8 ms·

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality imp

by derrida 11y ago

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle America living in poverty [2]. Looking at populations that are happier - but in poverty - is perhaps an interesting study. Imagine a cross disciplinary study between (perhaps) techniques used in epidemiology/health informatics & anthropology / the humanities. --- [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering. [2] Yeah, 3 assertions, no sources, sorry - just my word & unreliable memory of something someone said in a book once folks :)

mietek 11y ago
> Why quantity over quality? That’s a false dichotomy. Please disregard my one-liner, and watch one of de Grey’s talks instead — or read his “When Quality and Quantity Do Not Compete”: http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2011.1307 http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej....
- empressplay 11y ago
  You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. Of course not! Why should you ever want to die? Why should you ever "get over" that? It's a bug. We haven't fixed it yet. It should not be romanticized, and it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. It's an abomination we have yet to eliminate.
    - derrida 11y ago
      > it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. What life never dies? What non-living thing does not change?
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Do you think of cancer as inevitable? Or do you think of it as something humans could cure someday? Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? Or do you think humans can cure them someday? I don't think of death as inevitable. I think of it as something humans can cure someday. Thinking of it as inevitable means giving up on all possible solutions.
        derrida 11y ago
        > Do you think of cancer as inevitable? No. > Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? No. Change, and thus, death, is inevitable. Also, if you want to prolong you then you are the result of countless deaths.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, distinct from the one thus far used in this discussion. Lack of change seems closer to death than change does. But in any case, whatever definition of death you've used doesn't seem to relate in any way to the ones that people in this discussion have advocated eliminating.
        derrida 11y ago
        > I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, I mean the thing that everybody else means: ie "pushing up daisies", "feeding earthworms", "to dust", etc If I understand this differently, then it's this perspective I am offering :)
        deleted 11y ago
  - greggman 11y ago
    In my own life there are several things I'd like to do that will take somewhere between 5-10 years each. I only have 2-3 of those spans left and 100 of those things I want to do.
aylmao 11y ago
^ agree with this. Also, we should really focus on getting people on board with the life-preserving tech that currently exists (medicine, water treatment, doctor training, etc) before developing new (and potentially expensive) tech that will only widen the gap between what the rich can do that the poor can only dream of.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? We do: we need to realize how horrible it is that we treat it so casually, rather than as a tragedy. Perhaps then we'll do something about it. > [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering. All three of which (especially the first and last) have heavy ties to aging. It isn't just about living longer; it's about not aging. We're not talking about getting a few more decades like those in your 90s; we're talking about getting a few more centuries like those in your 30s-40s. (And hopefully that will buy us enough time for the next such improvement, and the next.)
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- nicky0 11y ago
  Interesting. Would you do it for animals too? It would suck to live for 400 years but your dog dies in only 10. How would people remember everything? How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do? Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too? Haven't done the math but if 8 billion people lived for say 500 years each, plus new arrivals constantly, wouldn't we accumulate rather? What about fertility? Should there be a window on that?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too? "centuries" is far too short-term; "forever" is the goal, and "centuries" just buys enough time to get there. And of course that lifespan should be available to everyone. If the solution itself doesn't already imply a post-scarcity world, then it'll help that once you have a cure for aging, it's more economical to supply that to everyone than to treat the myriad complications that arise from aging. It's hard to get people to fund such a cure, but it seems far simpler to get funding for "we have a proven cure, let's get it to everyone". > How would people remember everything? In the short term, curing aging seems likely to help greatly with many degenerative mental disorders. In the long term, I expect people will find increasingly successful ways to augment their own capabilities. I doubt I'll have the same brain structure a hundred thousand years from now that I do today, if only because I expect we'll eventually run out of effective ways to debug biology in-place. > How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do? What wouldn't everyone do? I don't have a finite "bucket list"; my list contains everything positive I can possibly imagine, with a sort order applied, and it will always grow faster than it shrinks. Quite apart from the rest of the universe, other people provide an unbounded source of novelty. Do you think people thousands of years ago would have asked such questions about a 120-year lifespan, and think it sounded too long? If you lived for ten thousand years by default, would you think it too long and decide to die at 120? How about if you lived indefinitely?
untog 11y ago
Agreed. With overpopulation already a problem I'm not sure that living longer is a pressing need for the world. Better to help people make the most of the time they have allotted on this planet.
- mietek 11y ago
  It’s not as bad as you think — “Don’t Panic”: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p... If you can’t spare an hour, please watch Rosling’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...
  - jakeogh 11y ago
    and https://overpopulationisamyth.com https://overpopulationisamyth.com
  - Ixio 11y ago
    Thank you for sharing "Don't Panic", watching that is really an hour well-spent. Since permanent growth comes from fertility and as "Don't Panic" shows we're getting to a sustainable average of 2 child per woman, augmenting our lifespan will only increase our maximum population, not our population growth. However I think YC research would be better spent trying to find better ways to fight climate change, world stability and/or lift billions out of poverty. This way if we ever augment lifespans in a significant way it will be available to more people and in a healthier world. Also lifting billions out of great poverty will have the added benefit of allowing more minds to work on issues like increasing life expectancy.
nathan_f77 11y ago
> Humans need more lifespan, badly. > Do we? Yes, we do. Categorically. If you would prefer to die, then speak for yourself. And of course, no one wants a longer life if they're miserable. We need to solve poverty as well.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Well, I think his issue was with the word "need". Wanting more lifespan is a different thing. The claim that most people want to live longer is not as controversial as the claim that most people need to live longer.
  - aminorex 11y ago
    If you will certainly die for the lack of some thing, then you can truly say that you need that thing. Senescence and death costs the species and the planet a horrible price in lost productivity, social conflict, medical costs, human desperation and suffering. Even if you don't want to live beyond some fixed span, if you want to impose suffering and death upon others...well, I don't even...
trappedfly 11y ago
> Why quantity over quality? Reminds me of Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae[1], an essay about (as the title suggests) the shortness of life. He argues that what matters is not how long one lives, but what he accomplishes and/or how "well" he lives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_(Seneca) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_(Seneca) (english translation in External links, worth a read if you have some spare time)
- reasonattlm 11y ago
  It is important to recognize that arguments for quality over quantity are written from the perspective of operating within an absolute and unchangeable limit, and an absolute and largely unchangeable high risk of unexpected death before that limit due to infectious disease. We've done a lot to reduce the latter, and now the former is up for grabs as well. This is not the same landscape for the human condition as occupied by Seneca and his peers. We can work towards both quality and quantity. That is the point of technology, to make everything better, to remove limits, to enable the human condition to be more than it was before, to give us choice where there was no choice. The choice to fly, to talk to distant people, to be healthy, to live rather than to die before we want to.
choosername 11y ago
it's not quantity over quality, they are directly proportional to each other, maybe, if meassured in absolute terms. There's an optimum and quantity is hampered by lack of quality.
Houshalter 11y ago
I remember when I first deconverted. I was horrified that there was no heaven, and that my loved ones weren't waiting for me. That they were just gone forever. They didn't exist. They weren't happy, and I would never see them again. I see many atheists carry on religious memes after they deconvert. Which is only natural, religion isn't just a single idea, it's deeply ingrained into our culture. One of those memes is that death is natural and ok. Which, if you believe in religion, it absolutely is. It's the way things are supposed to be according to a trustworthy higher power. There is a life afterwards that makes it all ok. People don't really "die", they just go to a different place. I don't see anything ok about true death. It's natural, sure, but there's no law that says nature has to be good. We are the product of an uncaring universe and plenty of bad things exist that shouldn't. Death is one of those things. So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. I was quite young at the time and influenced by science fiction. I thought that maybe future humans could invent time travel and come back in time and save people who died. I've since come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely to be physically possible in our universe. But other advanced technologies, like curing aging, are certainly not. Perhaps even within our reach. And if backwards time travel might be impossible, we have invented a way to do forwards time travel with cryonics.
- bambax 11y ago
  > So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. Heaven did exist, and our ancestors destroyed it; it was the Caribbean, and its inhabitants were all killed and/or enslaved to build... churches.
- fossuser 11y ago
  I think death is probably a selective evolutionary advantage for a species. A species is basically self perpetuating genetic code stuck somewhere in an evolutionary local maxima. In our case there may be an advantage in adaptability by having individuals die and genetic code mix/change more frequently. This still sucks and if we could figure out how the brain actually worked to prevent it that would be cool, but we'd start getting into identity issues (what makes you you? how does consciousness actually work?). Sleep is interesting to think about here since it likely has something to do with re-calculating weights in a neural net, garbage collection, persisting memories etc. Though we don't consider going to sleep dying and waking up new because of the sense of continuity. If a copy of you was made and the original then killed though we wouldn't like that. Sense of purpose difficulties still exist in our relatively brief lifespans, but at least we get an easy out with the biological one - we'd have to think more about this with death out of the way. Also the drive to have sex and reproduce would probably still be around since it's core to our existence, not sure how we deal with that. Though I'd still prefer a star trek future where we're colonizing the galaxy and the goal is to learn. Mostly rambling thoughts.
jashephe 11y ago
Indeed. From a biological standpoint, it's important to realize that an indefinite lifespan, as a life history trait [1], does not confer evolutionary fitness. The fact is that organisms do not appear to evolve to a maximal lifespan — they evolve to an optimal lifespan. Humans are already considered to be K-selected [2], and increasing lifespan appears to necessarily decrease fitness in other areas, as has been seen in worms [3] and flies [4] (e.g. reproductive fitness decreases and age of maturity increases, when lifespan increases). More importantly, "near-infinite" lifespans reduce the efficacy of natural selection — longer-living organisms evolve at a slower rate. While, perhaps, unappealing, the culling of species members well past reproductive age is necessary to allow for more resources and potential for competition and selection in their offspring. And humans are certainly still undergoing natural selection in many arenas; just look at sickle cell trait [5] or or CCR5-Δ32 [6]. Death is a feature, not a bug. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8608934 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8608934 [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601460 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601460 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965279 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965279 [6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791590 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791590
- reasonattlm 11y ago
  These are all arguments that apply to the house you live in, the blankets on your bed, the medicine you use. You are absolutely fine with all of those - you don't live in a cave, shun treatment for infectious disease, and wear furs. In fact I would go so far as to say that you probably think that modern technology is a good thing, and you are better off for it. Yet that already greatly manipulates your proposed optimal condition for the human species. So why does treating aging as a medical condition bring out this view? This seems like a very selective appeal to nature.
  - jashephe 11y ago
    It may not have been expressed the most clearly, but the intention was not quite as you describe. Shelter, clothing, and modern medicine all confer enhanced fitness — I was attempting to suggest that increased lifespan does not.

by derrida 11y ago

mietek 11y ago

> Why quantity over quality? That’s a false dichotomy. Please disregard my one-liner, and watch one of de Grey’s talks instead — or read his “When Quality and Quantity Do Not Compete”: http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2011.1307 http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej....

empressplay 11y ago
You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. Of course not! Why should you ever want to die? Why should you ever "get over" that? It's a bug. We haven't fixed it yet. It should not be romanticized, and it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. It's an abomination we have yet to eliminate.
  - derrida 11y ago
    > it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. What life never dies? What non-living thing does not change?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Do you think of cancer as inevitable? Or do you think of it as something humans could cure someday? Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? Or do you think humans can cure them someday? I don't think of death as inevitable. I think of it as something humans can cure someday. Thinking of it as inevitable means giving up on all possible solutions.
      - derrida 11y ago
        > Do you think of cancer as inevitable? No. > Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? No. Change, and thus, death, is inevitable. Also, if you want to prolong you then you are the result of countless deaths.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, distinct from the one thus far used in this discussion. Lack of change seems closer to death than change does. But in any case, whatever definition of death you've used doesn't seem to relate in any way to the ones that people in this discussion have advocated eliminating.
        derrida 11y ago
        > I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, I mean the thing that everybody else means: ie "pushing up daisies", "feeding earthworms", "to dust", etc If I understand this differently, then it's this perspective I am offering :)
        deleted 11y ago
- greggman 11y ago
  In my own life there are several things I'd like to do that will take somewhere between 5-10 years each. I only have 2-3 of those spans left and 100 of those things I want to do.

aylmao 11y ago

^ agree with this. Also, we should really focus on getting people on board with the life-preserving tech that currently exists (medicine, water treatment, doctor training, etc) before developing new (and potentially expensive) tech that will only widen the gap between what the rich can do that the poor can only dream of.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? We do: we need to realize how horrible it is that we treat it so casually, rather than as a tragedy. Perhaps then we'll do something about it. > [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering. All three of which (especially the first and last) have heavy ties to aging. It isn't just about living longer; it's about not aging. We're not talking about getting a few more decades like those in your 90s; we're talking about getting a few more centuries like those in your 30s-40s. (And hopefully that will buy us enough time for the next such improvement, and the next.)

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nicky0 11y ago
Interesting. Would you do it for animals too? It would suck to live for 400 years but your dog dies in only 10. How would people remember everything? How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do? Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too? Haven't done the math but if 8 billion people lived for say 500 years each, plus new arrivals constantly, wouldn't we accumulate rather? What about fertility? Should there be a window on that?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too? "centuries" is far too short-term; "forever" is the goal, and "centuries" just buys enough time to get there. And of course that lifespan should be available to everyone. If the solution itself doesn't already imply a post-scarcity world, then it'll help that once you have a cure for aging, it's more economical to supply that to everyone than to treat the myriad complications that arise from aging. It's hard to get people to fund such a cure, but it seems far simpler to get funding for "we have a proven cure, let's get it to everyone". > How would people remember everything? In the short term, curing aging seems likely to help greatly with many degenerative mental disorders. In the long term, I expect people will find increasingly successful ways to augment their own capabilities. I doubt I'll have the same brain structure a hundred thousand years from now that I do today, if only because I expect we'll eventually run out of effective ways to debug biology in-place. > How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do? What wouldn't everyone do? I don't have a finite "bucket list"; my list contains everything positive I can possibly imagine, with a sort order applied, and it will always grow faster than it shrinks. Quite apart from the rest of the universe, other people provide an unbounded source of novelty. Do you think people thousands of years ago would have asked such questions about a 120-year lifespan, and think it sounded too long? If you lived for ten thousand years by default, would you think it too long and decide to die at 120? How about if you lived indefinitely?

untog 11y ago

Agreed. With overpopulation already a problem I'm not sure that living longer is a pressing need for the world. Better to help people make the most of the time they have allotted on this planet.

mietek 11y ago
It’s not as bad as you think — “Don’t Panic”: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p... If you can’t spare an hour, please watch Rosling’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...
- jakeogh 11y ago
  and https://overpopulationisamyth.com https://overpopulationisamyth.com
- Ixio 11y ago
  Thank you for sharing "Don't Panic", watching that is really an hour well-spent. Since permanent growth comes from fertility and as "Don't Panic" shows we're getting to a sustainable average of 2 child per woman, augmenting our lifespan will only increase our maximum population, not our population growth. However I think YC research would be better spent trying to find better ways to fight climate change, world stability and/or lift billions out of poverty. This way if we ever augment lifespans in a significant way it will be available to more people and in a healthier world. Also lifting billions out of great poverty will have the added benefit of allowing more minds to work on issues like increasing life expectancy.

nathan_f77 11y ago

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. > Do we? Yes, we do. Categorically. If you would prefer to die, then speak for yourself. And of course, no one wants a longer life if they're miserable. We need to solve poverty as well.

enraged_camel 11y ago
Well, I think his issue was with the word "need". Wanting more lifespan is a different thing. The claim that most people want to live longer is not as controversial as the claim that most people need to live longer.
- aminorex 11y ago
  If you will certainly die for the lack of some thing, then you can truly say that you need that thing. Senescence and death costs the species and the planet a horrible price in lost productivity, social conflict, medical costs, human desperation and suffering. Even if you don't want to live beyond some fixed span, if you want to impose suffering and death upon others...well, I don't even...

trappedfly 11y ago

> Why quantity over quality? Reminds me of Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae[1], an essay about (as the title suggests) the shortness of life. He argues that what matters is not how long one lives, but what he accomplishes and/or how "well" he lives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_(Seneca) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_(Seneca) (english translation in External links, worth a read if you have some spare time)

reasonattlm 11y ago
It is important to recognize that arguments for quality over quantity are written from the perspective of operating within an absolute and unchangeable limit, and an absolute and largely unchangeable high risk of unexpected death before that limit due to infectious disease. We've done a lot to reduce the latter, and now the former is up for grabs as well. This is not the same landscape for the human condition as occupied by Seneca and his peers. We can work towards both quality and quantity. That is the point of technology, to make everything better, to remove limits, to enable the human condition to be more than it was before, to give us choice where there was no choice. The choice to fly, to talk to distant people, to be healthy, to live rather than to die before we want to.

choosername 11y ago

it's not quantity over quality, they are directly proportional to each other, maybe, if meassured in absolute terms. There's an optimum and quantity is hampered by lack of quality.

Houshalter 11y ago

I remember when I first deconverted. I was horrified that there was no heaven, and that my loved ones weren't waiting for me. That they were just gone forever. They didn't exist. They weren't happy, and I would never see them again. I see many atheists carry on religious memes after they deconvert. Which is only natural, religion isn't just a single idea, it's deeply ingrained into our culture. One of those memes is that death is natural and ok. Which, if you believe in religion, it absolutely is. It's the way things are supposed to be according to a trustworthy higher power. There is a life afterwards that makes it all ok. People don't really "die", they just go to a different place. I don't see anything ok about true death. It's natural, sure, but there's no law that says nature has to be good. We are the product of an uncaring universe and plenty of bad things exist that shouldn't. Death is one of those things. So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. I was quite young at the time and influenced by science fiction. I thought that maybe future humans could invent time travel and come back in time and save people who died. I've since come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely to be physically possible in our universe. But other advanced technologies, like curing aging, are certainly not. Perhaps even within our reach. And if backwards time travel might be impossible, we have invented a way to do forwards time travel with cryonics.

bambax 11y ago
> So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. Heaven did exist, and our ancestors destroyed it; it was the Caribbean, and its inhabitants were all killed and/or enslaved to build... churches.
fossuser 11y ago
I think death is probably a selective evolutionary advantage for a species. A species is basically self perpetuating genetic code stuck somewhere in an evolutionary local maxima. In our case there may be an advantage in adaptability by having individuals die and genetic code mix/change more frequently. This still sucks and if we could figure out how the brain actually worked to prevent it that would be cool, but we'd start getting into identity issues (what makes you you? how does consciousness actually work?). Sleep is interesting to think about here since it likely has something to do with re-calculating weights in a neural net, garbage collection, persisting memories etc. Though we don't consider going to sleep dying and waking up new because of the sense of continuity. If a copy of you was made and the original then killed though we wouldn't like that. Sense of purpose difficulties still exist in our relatively brief lifespans, but at least we get an easy out with the biological one - we'd have to think more about this with death out of the way. Also the drive to have sex and reproduce would probably still be around since it's core to our existence, not sure how we deal with that. Though I'd still prefer a star trek future where we're colonizing the galaxy and the goal is to learn. Mostly rambling thoughts.

jashephe 11y ago

Indeed. From a biological standpoint, it's important to realize that an indefinite lifespan, as a life history trait [1], does not confer evolutionary fitness. The fact is that organisms do not appear to evolve to a maximal lifespan — they evolve to an optimal lifespan. Humans are already considered to be K-selected [2], and increasing lifespan appears to necessarily decrease fitness in other areas, as has been seen in worms [3] and flies [4] (e.g. reproductive fitness decreases and age of maturity increases, when lifespan increases). More importantly, "near-infinite" lifespans reduce the efficacy of natural selection — longer-living organisms evolve at a slower rate. While, perhaps, unappealing, the culling of species members well past reproductive age is necessary to allow for more resources and potential for competition and selection in their offspring. And humans are certainly still undergoing natural selection in many arenas; just look at sickle cell trait [5] or or CCR5-Δ32 [6]. Death is a feature, not a bug. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8608934 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8608934 [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601460 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601460 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965279 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965279 [6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791590 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791590

reasonattlm 11y ago
These are all arguments that apply to the house you live in, the blankets on your bed, the medicine you use. You are absolutely fine with all of those - you don't live in a cave, shun treatment for infectious disease, and wear furs. In fact I would go so far as to say that you probably think that modern technology is a good thing, and you are better off for it. Yet that already greatly manipulates your proposed optimal condition for the human species. So why does treating aging as a medical condition bring out this view? This seems like a very selective appeal to nature.
- jashephe 11y ago
  It may not have been expressed the most clearly, but the intention was not quite as you describe. Shelter, clothing, and modern medicine all confer enhanced fitness — I was attempting to suggest that increased lifespan does not.