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A cure for aging terrifies me, my gut tells me that it would be the end of homo sapiens. Think about it, do you really think all higher order life has this "de

A cure for aging terrifies me, my gut tells me that it would be the end of homo sapiens. Think about it, do you really think all higher order life has this "defect" for no reason? Without aging, the youth would be at an eternal disadvantage in society. The rush to have children would all but disappear without a biological clock. Evolutionarily speaking, a cure for aging is a dead end. That said, i could easily see it happening, so like I said, I'm terrified.

chc 16y ago
In general, anything that happens after childbirth is tertiary from an evolutionary standpoint. All higher-order life has this defect not necessarily because it's good, but because merely delaying expression of the defect is enough. But what satisfies natural selection in the general case is not necessarily the best choice for people. Also, humans have become so dominant by leapfrogging biological evolution with our technological evolution. This would just be one more example. It would not really be a dead-end unless we're looking at some eugenics angle.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
Being terrified of change is an evolutionary dead end. At a talk Leonard Nimoy gave at USC on his poetry he remarked that his garden had taught him that one could learn to value the change in in a thing over the current state of that thing. I found that to be a fairly profound statement and worth remembering. The claim that youth would be at an eternal disadvantage in an ageless world not supported by observations in the current world. If having more time conferred universal advantage then youth today could not compete with those older than them. This is clearly not the case and demonstrated by young entreprenuers every day. To the extent that the cellular processes active in creative, contemplative, and evaluative thinking are exposed, if it becomes common to unify those processes in the functioning of everyone's consciousness then it is possible it would give rise to a modest time advantage for those who had been thinking longer about the same things. The more I read the news, the more I appreciate watching The Twighlight Zone :-)
jamii 16y ago
I think by the point that we can banish aging technological self-improvement will have overtaken evolution by a long way. We already severely handicap evolution by using medicine to compensate for disadvantageous features such as short-sigtedness.
- eru 16y ago
  We just alter the criteria for selection. Evolution is still there.
rjshade 16y ago
Higher order life has this "defect" because, from an evolutionary perspective, there is little reason for us to stick around for very long after reproducing. After passing our genes on to our children we have some years where it is helpful for their survival that we are still alive, but pretty soon Darwin has no more use for you. The various problems that you imagine might result from curing ageing can be solved _after_ we solve the problem of hundreds of thousands of people dying every single day.
loewenskind 16y ago
The entire point of a civilized society is to overcome evolution. For consistency, do you at least hate all our technology that lets e.g. babies that would have died 50 years ago lead long productive lives? They obviously had bad genes, right?

chc 16y ago

In general, anything that happens after childbirth is tertiary from an evolutionary standpoint. All higher-order life has this defect not necessarily because it's good, but because merely delaying expression of the defect is enough. But what satisfies natural selection in the general case is not necessarily the best choice for people. Also, humans have become so dominant by leapfrogging biological evolution with our technological evolution. This would just be one more example. It would not really be a dead-end unless we're looking at some eugenics angle.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

Being terrified of change is an evolutionary dead end. At a talk Leonard Nimoy gave at USC on his poetry he remarked that his garden had taught him that one could learn to value the change in in a thing over the current state of that thing. I found that to be a fairly profound statement and worth remembering. The claim that youth would be at an eternal disadvantage in an ageless world not supported by observations in the current world. If having more time conferred universal advantage then youth today could not compete with those older than them. This is clearly not the case and demonstrated by young entreprenuers every day. To the extent that the cellular processes active in creative, contemplative, and evaluative thinking are exposed, if it becomes common to unify those processes in the functioning of everyone's consciousness then it is possible it would give rise to a modest time advantage for those who had been thinking longer about the same things. The more I read the news, the more I appreciate watching The Twighlight Zone :-)

jamii 16y ago

I think by the point that we can banish aging technological self-improvement will have overtaken evolution by a long way. We already severely handicap evolution by using medicine to compensate for disadvantageous features such as short-sigtedness.

eru 16y ago
We just alter the criteria for selection. Evolution is still there.

rjshade 16y ago

Higher order life has this "defect" because, from an evolutionary perspective, there is little reason for us to stick around for very long after reproducing. After passing our genes on to our children we have some years where it is helpful for their survival that we are still alive, but pretty soon Darwin has no more use for you. The various problems that you imagine might result from curing ageing can be solved _after_ we solve the problem of hundreds of thousands of people dying every single day.

loewenskind 16y ago

The entire point of a civilized society is to overcome evolution. For consistency, do you at least hate all our technology that lets e.g. babies that would have died 50 years ago lead long productive lives? They obviously had bad genes, right?