Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates
gravityandlevity.wordpress.com
gravityandlevity.wordpress.com
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/05/applying-reliabil...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and...
Once you start to think along the lines of damage and repair, you inevitably end up in the SENS camp. It's the logical place to be.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/11/the-engineers-vie...
Bodies are complex systems and all complex systems can be prolonged in their period of prime operation by sufficiently diligent incremental repair. Developing a toolkit to do that for humans is the point of SENS the research program, with the point of SENS the advocacy program being to help people understand that the scientific community well understands in detail what needs repairing.
For more on the biochemistry of damage-that-causes-aging, explained for laypeople, you might look here:
(I'm totally serious)
I think we should stop funding/granting scholarships to liberal arts majors. Let them become STEM majors.
Sure, it might be less easy for some than others, and less motivating, but if they can learn A, they can learn B and vice versa.
People like my mother who, if she can quantify the data she can effectively do algebra, but as soon as X and Y appear she shuts down. She cannot make the jump to the abstract thinking of math, and it curtailed her ability to go back to college. It didn't help that her math teacher in 9th grade told her that she would never be good at math, much like many women from poor backgrounds. (I have no study, only the experience in tutoring on how many women said that a teacher told them not to bother, and could never make it over that hump.) Now you say that it's merely psychological for them and that they could. I'm telling you that for as much work as some of these people I tutored put in, they had a mental block that they simply could not overcome, fighting their way to a C in college algebra so they could get to where they're going.
I can give as an example my boyfriend, who can speak and teach two languages better than most people here can in their native language, and is a promising Ph.D candidate in his program. He worked for a month straight (with my help) to raise his GRE math to a minimum score. His limit may be calculus, but certainly not higher math, and not upper level sciences. Yet I have seen this man wake up, read, write, sleep, and repeat for weeks straight.
He's a gifted writer and academic, but even if he could muddle through (say...) managed information systems, he'd never be more than mediocre because his brain simply does not work that way. (He still asks for help with his Mac.) Square peg, round hole.
It doesn't benefit those who have a passion for the sciences to put him and dozens of others in the same class, wearing down the professor because they struggle to grasp concepts that future scientists understood in fifth grade.
2. I disagree that it doesn't benefit the stronger students. It was awfully hard for me to learn to teach mathematics, because I had never really had to learn it in a step by step way myself. However, when I did learn to teach an area, my understanding was orders of magnitude higher because I had the understanding of somebody gifted in the area but the method and the attention to detail of somebody who has learned it the hard way. If you mix classes with high and low skilled students, you just have to make sure you rely on the high skilled students as a teaching resource.
2. There have been many studies that have tried what you say. The problem is that the class must go slower to accommodate the slower students. Engineering degrees already have so much packed into them that they often can't take classes of interest -- are we going to make it even longer?
And I say that as someone who quite enjoys STEM. There's a lifetime of wonderful experience to be had outside of STEM.
The humanities are subjects that can be explored at home by anyone who has the luxury of free time. While I admit that a hand-holding professor can help you traverse the field quicker and lead you to insight that would be difficult to divine on your own, there are books and audio lectures that can do the same job. And what's stopping anyone from joining a mailing list on the topic of interest?
Even "big" art projects pale in comparison to the funding requirements of basic science research. We need to make sure every lab is fully-stocked with not only minds, but the latest equipment necessary to keep pace with the advancements being made at the top institutions.
Liberal arts should be clearly defined as a leisure activity, one that everyone has a right to, but not something that we should subsidize at the expense of advances in human health.
You can enjoy the liberal arts if you're dead. It's just a matter of priorities.
On the other hand, I don't see much reason to subsidize medical education or research across the board, given the huge profits in it; income from patent royalties ought to be sufficient to pay for most of the needed research and education. An exception is harder-to-monetize research, like running clinical trials for old generic medications where it's not profitable for the private sector to do so (since they wouldn't be able to patent the result), or studying diseases that primarily affect poor countries.
Ever stop to think of world hunger? Malnutrition still is the global leading cause of mortality in the world. And you're arguing to crowdsource a solution to aging which is supposedly "humanity's greatest problem" because us first-worlders can't live to 150, because having their genes fortified (or whatever) most certainly is not going to do much good for those that simply can't get enough nutrients.
This is only a problem to that tiny privileged part of humanity that has no worries whatsoever about the two lowest levels of the Hierarchy of Needs. And you must be well aware which side of the fence you're on, how many there are suffering on the other side, and you have the gall to pose THIS as humanity's greatest problem?
No. I don't easily use a "but the starving kids in Africa have it so much worse" argument, except in this case it's directly relevant.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not against longevity research, cancer research or any kind of medical advances but at least they don't fucking claim they're solving a greater problem than fucking World Hunger.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra...
The majority of those deaths are amongst the poor. Aging also causes great suffering for hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis. The majority of those people are also poor - the poor suffer far more greatly than the wealthy because of degenerative aging due to their comparative lack of access to what palliative treatments do exist.
If not for aging, the poor might have a far better chance of bettering their lot in life - they'd have no imposed time limit on working their way out of poverty, no need for large families to support them in their old age, and so forth.
So your hair shirt view of the world is completely wrong. Aging is the greatest problem, and like all universal problems falls most heavily on the poor.
Another potential benefit is that really long-lived people might take a longer-term view on other problems. It'd probably change the global warming debate pretty significantly, for example, if everybody right now had a life expectancy of a thousand.
Related: in this TED talk[1] Aubrey de Grey makes the assertion that extending life by another 20 years or so is an incredible feat because in that added 20 years science will figure out how to add 20 more, etc.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...
Lack of birth control is. Its symptom is malnutrition.
Small correction: survival to time t under the lightning bolt scenario follows an exponential distribution. A Poisson distribution, besides for being discrete, has factorial decay, not exponential decay.
What I rarely see discussion of, however, are philosophical and psychological implications of "living indefinitely".
Even if the body is says relatively youthful, what about diseases of the mind? In other words, I am saying that in the same way that increasing life-span has uncovered a plethora of diseases that were previously unknown like cancer, is it possible that further increasing life span may uncover conditions (perhaps purely psychological) that we can't even imagine. Will people _want_ to live 100's of years?
As for the question of whether people want to live for hundreds of years: if you don't want to live longer, you can easily stop. A surprisingly large number of people seem to rationalize the lack of immortality by claiming people won't want to live forever, which strikes me as sour grapes. Given an actual solution that allows people to live forever, the question becomes "do you want to die?", and I seriously doubt many people will say "yes".
(Also, if you think of immortality as "hundreds of years", I think you need to recalibrate your scale. I'd like a lifetime measured on a cosmological time scale, and I have no problem conceiving of ways to spend that time.)
Consider the sum total of human knowledge today. Consider how small a fraction of it any one person knows.
Within the next month, I'll have completed a PhD in computer science. It took me years to learn the fundamentals of one field, plus years more to get practical experience by tinkering in numerous areas, plus years more to become an expert in one narrow area (scalable concurrent data structures) and advance the state of the art in that area. Take a look at http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ to get a clearer picture of scale; now consider what a few million or billion lifetimes could produce, between research, practical work, exploration, and just good old-fashioned tinkering.
How many of those narrow areas exist in one field alone? How many more fields exist to explore? How many more will exist by that point? What happens when someone with expert-level knowledge in a pile of those fields starts applying them to each other? And most importantly, do you really think it ever stops?
Apart from that, I'd have plenty of time between learning everything and creating new things to enjoy the enormous amount of available entertainment created over the aeons, in all its various forms.
I think the future sounds awesome, and I want to see all of it. :)
Think of all the time you could spend learning... also, think of all the time spent learning and experiences and eventually wisdom accumulated in even just one human being by the time they are 60, 70.... only to have it practically all lost forever once you die?
Also, wouldn't you just love to be alive only to see what the future will actually look like? it has been quite some time now since the last real paradigm-shift and real heavy impact innovation that changes our lives forever. I would love to see what is coming.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Big Trip Up Yonder, by Kurt Vonnegut
He's just shy of 35 now, so we'll see ;) Sounds like your dad had a good sense of humor :)
Only if you assume the non-reproductive members are a net negative (grandparents becoming a burden)
Regardless of reproductive lifespan, in a population that is in equilibrium (not increasing or decreasing significantly), the average number of (surviving and reproducing) children per individual is going to be 2. So supposing we could live to be 1000 years old, and still reproduce at that age, we'd have an average of 2 generations per 1000 years.
It seems that I've seen a somewhat(?) common pattern among people who have young families and get divorced that often times have another family (+2 children) when they re-marry.
Young people on average, seem to be more acceptant of new technology, where older seem to be less acceptant. Additionally, from personal experience; I think younger people think about problems differently as well which leads to new developments. It makes me wonder, even if our capabilities to develop new technology are growing (Kurzweil's theory of Accelerating change) perhaps the age of both the general population, and the engineers will cause some level of impedance.
Along the same lines, if a growing population requires growing technological change. And my concept is correct, that age reduces technological evolution, is it possible that it also reduces our ability to adapt, and a natural population balance occurs?
I think to change anything substantially, you have to wait for a complete turnover - everybody has to die off, before the seeds of change can take root.
Young people (< 20yrs?) are purportedly more adaptable than older folks, say 20-50. I maintain they aren't really adaptive, they simply have more choices when they learn their first pattern. And they have many patterns to learn, which takes years, perpetuating the myth that they are adaptable.
PS: There is also trade offs involved which probably provided evolutionary benefits to those cutoff ages.
When they want to test learning they find people that don't know something, teach it to them, and test them at all points in the process. They also don't limit themselves to a single type of skill and can measure improvement based on how much they improve over time to measure long term skills acquisition.
Unless they limit themselves to reflex action or some such, it becomes impossible to separate previous learning of anything complex.
I think I give researchers plenty of credit. But they don't often have the time/resources to have many/any controls. When a remarkable correlation appears (like 'students stop learning about when they leave school') I call foul.
(Of course, we do die. But the explanation looks more like "growing and reproducing quicker beats longevity" than like "planned obsolescence".)
I also think, making grandparents less mobile means they are around the campfire teaching the youngsters. It makes sense it would be selected for in a race of communicators.
Humans can live for decades beyond their most-productive years. Their has to be a Darwinist reason for this.
Thus, the number of healthy years in the wild relates to both the probability of an external death AND internal heath issues. For a mouse this suggests a minimum of internal maintenance for maximum reproduction where a parrot can make significant trade-offs in reproduction in order to live 10x as long and have more long term reproductive chances.
However, that's in the natural setting. A pet (mouse, cat, parrot) can live slightly longer in captivity by surviving pat the point where it can find food for it's self. If you look a human vision decline people are significantly less capable of surviving on their own before they lose reproductive capability. And in that "unnatural" old age it's not uncommon for various species to have increasing reproductive issues.
We evolve because we don't die...we don't evolve so that we may live.
All known species die of old age. This includes species that are not social and do not share resources. Group selection can not be the mechanism at play here.
Except, possibly, the immortal jellyfish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula
In your example, what stops the genes from spreading is that the entire village dies of starvation or competition with other tribes that have younger, fitter members.
Its a matter of degree. Humans are social to a high degree, but possibly not as high as ants for instance. Ants eat members of the tribe that are injured, an extreme example of group-efficiency taking priority over the individual.
If you take 2 individuals and one dies sooner than the later, the alive one will have had more chances to pass his genes, so it's not adaptive to have mechanism to ensure our deaths.
This is not true though. It would be true assuming a constant population size or a single offspring. The number of children I have and the number of children my children have has nothing to do with how long we live.
Think of it this way: if you knew you had a high probability of living to 80, you might decide to have fewer offspring so that you could dedicate your earnings to supporting yourself in your later years (children are very expensive after all).
Regardless of whether this hypothesis is true, clearly the number of years you live likely has some bearing on how many children you might choose to have.
Apparently, it typically is better to create new organisms every now and then. That may just be energetically better or it may be because (in particular, sexual) reproduction allows for faster adaptation to changed circumstances
Not all animals are pre-programmed for an early death. I wonder if curve for these animals looks like the lightening bolt curve?
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/06/ageless-animals-t...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/we-age-because-th...
But the degree to which aging is programmed - versus simply an unhappy stochastic decay due to diminishing selection pressures in later life - is a big and ongoing debate. Some species clearly have a lot of programming going on. For example, salmon age at a rate determined by the laziness of bears near to their particular rivers:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/12/bear-consumption-...
But there are equally good counter examples for many more species that suggest the situation is that evolution sets up to win the short race, front-loading as much as it can for early success, and then the selection pressure drops off after you had your shot at reproductive success. All that front-loading produces unpleasant later consequences as things fall apart - you're not set up for the long term.
The adaptive immune system is a good example of this - it's a system that could never run as evolved for an indefinite period of time. It's always going to crash and burn at some point, and that's somewhat a consequence of how it's evolved to run extremely effectively right out of the gate in early life:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/when-and-how-does...
For more reading on this topic, you might look into antagonistic pleiotropy - the premature optimization of the evolved world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypothe...
In hunter-gatherer societies, elders older than 60 have been observed as 1) looking healthy and 2) still being able to hunt, fish, trap, build, and pretty much everything else along with their younger counterparts. Perhaps at a slower pace, but they're generally far more fit than the modern world's old.
Pampered bodies grow sluggish through sloth, movement and their own weight exhausts them. - Seneca
Survivorship bias.
There are hypothetical distributions, though, where the sum total of probabilities is less than 100% - where some proportion of the population will, statistically, never die.
Of course this brings us to the real issue, which is that what the model says doesn't really matter - if the model disagrees with reality in extreme cases, reality wins.
The odds of living to even 130 under his equation are 1 in 4.8*10^47. That's just a ...tad.. more people than have walked this planet.
While intuitively we can see that the probability of dying in any given year increases with the more years you live, perhaps slightly more counter intuitively the longer you live then the longer your life expectancy is (rolling average obviously).
Would love to see the two put together somehow and charted.