6 ms·

One concern I see with destroying aging is that it will most certainly result in the destruction of a very precise cycle of evolutionary innovation, even withi

One concern I see with destroying aging is that it will most certainly result in the destruction of a very precise cycle of evolutionary innovation, even within our species. It's like a giant "no retirement" program, never allowing younger generations to be placed into positions were they are forced to create change, innovate and fail; all the while bettering the human race. It's no accident that innovation comes mostly from youth - the inexperience that makes you foolish occasionally creates species changing progress. This is the Pandora's box of unintended consequences, all in the name of refusing to accept a key aspect of the human condition. Evolution has almost exclusively adopted destructive aging processes in every form of life on the planet. The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way.

Jebdm 18y ago
"Evolution has almost exclusively adopted destructive aging processes in every form of life on the planet. The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way." I'd say it's pretty obvious, although I'm no biologist: natural selection doesn't "care" how long you live, as long as you live long enough to have (and possibly raise) kids.
- dasil003 18y ago
  If you live too long you take resources away from your offspring.
  - Jebdm 18y ago
    Sure, but I don't think this effect is enough to be significant to most evolutionary processes, especially if (and I believe this is the idea) in aging you don't become feeble. As long as there are enough resources to go around, there isn't a big problem, especially since people are resources themselves. (If this weren't the case, you would think that evolution would drive us to die shortly after we had children, or at least after we lost our ability to have children.)
    - dasil003 18y ago
      Most species have far more limited resources than we do (ie. that we have created for ourselves recently), and they exist in some sort of equilibrium. If old members of the population live longer, then the group will run short on resources and some will starve. If the old are not feeble and they don't die more than the young, then evolution will slow and the population as a whole will be less able to adapt to a changing environment over time. Is this effect significant or not? I don't think we can guess at these types of things. Subtle changes in a complex system are hard to predict.
  - eru 18y ago
    People tend to care for their offspring. Humans do it longer than almost anything else.
  - ojbyrne 18y ago
    The longer life expectancies are, the less offspring you have. Seems like a natural counterbalance.
    - dasil003 18y ago
      The fewer offspring you have, the less adaptable the species becomes.
      - bloch 18y ago
        Depends on technological developments. Why should the individual survival machine care about the adaptability of the species as a whole?
  - mhartl 18y ago
    Natural resources aren't finite in any meaningful economic sense. Even in a physical sense, the upper bounds are huge. And, most important, most people are net producers; the longer they live, the more they produce.
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  If your statement was true, death wouldn't be so wide spread. Clearly, evolution is very opinionated on the matter.
  - Jebdm 18y ago
    No; the default is decay (as we see from the second law of thermodynamics), and we would have to explicitly inhibit decay in order to stop death. There is no evolutionary incentive to stop death due to aging.
robotrout 18y ago
You're right that aging seems to have an evolutionary advantage. That advantage is increased diversity within a species. Super successful individuals, who would otherwise "take over" a species, are replaced, so that other strains can get a chance. Diversity in a species is as important as diversity in a stock portfolio. What's working great today, may not work great tomorrow, so portfolios and species that survive plagues, asteroids, and global warming fanatics tend to be diversified. However.... I contend that the human race has moved beyond evolution. No longer do only the fittest survive. We protect our weak and stupid, and they mate just as frequently and successfully as our strong and smart. We've wrestled the destiny of our species away from evolution, and taken control of it ourselves. Now, how that experiment turns out, it's too early to tell. So far, so good. But since the ship has already sailed anyway, any argument that something is "against evolution" is a moot argument. I would like to live for longer than 100 years myself, so I admit to being a bit biased on this issue. I think a case can be made that the "best and the brightest" of our current governing and business class could use some augmentation. We've had some great leaders in our past, it might be nice if they were still active. Closer to our hearts here, what if we still had Richard Feynman? What if we still had Arthur C Clarke? Wouldn't the world probably be better? We are not so brimming with extra talent that we can just throw it away after a few decades.
- Jebdm 18y ago
  I don't know that increasing longevity would decrease diversity, because increased longevity doesn't necessarily open up the "window of opportunity" for having kids.
  - robotrout 18y ago
    It might or might not. We have women having children now at ages that would be considered absolutely ancient 10,000 years ago. As we extend our lifespan, we seem to stretch out everything ... childhood, child bearing years, productive years, etc. My point is that, it doesn't matter, since we no longer submit to evolution's rules, anyway.
    - 18y ago
jodrellblank 18y ago
The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way. No, it isn't. We're talking about death here. It's not like the alternative could be any worse.
- justin 18y ago
  For you, not for the race.
  - ericb 18y ago
    To play devil's advocate, why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out. The whole game of evolution is a greedy contest of self-interest--why approach it selflessly with concerns about "the race?"
    - gravitycop 18y ago
      why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out. Does anyone ever stick around to experience how anything turns out, anyway? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Definitions_of_.22the_same.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Definitions_of_... Normally, from instance to instance, each of us ceases to exist. A new person, under an illusion of being a "continuous" person and not merely one one in a sequence of related instantaneous persons, takes the place of the old person. And so it goes, from instance to instance. An instant from any given instance, the you of that instance will not exist. So why bother planning for those instances of you (who might remember being you, but are not you) that will exist (in their respective instances)? That you that were you when "you" began reading this, is not the you that is you now. That former you left you his memories, but he cannot experience what you are experiencing now. So, why did he bother leaving any memories for you at all? Such bothering should have been pointless from his point of view, now that he is extinct. Yes? (...Unless he were under the illusion that he would somehow still exist, rather than the more-likely scenario of merely some creature like him, i.e. you, existing in his stead and who might be under the illusion that he is the same person as the person who kindly left the memories, the physical possessions, the bank account, the bodily health, etc.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Scenarios http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Scenarios someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change#Identity_and_change_in_conscious_beings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change#Identity_an... The problem of personal identity relates to change as applied to people. [...] The question is exactly why we call the old woman in 1998 the same person as that little girl in 1920.
mhartl 18y ago
Those stubborn humans: they're always tempting fate by learning to hunt, farm, write, sail, smelt, fly, and compute. If only they would accept the human condition as their ineluctable fate: they would then learn the wisdom of dying, and welcome Death with happiness and joy!

Jebdm 18y ago

"Evolution has almost exclusively adopted destructive aging processes in every form of life on the planet. The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way." I'd say it's pretty obvious, although I'm no biologist: natural selection doesn't "care" how long you live, as long as you live long enough to have (and possibly raise) kids.

dasil003 18y ago
If you live too long you take resources away from your offspring.
- Jebdm 18y ago
  Sure, but I don't think this effect is enough to be significant to most evolutionary processes, especially if (and I believe this is the idea) in aging you don't become feeble. As long as there are enough resources to go around, there isn't a big problem, especially since people are resources themselves. (If this weren't the case, you would think that evolution would drive us to die shortly after we had children, or at least after we lost our ability to have children.)
  - dasil003 18y ago
    Most species have far more limited resources than we do (ie. that we have created for ourselves recently), and they exist in some sort of equilibrium. If old members of the population live longer, then the group will run short on resources and some will starve. If the old are not feeble and they don't die more than the young, then evolution will slow and the population as a whole will be less able to adapt to a changing environment over time. Is this effect significant or not? I don't think we can guess at these types of things. Subtle changes in a complex system are hard to predict.
- eru 18y ago
  People tend to care for their offspring. Humans do it longer than almost anything else.
- ojbyrne 18y ago
  The longer life expectancies are, the less offspring you have. Seems like a natural counterbalance.
  - dasil003 18y ago
    The fewer offspring you have, the less adaptable the species becomes.
    - bloch 18y ago
      Depends on technological developments. Why should the individual survival machine care about the adaptability of the species as a whole?
- mhartl 18y ago
  Natural resources aren't finite in any meaningful economic sense. Even in a physical sense, the upper bounds are huge. And, most important, most people are net producers; the longer they live, the more they produce.
run4yourlives 18y ago
If your statement was true, death wouldn't be so wide spread. Clearly, evolution is very opinionated on the matter.
- Jebdm 18y ago
  No; the default is decay (as we see from the second law of thermodynamics), and we would have to explicitly inhibit decay in order to stop death. There is no evolutionary incentive to stop death due to aging.

robotrout 18y ago

You're right that aging seems to have an evolutionary advantage. That advantage is increased diversity within a species. Super successful individuals, who would otherwise "take over" a species, are replaced, so that other strains can get a chance. Diversity in a species is as important as diversity in a stock portfolio. What's working great today, may not work great tomorrow, so portfolios and species that survive plagues, asteroids, and global warming fanatics tend to be diversified. However.... I contend that the human race has moved beyond evolution. No longer do only the fittest survive. We protect our weak and stupid, and they mate just as frequently and successfully as our strong and smart. We've wrestled the destiny of our species away from evolution, and taken control of it ourselves. Now, how that experiment turns out, it's too early to tell. So far, so good. But since the ship has already sailed anyway, any argument that something is "against evolution" is a moot argument. I would like to live for longer than 100 years myself, so I admit to being a bit biased on this issue. I think a case can be made that the "best and the brightest" of our current governing and business class could use some augmentation. We've had some great leaders in our past, it might be nice if they were still active. Closer to our hearts here, what if we still had Richard Feynman? What if we still had Arthur C Clarke? Wouldn't the world probably be better? We are not so brimming with extra talent that we can just throw it away after a few decades.

Jebdm 18y ago
I don't know that increasing longevity would decrease diversity, because increased longevity doesn't necessarily open up the "window of opportunity" for having kids.
- robotrout 18y ago
  It might or might not. We have women having children now at ages that would be considered absolutely ancient 10,000 years ago. As we extend our lifespan, we seem to stretch out everything ... childhood, child bearing years, productive years, etc. My point is that, it doesn't matter, since we no longer submit to evolution's rules, anyway.
  - 18y ago

jodrellblank 18y ago

The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way. No, it isn't. We're talking about death here. It's not like the alternative could be any worse.

justin 18y ago
For you, not for the race.
- ericb 18y ago
  To play devil's advocate, why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out. The whole game of evolution is a greedy contest of self-interest--why approach it selflessly with concerns about "the race?"
  - gravitycop 18y ago
    why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out. Does anyone ever stick around to experience how anything turns out, anyway? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Definitions_of_.22the_same.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Definitions_of_... Normally, from instance to instance, each of us ceases to exist. A new person, under an illusion of being a "continuous" person and not merely one one in a sequence of related instantaneous persons, takes the place of the old person. And so it goes, from instance to instance. An instant from any given instance, the you of that instance will not exist. So why bother planning for those instances of you (who might remember being you, but are not you) that will exist (in their respective instances)? That you that were you when "you" began reading this, is not the you that is you now. That former you left you his memories, but he cannot experience what you are experiencing now. So, why did he bother leaving any memories for you at all? Such bothering should have been pointless from his point of view, now that he is extinct. Yes? (...Unless he were under the illusion that he would somehow still exist, rather than the more-likely scenario of merely some creature like him, i.e. you, existing in his stead and who might be under the illusion that he is the same person as the person who kindly left the memories, the physical possessions, the bank account, the bodily health, etc.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Scenarios http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Scenarios someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change#Identity_and_change_in_conscious_beings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change#Identity_an... The problem of personal identity relates to change as applied to people. [...] The question is exactly why we call the old woman in 1998 the same person as that little girl in 1920.

mhartl 18y ago

Those stubborn humans: they're always tempting fate by learning to hunt, farm, write, sail, smelt, fly, and compute. If only they would accept the human condition as their ineluctable fate: they would then learn the wisdom of dying, and welcome Death with happiness and joy!