Dog Aging Project
dogagingproject.org
dogagingproject.org
What domesticated animals were bread for "cuteness"? Cats are mice hunters. Most popular dog breeds were selected for killing and dog fight! That "big smile" is not for laughter, but to crush bones!
And many domesticated animals can not even reproduce without human assistance. How they would survive in wild?
Dogs.
> Cats are mice hunters
Cats blur the line between domestication and taming.
> Most popular dog breeds were selected for killing and dog fight
One can breed for more than one thing. (Dog fighting as a selection pressure is very modern and very limited.)
Dogs literally evolved a muscle to make them more appealing to (and help them communicate with) humans [1].
> many domesticated animals can not even reproduce without human assistance
Not an argument against neateny.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dogs-have-special-...
> Dogs literally evolved a muscle to make them more appealing to (and help them communicate with) humans
Not necessarily exactly cuteness. The other explanation suggested is better communication in general - by exposing the whites of their eyes we can see what they are looking at, which is an important cue for humans (we use it between ourselves too) to indicate the direction of attention.
Sure. But most of those traits are shallow. Let the breed go stray and many characteristics go away. The neoteny does not.
> Not necessarily exactly cuteness
The neoteny—large eyes and heads, for example—is precisely cuteness. Not all breeds are equally neotenic. But they’re very much not wolves.
A lot of characteristics seem to be bred in and instinctive - breed specific behaviour occurs without training. Strays do not breed pure so of course breed specific characteristics are lost.
> The neoteny—large eyes and heads, for example—is precisely cuteness
To an extent yes. The specific trait mentioned in the comment I was replying to was not neotenous. Not all neotonous traits are physically cute.
My point is neoteny almost isn’t breed specific. Let strays breed and it’s preserved—stray dogs are cuter than wolves.
Wild dogs don’t become wolves. (They also stop being French bulldogs.)
> Not all neotonous traits are physically cute
Almost all physically-cute traits are neutenous.
This scene from an 1953 Tom and Jerry of Spike teaching Tyke what it means to be a dog seems prescient: https://youtu.be/jnW48TihBR0?t=50s
Fairly recent experiments with domestication of foxes show how it might work.
What you select for is behavior. Mainly you breed individuals that neither attack humans nor run away from them. Any other response than aggression or fear is ok. In few generations it turns out individuals selected this way retain more and more juvenile traits.
I think cats never needed to get domesticated because reacting to humans with neither aggression nor fear is within natural range of perfectly normal behaviors of most individuals of this specific niche feline species that got globalized through its relationship with humans.
Note the popularity of memes about "adulting".
That's one possibility. Another is subcultures which prioritise reproduction over personal freedom will end up demographically dominant in the long-run. Look for example at Kiryas Joel, New York, and similar ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, whose growth shows no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Of course, exponential growth can't last forever, but nobody knows what exactly the limit is and when it will be reached – it might not be reached until they've become a very substantial percentage of the population, maybe even the majority.
Do animals stop? There are plenty of examples of play in adult animals:
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03766...
- https://medium.com/illumination/wild-animals-at-play-982e26e...
The basic semantics of her language of play are all the same: she bows, she'll yawn, she barks and does that side-eye glance. Sometimes she'll dance. If she gets really hyped up she'll get the zoomies.
Dogs, from what I've observed, are incredibly intelligent and social animals as they exist today.
I think this already well known in evolutionary biology circles though not through culture. I don't recollect but it was most likely Robin Dunbar who said it, people ganging together to kill of the most annoying/bullying/maladjusted members.
I'm sure I did not misunderstand Robin Dunbar, He actually said homicides were common. If a bunch of people hated someone they ganged up and killed him/her, leading to humans being relatively more neotenistic than other primates.
(I used maladapted in a very loose way: especially being maladapted socially, we are not talking about being maladapted phicially and other ways)
However if socially we prevent girls from getting pregnant at 10 then biology can make them go through puberty at 10 without risk, since they will not get pregnant anyway.
Edit: As for the playfulness point, for us humans we punish kids for being playful when they reach 7, so it makes sense that we will evolve to stop playing around at 7 and hence becoming adults already by then. We don't punish pets for being playful though, at least not today.
Further, we can have multi-modal distributions that undermine the biological assumption. Some groups show much lower birth ages because it's not culturally disadvantageous than other groups. In that context, even if the average age increases, it doesn't mean lower birth age is biologically disadvantageous.
>humans we punish kids for being playful when they reach 7
This needs a citation or at least a definition of what is meant by "playfulness", because I find it hard to believe. I don't know any parents who would want their child to stop playing at 7 years old.
Parents don't decide what happens to the kids at school though.
> We can socially change much faster than we can biologically evolve.
If the genes were always there but they died constantly 200 years ago it just meant that we no longer cull those people early, and after a couple of such generations we now have them around. Early puberty is still not common, it just exists, that makes it more likely to be biological than social, if the social changes did it then early puberty would be the norm today rather than a very rare exception.
But there's no such thing as an objective "evolutionary fitness". It only makes sense to speak of evolutionary fitness in a given niche.
They share a list of academic publications that have resulted from the project, and their Team page lists the full names a sizable large number of people.
Their FAQ indicates that the cost of the DNA Kit and other things are covered by the project funding. [1]
What made you think that it's engaging in fraud? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not involved in the project but just from looking at the site for several minutes, it seems to be a fairly reasonable research project.
Or did you say "fraud" less to mean "these are people who are stealing money and e.g., hoarding it away" and more to mean "these are people engaging in a research project I disapprove of"?
[1] https://dogagingproject.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/441699...
Interestingly, through engaging with you I discovered that this is a cognitive bias called the "horn effect" and is the reverse of the more common "Halo effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_effect#:~:text=The%20horn....
Here, now it's one click
Especially those that target extremely small slices of population (some would say at the expense of other larger, mostly neglected groups)
Uhh there is a donation button on the site.
If interested -
Project lead interviewed by Dr. Peter Attia: https://peterattiamd.com/mattkaeberlein/
Rapamycin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/15/rapamycin...
Religion promises an eternal afterlife. Cryogenics promises a future thawing and cure in an enlightend and technically advanced future. Plastic surgery puts a veneer over the signs of the natural aging process. The more recent batch have targeted metabolism, growth inhibition (ie rapamycin), etc.
Very wealthy people that don't want to die or don't want their pets to die will never be in short supply. They will still all die, roughly around the same time they would have otherwise from different causes with different infirmities (search for "sirolimus side effects").
Enjoy and make the most of the years you are given. Happy New Year.
There is literally nothing about this project that will have any dog or human live forever. But it does have the possibility to improve dog and human health in some fundamental ways and increase the number of healthy years that we get before disease takes over. If this is longevity science, then all medicine is longevity science.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38447491
There's also https://leapyears.com/ - another project with similar goals. That one is associated with David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School:
https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/people/david-sinclair
Personally, I'm optimistic about the capacity of studies and projects like these to extend our knowledge regarding aging. Human trials are fraught with ethical issues, and have very slow feedback loops (acquiring results from a study might take decades, which can be an entire career). Laboratory trials on mice and other small mammals can be more effective, but funding is hard and the results are isolated to a small academic lab. Large-scale supplements for pets can give data in a few years, have lesser (though not negligible) ethical problems, and have built-in funding. The funding process is, of course, a source of conflicts of interest, but it has to be done somehow.
“As microbial and genetic discoveries were made, pathogenesis studies were required to integrate the new knowledge into useful clinical advances. Those advances include a creative model of enteric bacterial disease (Moon), demonstration of the transmissibility and pathogenesis of scrapie, a proposal that human kuru was a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (Hadlow), and the isolation of bovine leukemia virus (Miller) and bovine immunosuppressive retroviruses (Van Der Maaten)—5 years before AIDS and HIV appeared. Now modern molecular and genetic sciences and their applications in integrative, whole-animal biology make possible exciting advances for the benefit of both animals and people” [1].
(Counterfactual: “major methodological limitations of the animal research and evidence of widespread publication bias” limit translatability [2].)
If we want to get breakthroughs in lifespan extension quickly, they will have to come initially from something like this where vested interests are less strong and regulations less stifling. Not that I think this particular effort is going to do it, but something like it is the only way it could happen.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03936-8
But there's nothing stopping aging related research. Ethics committees allow scientists to conduct experiments as long as those meet proper privacy and safety standards. Nothing is being blocked over concerns about displacing human medical staff so I can't imagine where you're coming up with that type of conspiracy theory.
Even if all rules and regulations were removed there will be no radical improvements to human lifespan in your lifetime. This is fine. You are expendable.
If it works? It was promising but latetly it looks more unlikely.
Not if it’s running around fighting imaginary worms and generally inflaming everything.
They remain a canine. But yes, they become a research subject.
-A breakfast of eggs, turkey bacon, broccoli and coffee … with cream
-A splash of red wine to “circulate the arteries”
-Stimulation by way of nature documentaries screened in his garage-turned-theater
-Lots of love and attention
See: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-raise-a-165-yea...
with ublock origin.
And it is behaving as expected (correctly, I mean)
I'd say we should search for medical advances that improve health span, not lifespan.
This includes people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who would make the world better off by the cognitive nonexistance.
The hypothesis is exploitation scales with population?
Well yes, if you change definitions I am a pink elephant.
There is no evidence “exploitation by the rich” of everyone else scales with population. (There is some evidence for the opposite.)
Even if we talk environmentalism, economies of scale mean larger populations tend to be more efficient ceteris paribus. And the whole premise is foundational wrong: longer adult lifespans predict lower childbirth and population declines. Not increases.
I honestly think this meme is way more dangerous and insane than the idea of having a longer and healthier life
If 150 years is dangerous, why not 80?
Yes. This is why a thousand years probably isn’t dangerous.
> At the Dog Aging Project, we’re focused on healthy aging not just lifespan extension. We want to understand the biological and environmental factors that influence aging and intervene to prevent debilitating decline. We imagine a future in which we maximize healthspan—the period of life spent in good health and free from disease—allowing us many more years with high quality of life.
Just so we know, at what point should we have stopped searching for medical advances that make life significantly longer? I’m assuming you’re anti-chemotherapy?
I’d argue this is the popular take. With almost any medical research. “Don’t play god” and all that. At least while the benefit is hypothetical.
> If people could live 150 or 200 years that will make the problems on this planet much worse
Climate change would become a peach. We love to talk about thinking of the children, but self interest is more powerful among most. Longer lives mean longer-term thinking.
Care to substantiate that claim? Modern history flies straight in the face of it, from savings to childbirth rates correlating negatively with longevity.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting longer healthspans are a panacea. We are amply capable of screwing it up, e.g. by entrenching powerful people. But dynasties and aristocracies already exist. For every great builder of fortunes there are a hundred squanderers, even in the same lifetime. And despite it all, there is something to be said for age granting wisdom for most all the way up to senility, which an extended healthspan should forestall.
Older generations try to take in new ideas - about homosexuality, racial equality, universal human rights, whatever else you can think of - and raise their children with those ideas in place too. And most often, those children find out later that the older generation didn't really believe in what they were saying, at least not to the extent of being able to overcome their own childhood programming. But because this new generation was raised with these new ideas, they're actually able to internalize them and progress society further.
Having older people with stagnant ideas and larger and larger accumulated wealth and power, would be a disastrous headwind against social progress.
Almost as much as that, I’d prefer people having a longer time horizon on which they draw their lives.