never materialized, thus becoming less conservative.
Give me a $100M budget, and I'm pretty confident I could run a project to revert an omelette into an egg.
The aging analogy would be destroying old people and feeding them to pregnant mothers. This is obviously not a solution to aging.
Well, the paper does not deal with genomic or molecular underpinnings of life, it only models the curves of species' lifespans and mortalities, and fits these to simple equations ... to find that the curves can indeed be fit, and the parameters indicate that the variability of lifespan in primates, as captured by the equation, is mostly explained by variability of early mortality. Mostly expected result, given no interventions significantly slowing/reversing aging have been approved by FDA as of now. Still, it's questionable as to why we don't see social stratification as a driver of human lifespan variability, as found in [2]. Overall, the paper is underwhelming compared to its title.
Thus, the question remains open. The answer, at the very least, should explain the following:
1) How come some species[4], vertebrate species even, have more or less negligible senescence? [3][5]
2) How do specific alleles from lifespan GWAS influence human aging? [6]
3) What are precise molecular mechanisms underlying hallmarks of aging?[7]
4) Can these natural mechanisms be manipulated via therapeutic interventions to significantly change organism's lifespan? [8]
If we accept the challenge and look at molecular biology of mammalian aging, we'll see whole new fields of science right there, waiting to be explored, some already bearing fruit, given we are witnessing more than a dozen human clinical trials on various senolytics[9]
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23894-3
2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25135...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence
4. https://genomics.senescence.info/species/nonaging.php
5. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31366472/
6. https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/9/9/2863/6026390
7. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/
8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-020-0067-7
9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.13141
So I wonder, how can age and aging be defined mathematically, the messy way? If age were related to entropy, one could think of age as some sort of function on entropy. But despite all the hand-waving, I haven't found any evidence of biological age being related to physical or information entropy. Rather, I think people like to connect them to show that aging is inevitable and irreversible. Which, by the way, Colchero et. al. seem to be doing too by looking at some pitifully small amount of data. It is not[2]. IMO, the purported connection is more of a political, moral or religious statement than a scientific one.
Here is a simple definition of biological age I like to use: an organism which is not at its prime, is old. Basically, one picks an _arbitrary state_ in the lifetime of the organism, the "prime" state, and builds the notion of age as how far in state space the organism is from it. By this definition, a newborn human is (by my fuzzy idea of prime state) 21 years old at birth, and then during the next 21 years, for each birthday, their biological age decreases by one. At what we call the age of 21 years old, the "prime" state, the person is 0 years old by this definition, and from there on, the age goes up.
If describing the biological state of a human being seems overwhelming (it most certainly is), one could start with something simpler, say a bacterium, or even a totally made-up organism living in a computer, and try to model all the ways state can fluctuate. If one does that, I bet we will find the following:
- It is possible to design/find an organism state which is a stable attractor[3], and it is possible to make that state arbitrary close to "prime", or close enough to be considered "eternal youth".
I'm pretty sure that from the point of view of natural selection and population dynamics, such a state attractor would be a death end more often than not. But for the question of human immortality or eternal youth, it could be a really nice start. In particular, it will change the question from "is aging a physical/biological inevitability?" to the more constructive "how does one create unaging organisms?". This last question has more of a heretic charm than the (insert-your-adjective-here) take from Colchero et. al.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_axioms [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor