Aging may be a program, not a breakdown | Hacker News Reader

Aging may be a program, not a breakdown

quantamagazine.org

82 pointselo200088 comments

It's probably a bit of both.

Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.

You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...

a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.

> a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

In an properly-managed world (not ours), we'd figure out how many factories we need to keep the process knowledge fresh and safe, then have those factories build items that last exactly as long to keep their production steady. Then other factories could make other things. End result: more and better stuff.

Like instead of 1000 washing machine factories that make washing machines that last 5 years each, have 100 that make washing machines that last 50 years.

Instead we get hyper-fast planned obsolescence, pushing the frontier of unreliability and waste creation, so number can go up this quarter.

The world you imagine is a fragile one.

Waste and inefficiency is the cost of anti-fragility that's necessary to not go extinct when the unexpected happens.

Your world would also slow down innovation. Those old machines were much more energy hungry and only rapid iteration has made them dramatically more efficient.

most of human evolutionary history was hunter gatherer and survival was subsistence level, and your arguments don't work.

birthing was necessary at least to maintain population, but preferably to expand it. it's only now that we consider "too many" a possibility, and we didn't evolve for this moment.

our history does not show potentially perpetually compounding gains that our children would evolutionarily need a genetic defense against, we already had looting, stealing, and killing.

I think the answer, if there is a programmed obsolesence, is because the genetic admixing of the next generation through sexual reproduction is so useful and important.

I never considered the compound interest angle. This helps me reason about my life; thanks!

because of the immortality of financial accounts and such, it's basically what's happened to the economy. ancient 100, 200-year-old trusts choking the viability of laborers doing anything and so on. especially bad in europe.

It's not just modern finance.

A tree experiences compounding interest. The longer it lives, the more ground it owns and the more its tall branches and leaves blot out the sun below, making it extremely difficult for any juvenile of its species to take root and mature beneath it.

This is why some conifers have pine cones that only release seeds when burned in a fire. For these species, evolution has determined it's not even worth trying to germinate unless it's likely a fire killed its parents and made space for them to grow. This is part of how we discovered wildfires are a critical part of some region's ecology. We managed to halt most forest fires and it ruined the natural rhythm of life there.

No need to wait, you can die now to make room for those younger.

Currently in the process of germinating as many of my own offspring as I can, because I want the world to look a little bit more like me and my wife.

Plenty of time to die later once they all launch and continue punching through the future with our genes and memes.

"I want the world to look a little bit more like me and my wife."

Yikes.

I hope one day that you too find love for yourself and another that you also want to propagate.

Done with all that, thanks, but not for such narcissistic reasons.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting mythology to be linked to this discovery. But you did it very nicely.

There are animals that don't "age"[1] so of course it's programmed. There's a balance between how often you want to recombine genetics and how long you want to be able to remember. It seems like a better system would have humans decline differently (i.e. no dementia) but having people grow old is almost certainly beneficial to the species.

[1] Their risk of death does not increase after reaching adulthood. I.e. every year after adulthood has the same risk of unexpected death. Humans and other animals that age have their risks of death climb in "old" age.

The animals are wildly simple however. It may well be that ageless is only possible before you develop a brain.

Naked mole rats are social animals that live in colonies. There are differences of course, but I do not think the evidence suggests that aging is a 'requirement' for complexity. The simplest explanation is that aging is an evolutionary adaption that gives species that age an advantage. Human cells obviously possess the potential to persist past their programmed deaths - that's what cancer is. So I think it's obvious there are no biological limits to us stopping our physical age at whatever stage we want - but I'm equally sure that would involve changes to the experience of being human we may not like (perhaps being in the body of a 20 year old means being in the mind of a 20 year old, for instance).

The best example of human cells having programmed death is simply the main exception: offspring.

Children are made from a cell of the mother, combined with some DNA of the father. It is not created out of nothing or from scratch, it quite literally just one of the cells of the mother. So if a child survives one of the cells of the mother survives the mother's death.

Obviously the process involves resetting the "death counter". In fact there's a disease where that step seems to have gotten skipped: progeria.

They seem to have a biological clock and are just more isolated from the effects of aging. Humans are similar that we live three to four times as long as other great apes.

What are examples of non-aging animals?

The Immortal Jellyfish, and functionally the naked mole rat.

That you can go 300km/h in an F1 car, doesn't mean you can go that fast on a bicycle, even though they're both in the genus "wheel-based vehicles for human transport". The jellyfish is a rather different animal. Trees can grow very old, but there's a reason why you didn't use those as an example: too far from human biology. That jellyfish may be at a similar distance.

The process of science is to determine what exactly these inferred limits actually are and how many can be overcome.

It would be a scientific process to find the limits, but I don't see a scientific reason to find out how to overcome them. Science' job description is oberving and explaining, not altering nature.

In some sciences like astronomy you just really don't have the the ability to.

With medicine it's really the entire point, it's science we learn to improve humanity.

Perhaps that explains why medicine is often such bad science. It's more engineering, really.

We have the ability to convert to becoming immortal. It actually happens to some of us. It sucks though. We call this cancer. Turns out the immortal cells become selfish. But you can scrape some off yourself, throw them in a petri dish, supplement growth media, and they will divide forever.

*sucks for the rest of the body. I'm sure the cancer itself is pretty "happy".

The lobster, though they die from being too large to molt.

IANAB but lobsters are worth a look. They apparently do not get slower or weaker or even lose fertility as they age. And apparently Greenland Sharks might live for 300-500 years, are immune to cancers, and their DNA can repair itself. Maybe leaving the ocean was our ancestors' mistake.

Greenland sharks are interesting because they do everything slowly, including aging. Our best guess is that pregnant Greenland sharks have at least a decade-long gestation period. Which seems like an adaptation to cold and relatively barren environments?

I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce. If your reaction times, intelligence, etc are always good, and your experience and memories get better, it just seems like you'd out compete your kids and younger cohorts. All well and good but basically stops genetic turnover that got us to this point.

OTOH, you'd accumulate uncurable disease, injuries, etc as well. Maybe you become a disease resevoir inside your own growing family. Or you pass on as-yet-unknown genetic anomalies that are unhelpful, and you do so forever.

Granted that's a modern take, and in particular a modern rpg-like take. Regardless though getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward if natural selection is driving "forward".

OTOH a vast amount of mayhem and madness arises just from each generation's memory being wiped clean. Within three or four generations the earth lacks any sense of what risks came before it, and repeats the same stupid stuff.

If we were managed by the interwar generation, little of what's happening today would be happening today.

That goes both ways.

Lack of experience is critical for risk taking. Even great successes like Jensen Huang have said that if they knew how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't choose his path again.

Memory blocks you from experimentation as much as it protects you from making recurrent mistakes. A species or civilization with too much memory will eventually wither away towards complete inaction and decay.

There seems to be a balance point with the number of Chesterson's fences. Too many and you are penned in or routed on one vector only. Too few and you are blind.

Yep, it allows you to climb out of local maxima.

Only if it works. Evolution works like this with local fitness maxima and wells of stability favored by entropy. You have to luck out with the right combination of mutations to not only get out of that well but fall into one of lower entropy. Imagine the size of the search space required for something like this. This is why evolution is "slow" in species that live as long as us and quite rapid in things that grow logarithmically by the hour.

>the earth lacks any sense of what risks came before it

The earth is a bad term here, how about human civilization?

Your DNA, epigenetics, and a ton of other subconscious intelligent processes are well aware of the risks and contain a massive set of tools to overcome them.

The problem? Many of these tools have to run from zero in an egg to work in the changing environment.

> If we were managed by the interwar generation, little of what's happening today would be happening today.

Doubtful. They were the ones who created the world we live in today.

OTOH same is true for wiping clean habits, prejudices and deeply held wrong beliefs. It's said that science advances one funeral at a time.

If we were managed by the colonial generation, slavery and segregation would still be the norm, only rich white men would be able to vote and a king would still have the final say.

> If your reaction times, intelligence, etc are always good, and your experience and memories get better, it just seems like you'd out compete your kids and younger cohorts.

On the other hand, always being around as a sort of Protector to protect your kids seems like it would generally be good for your genes. (Of course, you'd have to fight off other Protectors who are doing the same...)

Finally mankind can return to it's intended 3-phase form of existence as described by Niven

Right, but should your kids get your protection? You can protect them to adulthood now, even your grandkids.

But 1000 generations of unassailable, un-evolving, 40IQ lions doesn't get you to the galaxy.

Hey, maybe this is the fermi paradox.

This is where being a real parent vs a theoretical one makes a huge difference to your take. After seeing how much damage to their kids people adapted _their_ childhood do, I've started to think that humans should die around 40 with reproduction age being between 10 to 20 - like most other great apes. It's only in increadibly stable environments that waiting for as long as we do for children that it makes sence.

How this number is going to change in the future with exponential growth in the environment is left as an exercise to the reader.

Not if that protection ended up making your offspring weaker. Some adversity is necessary to develop resilience and self-sufficiency.

One's kids may disagree.

Imagine still having helicopter parents at 50 years old.

My granddad tells the story of the time he left his parents house and they called out "Make sure to turn your burners on".

He was in his 60s....

Once a parent, always a parent, I guess.

There's the saying in science that progress happens 'one funeral at a time,' but that's not because older scientists are less intelligent - it's more like they begin to intellectually ossify. Or in the arts, the critics that rejected Matisse's 'Woman With a Hat' weren't stupid, but their thinking had stagnated.

I think we underrate the value of a fresh perspective. People living longer lifespans would dilute that benefit, imo. Sidenote: this is also an underrated issue with LLMs and their application to science - collapsing to single modes of thought over time.

Could you all stop plotting to kill me off >:(

Sounds like an argument for pacing the frontier of geriatric medicine.

> getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward

This is the real feature of aging, death, and dying. Progress is measured in funerals, not years. If everyone lived forever, nothing would ever change.

>nothing would ever change

Including our fundamental biology.

If we want a chance at improved, more resilient biology, aging and death have to be a part of that.

Aging and death should be a more discussed and comfortable topic for people. Death and dying is natural, just as is being born.

I mean, "should"?... I don't know. Death is natural, but so is fear of death and not wanting to bring up topics that disturb you.

Fear of death is natural, completely agree. My point is that demystifying death and talking about it openly can help make it a less disturbing topic.

For instance, both of us in this conversation will die someday. It is a guaranteed fact.

The question then becomes: how do we live our lives well in view of that fact?

> I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce.

This is almost the stated intention of longevists.

A big issue with the programmed aging theory is that while we already have pretty good evidence from a biological perspective of a programmed aging clock, it is harder to find an evolutionary justification for it.

I don't know how the antagonistic pleiotropy theory is doing. If true it would be a satisfactory explanation from an evolutionary point of view but I recall that it had some problems.

Otherwise I don't find the other evolutionary explanations of programmed aging to be satisfactory, especially when you consider that genes are selfish and act on the individual rather than population level.

Perhaps reproductive aging (egg quality) is the ultimate limiter, and then overall aging is adaptive downstream of that because hunter-gatherer families benefit (in terms of evolutionary fitness) from fewer old people to increase the percentage of people at reproductive age? That would fit the modern evidence of early egg freezing significantly increasing reproductive success in older women, showing that the problem of fertility decline by age is primarily cellular.

Or perhaps the aging mechanism is leftover from pre-human ancestry and there simply wasn't enough time in our evolutionary history for humans to evolve longer lifespans, maybe because it's slightly helpful but not nearly as helpful as other traits like intelligence, and lifespan is hard to improve via genetic adaptation due to bottleneck effects?

Great article on programmed aging as a tradeoff of telomeres versus cancer: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/liver

Reminds me of a thought I had about galaxies being instance runs while writing Github actions to build database binaries.

Each galaxy and any planets/life it contains are just artifacts of an "existence run." That's why life feels like a simulation so often (and human history repeats itself): we're inside of an organic (human word) "program" that's trying to perfect itself by running similar, but consistently tweaked "logic" over and over. Things like evolution are just an algorithm embedded in the system.

If the theory discussed in the article is correct, then aging is (in the scope of the above thought) just one program among several that we interpret as existence/life.

Just a daydream but fun to think about.

In biology, there are always many causes, of course.

I wonder if people are familiar with the hypothesis of parasite-driven aging.

Parasites are vastly more prevalent than most people in modern, sanitary, medicated societies realize. Studies show that over half the biomass in a region may be parasitic.

Parasite frequently keep the host alive, but inhibit reproduction. This leaves the host alive, and competing with healthy members of its species for resources, but no capable longer reproducing. It's evolutionary dead weight.

Death is basically "turning it off and on again", just as you would do with a computer, and for very similar reasons. It clears the accumulated parasites and starts fresh.

This would also help explain why death is strongly conserved.

I think death has some actual benefits. Yes, some of our comfort with death comes with learning to live with its inevitability, but it has genuinely some upsides. I think they have some to do with being able to change things and institutions, but mostly it centers around our brains and psychology. Our life cycle is connected to how our brain develops and matures, inherently I think.

For example, if you go through some events in your childhood, they may stick with you until your death, as an inevitable part of you. Sure, treatment helps, but probably some memories you can't just erase.

Recycling things into a next generation, with probably better living conditions seems like generally pretty positive thing.

Also, some time you'd probably start to stop learning, not necessarily due to brain aging and neuron death, but simply because of basic architecture of our brain and how information solidifies and it starts to become more difficult to learn new things. We are a little more bored of most things and a lot of mystery and wonder diminishes somewhat.

There is no life without death (nor light without darkness).

Aging could very well be a program to deal with the breakdown.

It very much is. We have a term for cells that escape immune surveillance to cull them off when they are broken: cancer cells.

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413305

Not surprised. Some sort of optimization program to terminate the aged in order to reduce the maintenance issues for the next generation I suppose..

And the mandatory need for replacement keeps mixing the gene pool, occasionally producing improvements.

This is the real answer. Nature only cares that the old already mixed their genes. So, from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's good to clear out the old stock at the end of every generation. Nature already got whatever it was gonna get out of us at that point. To allow that set of genes to stick around actually yields negative returns, ie - less chance of producing improvements, at that point. (Again, just from the perspective of "Mother Nature" so to speak. Obviously the animals themselves would rather not die.)

Mother nature has no perspective. There are no improvements either, only things that are and are not. Everything is dependent on local context at the present point in time and framing whether it is "good" or "bad" (e.g. one could frame our intelligence as good or bad given how it resulted in anthropocentric climate change that may doom us in time, while 'dumber' species have existed for millions of years without wiping themselves out).

What works today may not work tomorrow. What didn't work yesterday may work today. Evolution is not linear. It tends to happen in bursts almost like a dam busting loose. A constant cycling between periods of genetic diversity (i.e. big resetting just happened, no winners taking all quite yet), and what is known as allele fixation (a winner emerged, oh god no...).

>What works today may not work tomorrow. What didn't work yesterday may work today.

All the more reason for variety. Which stops happening when only one set of genes is mixing. (Assuming that set of eternal genes would have any motivation to mix at all.) If you want a higher chance at producing the genes most resilient in a given context, aging and death are a necessary part of that process if you're stuck with sexual reproduction. You need motivation, and you need maximum mixing.

It’s an accumulation of damage. End of story.

In the end, can aging itself not be cured, and is the only option to prevent the program that causes it? I'm curious

I don't understand why the system would evolve to this state if it didn't impact reproduction.

Any Larry Niven fans nodding along?

Had to go look it up ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_(novel) ) but now the 'upgrade pak' joke in the next comment makes sense :)

I think it's my favorite novel of his.

You could even say it's an "upgrade Pak."

One programmed reason for aging is Telomere shortening which kills cells after X reproductions (Hayflick limit) which is part of our body's general anti-cancer defenses.

Also relevant to the article is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...

>when he became acutely aware that his grandparents and parents were not going to live forever…Cao turned to science. Finding a way to slow aging became his lifelong goal

Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try

> Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try

"Supposed" by whom?

Entropy.

"Nothing is supposed to <something>" is a meaningless assertion for entropy. Entropy doesn't suppose things. "Suppose to" implies intent.

Also, entropy might not be directly related to the biological process of aging. I mean, that's the point of TFA.

Indeed exactly this. No system persists or could persist

We're not discussing geological or cosmic eras, just shorter biological processes. Systems can persist for enormous (but still human bound) periods of time.

> Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try

Perhaps instead of "forever," we could settle for, let's say, a thousand years in good health?

I can’t think of a faster way to destroy the planet

I can think of several faster ways.

Besides, if people know they'll be around for longer, they will have more incentive to take care of the place.

I wonder what Cao would've done once he learned that his great-grandparents are already gone. Perhaps at that point nothing less than time machine invention will do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com