Thanks for posting this, Karo. I was going to open a topic on this as well.
He made some rather provocative statements but gave few leads as to what specific mechanisms he proposed to explain his statements (and Google hasn't been much help so far).
Specifically, the slide at around 16:10:
Why does this matter for SENS?
* This is huge for non-evolutionary SENS, because the SENS proposal is based on a simple model of fixing damage
* This model is in turn based on the erroneous assumption that aging is a process of accumulating damage, the ubiquitous non-evolutionary gerontological model, that leads to unrelenting Gompertzian aging
* But this Gompertzian aging DOESN'T HAPPEN
* Instead, aging is a loss of adaptation, NOT an accumulation of damage
I must admit I don't fully understand, even after watching the lecture twice,
* Do the experiments to which Rose refers really prove that the damage-based model is completely invalid? If so, I don't see how. He claims that "that's not fundamental or intrinsic to the process," but doesn't seem to even so much as hint at what factors could possibly replace them.
* What does Rose mean by a "loss of adaptation"? He later states that "In fact, a lot of work that I'm not discussing today indicates that
allocation is a much more important process than damage as a mechanism of aging." Allocation of what, exactly ...?
Edited by resveratrol, 08 October 2007 - 10:13 PM.