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Maybe. But why in this case do we not see bugs and failures in this program, i.e. no one lived 5 times more than the average or did not live forever at all, for
by NoOn3 1y ago
Maybe. But why in this case do we not see bugs and failures in this program, i.e. no one lived 5 times more than the average or did not live forever at all, for example? I'm not making a statement, just a guess.
- hyperman1 1y agoYou could say this woman is immortal. Or at least her cancer is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
- NoOn3 1y agoI'm not a biologist. But it seems to me that this is at the level of one cell. Yes, a cell can become immortal, but cells live much less than a whole person. Over the course of a person's life, many many cells change. And the program for human life, rather than individual cells, is perceived differently.
- piombisallow 1y agoHeight is controlled by genes too and you don't get people shorter than 0.5 m or taller than 3 m
- JPLeRouzic 1y agoTrue, but one guy was 272 cm (8 ft 11 in) tall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people And another was 76cm high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_dwarfism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_dwarfism
- tgv 1y agoBecause the whole system is quite resilient and self-repairing, and probably requires a great deal of consistency between the various genes? Aging is quite fundamental to life, and a "bug" in that area would almost certainly cause severe problems in other areas, probably death. Cancer might be an example. And systems of many components tend to narrow the standard deviation of the composite. But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
- rowanG077 1y agoaging doesn't seem fundamental to life to me. There is known complex life that doesn't age. I expect age is a huge driver of evolution in many cases so it makes sense that most life has it.
- fc417fc802 1y agoYou have that backwards. In many cases aging hasn't noticably impeded evolution so it hasn't been selected against.
- rowanG077 1y agoYou misunderstood what I said. I'm saying not aging does clearly impede evolution. This is not some exotic idea, it's be brought forth before: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1957.tb02911.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1558-5646....
- landl0rd 1y agoBecause the odds of something 5x the average that's more or less normally distributed are really, really low. It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality. It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
- DevelopingElk 1y agoIt's because age isn't normally distributed. The annual odds of dying go up by a factor of 2 every 8 years. This gives tighter bounds on age than a normal distribution would give.
- kkoncevicius 1y agoSuch arguments go both ways. For example, if aging is accumulation of damage and not programmed, then why don't we see lucky people who live 5 times longer. Also how come the patterns of aging are so similar between individuals and even between different species (wrinkly skin, grey hair, fragile bones).
- abeppu 1y agoBut aren't there a lot of processes that could drive accumulated damage that are hard to avoid (so you can't realistically get lucky)? E.g. if metabolic processes produce harmful products in low quantities that build up ... How would you possibly survive many decades without doing at least a certain amount of metabolizing food etc?
- blargey 1y agoHow do you propose someone would "luck out of" the wear and tear your body undergoes just to function? It's accumulation of damage to the very systems that work to prevent and repair damage, leading all organs to accumulate the damage they would have hidden by fast repair in "youth". It's unavoidable and accelerating by definition, and that reflects what we observe in aging. The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
- crinkly 1y agoThink this is a statistical thing. Your body is made of lots of cells. But one exceptional one wouldn’t outlive the whole system’s failure. You’d need a hell of a lot of cells to survive that long.
- csallen 1y agoLots of models could explain this. For example, let's say it's not just one program, but thousand of programs running in your body, trying to get you to age or die. The chances that all of them bug out would be astronomically low.
- dotancohen 1y agoBut there have been astronomically high qualities of humans produced, none of which have shown this phenomenon.
- csallen 1y agoCombinatorics can make things astronomically unlikely. Imagine the "aging program" bugs out 1 in 100 times, a pretty high failure rate. However, imagine the program runs in 10 systems in the body, and success in any one of these systems is enough to age and kill you. The body is quite fragile after all. If this were the case, then in order to not age at all, a person would need not just a 1/100 event to occur, but a (1/100)^10 event to occur. That's 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. In other words, one in a hundred quintillion. A hundred quintillion is about 840 million times higher than the number of humans who have ever lived, which is 120 billion.
- dotancohen 1y agoSerious question. There are biblical accounts of people living hundreds of years. For people who like to find scientific explanations for biblical stories, is this plausible?
- fc417fc802 1y agoNo, because the underlying mechanism of intentional aging (as opposed to incidental) isn't plausible. The top level comment is pure fantasy. There's extensive scientific research on the subject of aging if you care to sink time into reading about it. Consider one of the many examples of embedded systems that suffered from subtle bugs that were dependent on environmental factors after they were left running for too long. The official manufacturer provided solution was to reboot (ie there is no solution). Now imagine someone in a comment section somewhere proposes the idea that these bugs are actually intentional program features. That's the scientific level this discussion is at.
- oneshtein 1y agoBecause those will need 5x more time to become adults.
- 0xcafefood 1y agoIf you want to see that idea explored in art, I highly recommend the movie "The Man From Earth."