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How likely is that aging will be cured (in the next 20-30 years)?


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#31 addx

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 03:07 PM

Peter Nygard is featured in a YouTube video claiming stem cell technology being developed in the Bahamas is making him look and feel younger. http://www.cbc.ca/ne...hamas-1.2555831 Hei is probably just full of it http://corporate.nyg...rger-than-life/ marketing his clothebrand.
“From the woman’s egg, we took out her DNA, put my old 70-year-old DNA in its place [and] grew it in vitro,” he says in the video. “I may be the only person in the world who has my own embryonic stem cells growing in a petri dish.”
Then, Nygard makes his boldest claim.
“This is huge. This is a game changer. This could eliminate all disease. This perhaps is immortality,” he says.


His nervous system if it sees fit will stress the shit out any cells he introduces. He's only helping his tissues recover for a short while, but if his nervous system is for example causing irritable bowel syndrome, new stem cells will not cure this as they will not affect the already established neuron networks associations and charges. It is more probable that an electroshock therapy will cure this type of aging.
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#32 Bogomoletz II

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 07:57 PM

Aging doesn't have to be conclusively cured within the time frame of your current life expectancy in order for you to make it. All you need is periodic boosts to your life expectancy, since these all add up, allowing you to potentially live up to the time when unlimited lifespan becomes a reality in practice. It's sufficient to focus at first on longevity alone, rather than on an ultimate solution. This is about the longevity escape velocity, which has already been mentioned on this thread more than once.

Death and aging is not a disease to be cured, it is a part of life and an evolutionary mechanism of "avoidance of extinction"(not death of a single organism itself). Without death, life has no meaning and it would not exist.


Please don't take this wrong, but I'm baffled as to why you would even want to register on this website if this is truly your opinion on aging; that there's nothing wrong about aging or that, God forbid, it's even good. It's like being an American Christian at a Jihadist meeting.
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#33 Galactic Public Archives

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 09:08 PM

Very soon with the advancements of 3d printing and stem cells, patients in hospitals will not have to die waiting for organs we'll be able to grow them! We are certainly have not reached immortality as of yet but how far off are we really? Dr. Aubrey de Grey, founder of the Sens foundation, studies repairing or intervening the cellular side effects of metabolism which is the basis of mammalian aging! Let's see what his research has to offer!

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#34 addx

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 09:10 PM

No, I'm actually here participating in a group buy of JDTic.

I do believe that substance has anti-aging qualities to it.

Infact it is shown that aged rats spine contains a lot more kappa opioid receptors and I think dynorphin content than young rats. JDTic is kappa opioid antagonist. It is also shown that aged stem cells can be revived through p38 mapk inhibition, a stress way also activated by kappa opioid receptors and dynorphin.

My interest is that I do beleve kappa opioids are also in charge of "death drive" of behaviours/relations/memory schemas and facilitate fear memory and fear response. Given the effects of kappa opioid agonists this is quite substantiated. Animal testing with antagonist is also quite in favour of my explanation. As such I do believe the balance of "life force" through the various stages of life is mainly governed by a balance of mu-opioid and kappa-opioid activity, moving towards kappa-opioid activity as the organism ages at all levels, cellular, spinal, psychic. This provides most of the ageing. Initial mu-opioid activity provides the zest for life of younger organisms.

My point is that science is looking for errors in evolution rather than mechanisms and this is why gerontology has failed thus far.

You're thinking I'm a cook. And I make more sense than this whole forum.

http://pharmrev.aspe...t/56/3/351.full

Edited by addx, 25 March 2014 - 09:14 PM.

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#35 niner

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 09:25 PM

As he was recently mentioned here, Peter Nygard might be the love-child of Donald Trump and Cenegenics... A little testosterone goes a long way.

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#36 niner

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 09:32 PM

You're thinking I'm a cook. And I make more sense than this whole forum.


I don't think that you are a food preparation professional. However, you seem to have an inordinate interest in opioids, some unusual ideas about aging, and a great deal of confidence in your ideas.
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#37 Kevnzworld

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 12:51 AM

I'm hoping that Kurzweils longevity escape velocity is a reality..since no cures for aging or cancer are on the horizon.
In the meantime one needs to increase health span, squaring the curve as they say, just to hope to get to the point where there is a real proven breakthrough in longevity science. No, and I'm not talking CR, err starvation....
That Cenegenics guy does look good, I saw a piece on him on 60 minutes. That's bio identical hormone replacement on steroids, literally. That being said I do take bio identical hormones in moderation, not HGH though.

#38 PWAIN

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 01:28 AM

You're thinking I'm a cook. And I make more sense than this whole forum.


I don't think that you are a food preparation professional. However, you seem to have an inordinate interest in opioids, some unusual ideas about aging, and a great deal of confidence in your ideas.

LOL this is just too funny - so diplomatic. Thanks for the laugh Niner :) :)

#39 BobSeitz

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 03:39 AM

In 1936, a Yale University Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering by the name of Clifford C, Furnas wrote a book entitled, "The Next 100 Years: the Unfinished Business of Science". In Part I, BIOLOGY, he includes a chapter "What of Death?" in which he talks about what was known about aging and death in 1936... practically nothing. He notes that the life expectancy for a baby born in 1936 was 60. He writes, "According to the chief statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who should know his mortality if anyone does, an expectancy at birth of of a life of 70 years is not at all unreasonable with our present biological equipment and knowledge and may be expected to come about within a relatively few years." A little farther on, he writes, "We should be allowed to exist on and on, long after our procreative objective has been reached; yet despite our apparently valiant efforts, we probably have not added one single day to the inherent span of average human life. If you are Nordic, your chances of surviving at an advanced age are better than if you are of Latin extraction. If your grandparents and parents lived to an old age, than the chances are that you will live longer are better than if they have been short-lived, but all the human effort has not stretched the average inherited human lifespan in the slightest. We waste away and slip into senility for no apparent reason. It is customary to say that the body wears out and just quits, but that is no answer. Its worn parts are constantly being replaced by new ones. Every day dead cells leave the body, and live ones take their place. The Sequoia trees of California keep laying down new cells and living indefinitely."

He concludes, "On the long end of life, there has been no progress. If you ask a good biologist if we will ever know what senility is and if we do, whether we will ever be able to control it and thus postpone death indefinitely, he will just look at you over the top of his glasses. Use "biologist" in the broadest sense to include medical researchers, physicians, botanists, zoologists and all the rest and still you will find no sympathy with the idea. The answer is so far beyond the present knowledge that the expert cannot allow himself even to think about it. He must wait upon the work of the biochemist. Meanwhile, we keep dying and he writes theses upon the life of the earthworm."

One of my reasons for quoting this is to convey the hopelessness of the prospects for influencing the aging process in 1936 (two years after Clive McKay and Mary Crowell published the results of their study showing that calorie restriction prolongs the lives of rats). The received wisdom in 1936 was that how long you can live was 100% determined by your genes, and that three-score-and-ten was probably the upper limit on the average lifespan.
Hopeless as slowing aging may have seemed in 1936, it paled into insignificance compared to the hopelessness of space flight. Aeronautical engineers prated that rockets couldn't work in outer space because they would have nothing to push against. (Apparently, they slept through their undergraduate physics classes.) Although kids like me were atwitter over rocket ships like Flash Gordon's and Buck Roger's, the grown-ups considered space flight to be childish foolishness. By the summer of 1944, the highest that Robert "Looney" Goddard had gotten any of his liquid-fueled rockets to fly was 11,000 feet. An artillery piece could lob a shell higher than that.
Another "show-stopper" was the problem of containing the burning fuel in a rocket motor. Tungsten might have taken the temperatures, but incandescent oxygen would have caused any metal to catch fire.

That all changed in September of '44 when the first V2 landed on London. Here was a huge, single-stage rocket that could attain a speed of a mile a second while carrying a one-ton payload. The "big people" around me still didn't "get it". After all, the V2 had a range of 75 miles, no greater than "Big Bertha", the giant 75-mile German gun that shelled Paris in World War I. It's 239,000 miles to the moon. But of course, scientists and military planners understood the differences and grasped the potentialities.

The same situation existed with respect to "atomic" energy. In 1939, it took a cyclotron and a huge energy investment to smash an atom or two. Only science fiction writers fantasized about atomic energy. (Hahn and Strassman's 1939 discovery that the Uranium 235 atom could be split with slow neutrons didn't reach public awareness until the end of World War II, at least in my universe of discourse) Unbeknownst to the world, the first nuclear reactor went critical under the grandstands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field stadium on December 2nd, 1942... only six years after Dr. Furnas published his book, "The Next 100 Years". When the first "atomic" bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, it took the world by storm. Even so, the headline, "Bomb Destroys City" didn't register that night with my mother and her friend, Mrs. Moore.

To me, this is so reminiscent of the current situation with respect to anti-aging research and prospects. The same nay-sayers and ankle-biters are still gnawing away at pioneers like the founders and us communicants of Longecity. At the same time, we've come so far and matters are moving so fast. One enabling technology that (I believe) is profoundly affecting everything is the existence of the Internet. The Internet is ramping up around the world, and its impact upon scientific progress must surely be revolutionary. Twenty years ago, as a research physicist, I was limited to whatever was available in our local library, and to capture hard copy, I had to feed dimes into the library's Xerox copier and manually copy everything I wanted to take home. Communication was by long-distance telephone or by snail mail. Interaction with other researchers occurred at conferences after I had presented my own "transportation paper", and could pay attention to what else was going on.

Over the past year, new products like Niagen, MitoQ, and Longvida curcumin seem to be appearing at a breath-taking rate. In the meantime, there are evidence-based ways of slowing human aging to which, at three months south of 85, I can personally attest. And new strategies for stretching out aging are arriving at a pulse-pounding pace. Like what? Like high-intensity interval training. Like Josh Mitteldorf's suggestion that we, viz., get out every hour or so and run lickety-split around the house because we need to keep moving all day, even after we've had our daily workout. Like the role of high-flavenol, minimally processed cacao mixed in with our matcha green tea. Like the dose-dependent reductions in all-cause mortality that attend the daily consumption of a palmful of walnuts.
When I was a child back in the 1930's, we kids bounced off the walls, but no adults exercised beyond walking places now and then. I suspect adult exercise would have been deemed unseemly and juvenile, although I never thought about it, and never asked. Older adults would probably have been afraid to exercise beyond a walk in the park. In any event, although exercise was considered to be healthy for us, there was no quantitative evidence linking exercise to any kinds of health outcomes. Smoking was considered to be an unhealthy habit, but there was no evidence tying it to lung cancer or to heart attacks.
Fresh fruits and vegetables would have been available only for a short time in the summer. Their nutritional content may have been higher than what's typical today, but we only had access to them when they were "in season". The rest of the time, we had to eat canned or dried foods. We kept potatoes in the potato bin in the fruit cellar, and some people had dried apples. Frozen food in the home didn't arrive until the 1950's. Fruit juices weren't available other than in canned form. We got an orange in our stockings at Christmastime. Bread and cookies would spoil after a few days in the breadbox. Sugar was considered to be bad for your teeth and to represent empty calories, but unless you had "sugar diabetes", sugar would do no harm.

The point is: even if we'd wanted to eat differently than we did, we wouldn't have had a choice.
Heart attacks, ulcers and high blood pressure were attributed to stress. Nobody had a clue to what caused the degenerative diseases of aging. Alzeimer's disease was lumped in with senile dementia, and it happened to a lot of people (but not everyone) when they got older. Ditto for Parkinson's disease (the palsy). Rheumatism (arthritis) was another unavoidable concomitant of aging. Cancer was terrible, but there would be a cure for cancer by the time I reached my majority in 1950. Infections (e. g., TB... "the white plague") were the leading cause of death until penicillin became available after World War II. If you want an example of an anti-aging breakthrough, consider dentistry. Nobody around me knew about the importance of getting tarter removed twice a year at the dentist's office. By the time people reached their 50's or 60's, practically all of them had "doggy breath" false teeth.

I believe that we've come a long way and that we're moving at flank speed. Among other game-changers, I believe the arrival of the Internet and its bandwidth improvements are revolutionizing various kinds of personal and professional interactions, along with the creation of a global village. I've recently been reviewing some of the literature regarding the effects of exercise, diet, stress reduction, and other interventions on all-cause mortality, and inferentially, on "health spans" and life spans. The published results appear to be pretty dramatic. One Oxford University metastudy arrives at ratios of all-cause mortality of 5-to-1 to 10-to-1 between lowest-risk subgroups and highest-risk subgroups in the studies they've reviewed. They note that "The big effect is smoking - both on overall mortality, and especially on lung cancer." In another study of all-cause mortality, the National Institute on Aging's Women's Health and Aging Study, of 713 community-dwelling women between the ages of 70 and 79, women in the most-active group and highest tertile of serum caretenoids had about 1/8th the 5-year mortality rate of women in the least-active, lowest-caretenoid group. (Of course, correlation doesn't guarantee causation.)
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#40 Brett Black

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 03:56 AM

Death and aging is not a disease to be cured, it is a part of life and an evolutionary mechanism of "avoidance of extinction"(not death of a single organism itself). Without death, life has no meaning and it would not exist.

Species that would not mature and die would seriously reduce their ability to evolve and would be wiped out by any changes in surrounding conditions - first of which would be a species that has evolved "programmed death" in order to produce faster generational evolution.


Your ideas are contradicted by evidence; there are a number of organisms that appear not to age:
http://en.wikipedia....ible_senescence

Edited by Brett Black, 26 March 2014 - 03:59 AM.


#41 ben951

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 07:50 AM

Species that would not mature and die would seriously reduce their ability to evolve and would be wiped out by any changes in surrounding conditions - first of which would be a species that has evolved "programmed death" in order to produce faster generational evolution. A species that changes generations each 10 years will evolve 100 times faster than a species that changes generations every 1000 years. The faster evolving species would wipe out the slow evolving species. If the species that lives 1000 years did perform more sexual reproduction during those 1000 years(as if they lived only 10 years) in order to still provide some means of evolution they would easily overpopulate, the old unevolved forms would waste resources on their life and on producing less evolved offsprings. This "lag" of death would be detrimental to the population.


Renewing generations doesn't always mean evolving, rabbits reproduce and die fast most primate don't, should we be afraid that rabbits would wipe us out one day ?
I think evidence proves us that the most evolved species reproduce slow live and nurse long, like elephants, dolphins, chimps on the contrary a lot of insects that reproduce and die hyper fast practically did not evolved in millions of years.

Edited by ben951, 26 March 2014 - 07:51 AM.

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#42 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 08:22 AM

Death and aging is not a disease to be cured, it is a part of life and an evolutionary mechanism of "avoidance of extinction"(not death of a single organism itself). Without death, life has no meaning and it would not exist.

Species that would not mature and die would seriously reduce their ability to evolve and would be wiped out by any changes in surrounding conditions - first of which would be a species that has evolved "programmed death" in order to produce faster generational evolution.


Your ideas are contradicted by evidence; there are a number of organisms that appear not to age:
http://en.wikipedia....ible_senescence


I've actually looked at the species with "negligeble" senescence. Early life breaks many of the more evolved strategies. You can confuse yourself with early life if you want. I don't think the starfish/lobster strategy of immortality will provide us with nothing more but ways to produce cancer.

As for complex species - life forms that live longer are infact organisms that have little competition and live steady, slow uneventful/unstressful lives, tortoise, whales etc. In other words, they encounter little threat to extinction in their lives for their evolutionary mechanisms to recognize they're in danger and increase the "revolution" processes.

Edited by addx, 26 March 2014 - 08:49 AM.

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#43 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 08:31 AM

Species that would not mature and die would seriously reduce their ability to evolve and would be wiped out by any changes in surrounding conditions - first of which would be a species that has evolved "programmed death" in order to produce faster generational evolution. A species that changes generations each 10 years will evolve 100 times faster than a species that changes generations every 1000 years. The faster evolving species would wipe out the slow evolving species. If the species that lives 1000 years did perform more sexual reproduction during those 1000 years(as if they lived only 10 years) in order to still provide some means of evolution they would easily overpopulate, the old unevolved forms would waste resources on their life and on producing less evolved offsprings. This "lag" of death would be detrimental to the population.


Renewing generations doesn't always mean evolving, rabbits reproduce and die fast most primate don't, should we be afraid that rabbits would wipe us out one day ?
I think evidence proves us that the most evolved species reproduce slow live and nurse long, like elephants, dolphins, chimps on the contrary a lot of insects that reproduce and die hyper fast practically did not evolved in millions of years.



We're not in direct competition with rabbits are we? But the main predators of rabbits in nature will start to fail at catching rabbits more and more as time goes if they reproduce/mutate and die every 1000 years.
(infact that's not really true as both are mammals and can adapt somewhat during their lifetime, but will also begin to lag probably behind the faster evolving rabbits. in case of premammalian specie it is absolutely true)

Can you tell me exactly what's wrong with that logic? Tell me what's wrong with the logic, not some singular freak of nature example, but the general logic? As all other scientists like Dawkins seem to be indulged in their thought experiment, indulge my diletant ass and explain to me, how "speed of evolution" is not important among species?

Primates evolve their knowledge and they have much better circuits for this, this can be done within a life time and improve the species efficiency without mutating the DNA by transfer of knowledge. This causes the need for slower aging in order to learn and transfer knowledege, it's a trade off from basic DNA mutation/evolution to allow more knowledge/behavior mutation/evolution. Why does everyone have to simply throw around stupid examples to nullify any meaning or sense in evolution so we can concentrate of finding mistakes for aging rather than mechanisms.


Insects did not evolve? Are you serious? Insects produced the highest number of species among all, accounting for 90% of all animal species. Insects are such a fortified branch of life to survive almost all conditions, right after the resiliant early simple life. Elephants will be easily wiped out by a climate change as history has proved for dinosaurs as well. But the fast breeding and adapting small mammals survived(along with insects and more amphibian and aquatic creatures). Can you see now how any immortal species would get wiped out? And why generation exchange is a neccesity.


Or are you thinking insects should have evolved brains like ours and we should be their slaves?

Edited by addx, 26 March 2014 - 08:59 AM.


#44 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 08:55 AM

You're thinking I'm a cook. And I make more sense than this whole forum.


I don't think that you are a food preparation professional. However, you seem to have an inordinate interest in opioids, some unusual ideas about aging, and a great deal of confidence in your ideas.


Touche :)

It's not just opioids but they seem most fundamental.

It seems arrestins and various intracellural signaling is important to elucidate because opioids combine with these to produce their results. Arrestins alter what the receptor will to after a ligand attaches and also some endorphins do not cause all receptor functions to activate. Opioids can cause cell proliferation and apoptosis depending on these other conditions. It is somewhat explained in the last link I gave which proves opioids control cellular life cycle.

So opioids control cellular life cycle, they also control the life cycle of "mammalian behaviors"(dopaminergic methods of control/relation, including attachement) and finaly they also control the life cycle of ego-possessions(again dopaminergic methods of control/relation to abstract objects anchored within the recently evolved "imagination" ability of great apes and mammals). Talk about coincidence.

The first and single 100% effective antidepressant is infact heroin/opium/etc. It's just that they havent figured out that they need to antagonize kappa opioids to stop tolerance from developing and since then most opioidergic research has been about analgesia or taboo.
And they need to do this manipulation at exactly the right place because opioids control a number of evolutionary life/death drive mechanisms, only the most recent ones like awareness need to be modulated for most purposes we need.
Depression is evident from the increase in CREB cycle in the hippocampus. CREB cycle in the hippocampus increases KOR tone and dynorphin release. This prepares the person for death drive(drive away from extinction) instead of life drive(drive towards thriving). Antidepressant clinical benefits are aligned with their ability to reverse the CREB cycle, something which KOR antagonist do on their own and a lot sooner and more directly.

Edited by addx, 26 March 2014 - 09:17 AM.

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#45 ben951

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 10:38 AM

We're not in direct competition with rabbits are we? But the main predators of rabbits in nature will start to fail at catching rabbits more and more as time goes if they reproduce/mutate and die every 1000 years.

I'd say at some points in hour history we where in direct competition with rabbit, for instance:
http://en.wikipedia....ts_in_Australia

Now we are the main predator of rabbits and we are part of nature we evolved in it with rabbits, insects etc, even if they go faster and we live 1000 years It's unlikely that rabbits will surpass us one day.

Can you tell me exactly what's wrong with that logic? Tell me what's wrong with the logic, not some singular freak of nature example, but the general logic? As all other scientists like Dawkins seem to be indulged in their thought experiment, indulge my diletant ass and explain to me, how "speed of evolution" is not important among species?


I think the speed of evolution among species is very important, human evolution will be explosive very soon, I just don't think that living short lives, reproducing fast, and dying fast led to fast evolution, the fastest evolution came from species that live long, reproduce slow and nurses long.

Primates evolve their knowledge and they have much better circuits for this, this can be done within a life time and improve the species efficiency without mutating the DNA by transfer of knowledge. This causes the need for slower aging in order to learn and transfer knowledege, it's a trade off from basic DNA mutation/evolution to allow more knowledge/behavior mutation/evolution. Why does everyone have to simply throw around stupid examples to nullify any meaning or sense in evolution so we can concentrate of finding mistakes for aging rather than mechanisms.


Then we agree a long life if a more efficient way for evolution than short one.

Insects did not evolve? Are you serious? Insects produced the highest number of species among all, accounting for 90% of all animal species. Insects are such a fortified branch of life to survive almost all conditions, right after the resiliant early simple life.


I disagree insects almost did not evolved in 100 million years
"Most modern insect families appeared in the Jurassic, and further diversity probably in genera occurred in the Cretaceous. It is believed that by the Tertiary, there existed many of what are still modern genera; hence, most insects in amber are, indeed, members of extant genera. Notably, insects diversified in only about 100 million years into forms that are in many cases almost identical to those that exist today."
http://en.wikipedia....geny_of_insects

100 millions years ago primate did not even existed and our ancestors where little rodent.

Elephants will be easily wiped out by a climate change as history has proved for dinosaurs as well. But the fast breeding and adapting small mammals survived(along with insects and more amphibian and aquatic creatures). Can you see now how any immortal species would get wiped out? And why generation exchange is a neccesity.


No I fail to see your logic IMO the greatest chance for life to survive is to develop intelligence witch is correlated to long life slow reproduction and nursing.

In five billions years our sun will die, no fast breeding and adapting species will be able to survive it.

#46 PWAIN

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 10:57 AM

Our evolution is just happening in a different way now. We are 'evolving' much faster than any other species right now and will continue to. This is why we are able to support those that would normally be expected to become extinct such as disabled, people with genetic defects etc. We may not be able to run faster to catch those rabbits but we have invented guns which they will never be able to outrun. Sorry bunnys but humans rule!!! :))

#47 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 11:48 AM

I think the speed of evolution among species is very important, human evolution will be explosive very soon, I just don't think that living short lives, reproducing fast, and dying fast led to fast evolution, the fastest evolution came from species that live long, reproduce slow and nurses long.


This is because the nervous system abiliy of humans evolved to support non-genetic evolution. Evolution of behavior. Behavior as such lives and dies and produces evolution. Within a life time of a mammal behaviors are created and extincted. Via the same neurotransmitters that proliferate and extinct cells within tissues. It's a mechanism. Not a fluke or error in design.

Primates evolve their knowledge and they have much better circuits for this, this can be done within a life time and improve the species efficiency without mutating the DNA by transfer of knowledge. This causes the need for slower aging in order to learn and transfer knowledege, it's a trade off from basic DNA mutation/evolution to allow more knowledge/behavior mutation/evolution. Why does everyone have to simply throw around stupid examples to nullify any meaning or sense in evolution so we can concentrate of finding mistakes for aging rather than mechanisms.


Then we agree a long life if a more efficient way for evolution than short one.


To an extent yes. I have explained in the other topic what I am explaining here. Mani life/death mechanism in guessed order of evolution are

feeding - all
swarming - a lot of unconscious life
sexual reproduction( including migration to special places of reproduction) evolved in unconscious life(pre reptilians)
group domination modulated by power - reptilian - subconscious
group domination evolved to be modulated by seniority(knowledge) - evolving cooperation and transfer of knowledge and
offspring nurture - mammalian - conscious
group domination evolved to be modulated by awareness of wisdom and possession - evolving social structure - great apes and humans.


Obviously, the later evolved life takes a penalty from aging too fast because it causes the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom to be shortlived and useless.

You're all being way too focused on a single "balance" and take it to the extreme to invalidate all the other balances.

A human has all the above "mechanisms" of life and death drive installed(and probaly a few more, other especially simple life evolved differing strategies) and in balance with each other with the top being the most recently evolved awareness or vmPFC.

But for simple life, the death/reproduction is the main regulator of adaptation. They are not capable of "mid-lfe" behavior adaptation(learning), they must reproduce to mutate in order to change behavior, in order to adapt.

Insects did not evolve? Are you serious? Insects produced the highest number of species among all, accounting for 90% of all animal species. Insects are such a fortified branch of life to survive almost all conditions, right after the resiliant early simple life.


I disagree insects almost did not evolved in 100 million years
"Most modern insect families appeared in the Jurassic, and further diversity probably in genera occurred in the Cretaceous. It is believed that by the Tertiary, there existed many of what are still modern genera; hence, most insects in amber are, indeed, members of extant genera. Notably, insects diversified in only about 100 million years into forms that are in many cases almost identical to those that exist today."
http://en.wikipedia....geny_of_insects

100 millions years ago primate did not even existed and our ancestors where little rodent.

Elephants will be easily wiped out by a climate change as history has proved for dinosaurs as well. But the fast breeding and adapting small mammals survived(along with insects and more amphibian and aquatic creatures). Can you see now how any immortal species would get wiped out? And why generation exchange is a neccesity.


No I fail to see your logic IMO the greatest chance for life to survive is to develop intelligence witch is correlated to long life slow reproduction and nursing.

In five billions years our sun will die, no fast breeding and adapting species will be able to survive it.



We are the most evolved species but are also most fragile which is why our survival depends on our intellect being able to control natures whims and the threat of our own overpopulation or overexhaustion of resources.

Instects evolved to their maximum pretty much. Meaning maximum of a given "domain". They represent life in a special domain, small animals that have much variety, living of various resources that are completely useless to humans, living in conditions unlivable for humans etc. They are maximally evolved for their "territory", for the resources they use etc. And they will survive many conditions which humans can't or can with great casualties and theoretical "time bubble machines".

What is your point? That insects shouldnt exist since smarter life evolved? You fail to see logic because you dont want to see it. Insects occupy a "niche" in the worlds ability to provide life and they occupy it with the utmost evolved strenght.

Insects are here because they're able to survive famine, drought, nuclear catasthrophes, vulcano eruptions. Dinosaurs can't. Neither can elephants. While we may consider ourselves most evolved for this day and age, this is just a speck in the timeline of earth and universe. You're just being blindly narcissistic in your views on what "more evolved" means. Insects are most evolved. The complex foodchain of insects, the strength of insects, their foothold in this planet is far greater than mammal will EVER be regardless of the fact that we as mammals drilled the earth miles in and landed on the moon. You're all here laughing at me while at the same time knowing that all great biologists and thinkers testify to the fact that, shoud push come to shove, the last thing left standing on earth will be a cockroach, not a human. Testimony to that fact is the fact that all of your are looking to simple life to see how they fail to age. Or rather how they succeed in immortality. As if evolution managed to evolve our complex brains but failed to evolve immortality obvious in life as simple as star fish. It doesnt add up.

A mammal needs to start agings or else the offspring will not be able to reproduce as the older mammal owns women being more wise, having more possesions and therefore being more dominant. So evolution stops as the older immortal mammal can not be beaten by the sheer advantage of his evergrowing strength and knowledge.
If there is an inbuilt "penalty"(aging) the older mammal will be worn down sooner or later. If it happens sooner, the offspring will start to reproduce earlier and spread his genes more. If it happens later the older mammal will produce more of his offsprings. Are you people really invalidating the point in all this? It's all just cellular senescence and telomerase shortening? Are you serious? Evolution carefully preserved telomerase lengthetning enzymzes in germ cells that produce sperm. And you're saying that it recklessly forgot the telomerase lengthetning enzymes in the rest of the cells. SERIOUSLY. Add that up.

You can see these issues in humans, the generational gap is the main social difficulty of civilization. Elders are either afraid of young ones or they cherish them, depending on how they lived their lives. If they "seeded" life by teaching, they rejoice in seeing their knowledge applied and bettered. If they lived their lives abusing their dominant position of the young, they spend their older age in paranoia of the young ones. And such young ones spend their lives rising revolutions against the old, rather than adopting their knowledge and slowly bettering it(slow evolution, vs revolution).

Edited by addx, 26 March 2014 - 12:01 PM.


#48 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 12:50 PM

Our evolution is just happening in a different way now. We are 'evolving' much faster than any other species right now and will continue to. This is why we are able to support those that would normally be expected to become extinct such as disabled, people with genetic defects etc. We may not be able to run faster to catch those rabbits but we have invented guns which they will never be able to outrun. Sorry bunnys but humans rule!!! :))


Oh, and btw, humans grow bunnies(and other such animals) in order to eat them. We can not afford to extinct them, can we? Are we really separate from them? Are they evolving to produce more food given our selection/preference of fat bunnies? Are we evolving to create more faster ways of fattening them than natural selection? So, the system of bunnies and humans is evolving to be stronger/resiliant. Bunnies will survive as long as we survive and they offer us "life". We will provide "life" for them in exchange. So, it's still really a win/win for both in some way, at least in survival. The bunnies will inherently become less and less able to survive in the wild, fat and stupid. The humans will inherently become less and less able to survive without the fat bunnies. The fat bunnies provide humans more time for other activities. Which strengthen their existance and consequently the existance of the fat bunnies. As a system they are stronger. And the fat bunnies, even though they're being slaughtered daily have evolved compared to the wild bunnies. Their existance is probably more secure as they made humans dependant on them and as humans are resourceful they will make sure their dependency survives with them.

The fact that reasoning of other people in this thread is plagued by this fundamental blindness is disabling me from having a meaningful conversation.

It can be easily seen from the example above that life is inseparable and that lower food chain organisms owe their lives to those below them as much as those above them. Those below them provide their life drive. Those above them provide their death drive. Those at the top only have themselves as competition and planet earth. It's a fluid/balanced evolution of the entire ecosystem and food chains, not just a gene or a species.

Edited by addx, 26 March 2014 - 01:01 PM.


#49 ben951

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 02:39 PM

What is your point? That insects shouldnt exist since smarter life evolved? You fail to see logic because you dont want to see it. Insects occupy a "niche" in the worlds ability to provide life and they occupy it with the utmost evolved strenght.

You're just being blindly narcissistic in your views on what "more evolved" means. Insects are most evolved. The complex foodchain of insects, the strength of insects, their foothold in this planet is far greater than mammal will EVER be regardless of the fact that we as mammals drilled the earth miles in and landed on the moon. You're all here laughing at me while at the same time knowing that all great biologists and thinkers testify to the fact that, shoud push come to shove, the last thing left standing on earth will be a cockroach, not a human.


Please don't take it personally we just have different ideas, I've never laugh at you why would I ?

In your view I'm being blindly narcissic because I think humans have more evolved than insects ?

I respect all life form, I think they should be preserved, I even think that eating meat from an evolved animal like a rabbit is a barbaric practice that will be soon abolished when in vitro-cloned meat will be possible.

It's true though that i see insect as a lower life form, to my knowledge insect have no emotions, no emphaty.
An insect with a damaged foot doesn't limp.
Insects with crushed abdomens continue to feed and mate.
A locust being devoured by a mantid will behave normally, feeding right up until the moment of death.
Insects lack the neurological structures that translate a stimulus into an emotional experience.

That does not mean I want to eradicate insects at all.

I just think complex organisms are more evolved than simple one, I embrace technological progress and the idea of human beings applying tools to overcome suffering and extend life.

Edited by ben951, 26 March 2014 - 02:39 PM.


#50 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 03:30 PM

In your view I'm being blindly narcissic because I think humans have more evolved than insects ?

I respect all life form, I think they should be preserved, I even think that eating meat from an evolved animal like a rabbit is a barbaric practice that will be soon abolished when in vitro-cloned meat will be possible.

It's true though that i see insect as a lower life form, to my knowledge insect have no emotions, no emphaty.
An insect with a damaged foot doesn't limp.
Insects with crushed abdomens continue to feed and mate.
A locust being devoured by a mantid will behave normally, feeding right up until the moment of death.
Insects lack the neurological structures that translate a stimulus into an emotional experience.


Exactly. The ability to emotionaly(consciously) experience our actions evolved in mammals to support "mid-life" adaptation of inbuilt behavior schemas. Reptiles can not hunt, they can not learn tricks, they can not learn how an animal will run from them, they can not be tamed. They have their instinctual strike range and as all preconscious life base their hunt on camouflage and instictual striking and conditioned place preference systems and some simple homing/guiding mechanisms that do not support learning but simply instinctually cause inbuilt and unchangeable behavior. Premammalian life has to use death to perform natural selection in order to evolve their behavior schemas.
Mammals can evolve their knowledge/behavior during their life time. They can perform a behavior, and it if works it is good, if it doesnt it is bad - so a natural selection of behavior can be performed and the result must be remembered and experienced in order to produce extinction or reinforcement of behavior. And they can pass on these learned behaviors. These "drives" are rewarded by "good feelings" or "bad feelings' when they fail(behavior proves to be fruitless resulting in frustration which can be rescued by delta opioid agonists(probably human humour) - if frustration is not rescued it creates an learned avoidance/fear paradigm through kappa opioid receptors in order to avoid the disappointing/frustrating behavior in the future. successive negative contrast - look it up, only mammals have it). Evolution of knowledge is pitted against the need for knowledge of the group resulting from their more basic needs, which they express/communicate. The group in an emotional way rewards the evolver of knowledge - therein lies inherent motivation. They feel happy to serve the one who offers them knowledge that helps them and thus proving seniority to be the domination hierarchy rather then sheer power as in reptiles.

As you can see, aging/death/reproduction was the only mechanism to modulate "evolution speed".

In mammals and later, learning and unlearning of behavior allowed the evolution speed to increase but this system must have evolved from or "on top" of the older "evolution speed" systems that regulate aging/death.

Aging should rather be called "maturing" to make matters more clear.

Btw. my remark about narcissism is not an offense but a qualification for our human-centric perspective causing inability to see out of the box.


That does not mean I want to eradicate insects at all.

I just think complex organisms are more evolved than simple one, I embrace technological progress and the idea of human beings applying tools to overcome suffering and extend life.


It's just a matter of scale and niches.

A single insect is a silly thing.

But a beehive proves to be more of like a single organism than a set of individual insects. They also perform programmed suicide(as to natural killers cells) in certain cases. I do not find that "pure altruism" as its instict, the bee does not choose to sacrifice, it just does it. If you look at insects as one big organism/foodchaing thing, they're quite a resilient thing.

Our self-awareness is very much overrated becase we ignore the reason nature gave it to us which I'm desperately trying to explain. We beleive that self-awareness is some final step of becoming a sentient being, something very special. But we are not really that sentient, free willed or whatever we like to think. We just blind ourselves to our heritage and dependencies.

Edited by addx, 26 March 2014 - 03:53 PM.


#51 Kevnzworld

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 04:34 PM

This thread is titled " How likely is that aging will be cured in the next 20-30 years ?"
It's " devolved " into theories on evolution.....
Start a new thread!
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#52 addx

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Posted 26 March 2014 - 05:05 PM

Fair enough.

Sorry for the supposed derailment, I thought I was giving a general opinion on the lack of progress and why. As much as most others here, except my opinion differs greatly in the fact that I find aging to be a complex mechanism rather than a complex mistake of evolution. And I do beleive that difference in opinion is quite important but obviously others find it just important to deny so an argument escalates.

I will remove myself.

#53 Brett Black

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 02:21 AM

Death and aging is not a disease to be cured, it is a part of life and an evolutionary mechanism of "avoidance of extinction"(not death of a single organism itself). Without death, life has no meaning and it would not exist.

Species that would not mature and die would seriously reduce their ability to evolve and would be wiped out by any changes in surrounding conditions - first of which would be a species that has evolved "programmed death" in order to produce faster generational evolution.


Your ideas are contradicted by evidence; there are a number of organisms that appear not to age:
http://en.wikipedia....ible_senescence


I've actually looked at the species with "negligeble" senescence. Early life breaks many of the more evolved strategies. You can confuse yourself with early life if you want. I don't think the starfish/lobster strategy of immortality will provide us with nothing more but ways to produce cancer.

As for complex species - life forms that live longer are infact organisms that have little competition and live steady, slow uneventful/unstressful lives, tortoise, whales etc. In other words, they encounter little threat to extinction in their lives for their evolutionary mechanisms to recognize they're in danger and increase the "revolution" processes.


To me, your argument above, and particularly your statement "Without death, life has no meaning and it would not exist." read like axiomatic absolutes. Hence, any evidence of counterexamples that contradict your argument(like those I provided) completely negate it.

Another issue: I think an error you're making is in believing that evolution is fundamentally and inherently dependent upon death. That is incorrect.

The reality, rather, is that evolution is fundamentally and inherently dependent upon reproduction.* Reproduction is the means by which genes become altered and is therefore the mechanism at the heart of evolution.

Whilst the death(or lack of death) of prior generations may exert selective pressures, death is not fundamental to evolution.

*(Horizontal gene transfer even bypasses the necessity for reproduction.)

Edited by Brett Black, 27 March 2014 - 02:36 AM.

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#54 Brett Black

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 03:55 AM

Evolution carefully preserved telomerase lengthetning enzymzes in germ cells that produce sperm. And you're saying that it recklessly forgot the telomerase lengthetning enzymes in the rest of the cells. SERIOUSLY. Add that up.


Do you know of the "Disposable Soma" evolutionary theory of aging? This theory and variants of it apeal to me, and there is evidence to support it. The basic premise is that most organisms, most of the time, have been subject to death by exogenous (environmental) causes, e.g. predators, disease, starvation (as opposed to death by endogenous/intrinsic factors like aging.)

Based on the organism in question, and its particular environment, there will tend to be a certain temporal pattern of death (by exogenous/environmental factors), and this will lead to certain selective pressures.

One selective pressure will be on reproductive age, such that organsisms that tend to be killed by their environment at young ages, like rodents, will tend to reproduce at earlier ages, and organisms like humans, that tend to live much longer before the environment kills them, will reach reproductive age later. This is a simple necessity - the continuation of the species requires reproduction to counter the deaths of the prior generation, and reproduction must be accomplished before death.

One side-effect of this, posited by the Disposable Soma theory, is that since most organisms are/were killed by the environment, there is no selective pressure to evolve immortal individuals. Basically, there is no evolutionary benefit to "spending" limited resources on immortal biological systems that are expected to be killed off by the environment anyway.

Evidence supporting this theory includes the observation that species that are naturally subject to a high risk of death from environmental causes, intrinsically age quicker.

One often-given example are rodents versus birds. Both are around the same size, have similarities in physiology, and inhabit the same environments, but birds live much longer and age much slower than rodents on average. The argument is that wings, and the ability to fly, give birds the ability to escape environmental causes of death like predators and starvation(by migration) that rodents cannot. With their protection from environmental causes of death, birds have evolved slower rates of intrinsic aging.

This may also be why larger animals tend to have slower intrinsic rates of aging than smaller animals - they tend to have less predators. Whales are massive, thus have few predators, and live in a relatively benign environment and show slow intrinsic aging. Turtles are large and their shell gives them very effective protection against predators and they also show slow, or maybe even no, intrinsic aging.

In short, according to the Disposable Soma theory, death due to intrinsic aging was such a rarity for most organisms(since most were killed by the environment long before old age) that it has had little to no evolutionary selective pressure, either for or against it.

Edited by Brett Black, 27 March 2014 - 04:55 AM.

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#55 addx

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 09:47 AM

Evidence supporting this theory includes the observation that species that are naturally subject to a high risk of death from environmental causes, intrinsically age quicker.



Species that encounter more environmental stress ARE pressured to breed(and mutate) and die faster in order to evolve ABOVE(and around) this environmental stress. It is a pressure - an evolutionary pressure. Those who have overcome their environmental stress threats can afford to live longer and reduce evolution pressure.

First life was immortal. And much simple life is almost immortal. Mortality is a mechanism of evolution, that evolved.

So, it's the other way around.

You stress your body in certain ways, you get cancer. What is really cancer? Is it perhaps a an age old death drive that survived in our DNA that causes mutation with which bacteria used to become virulent. This cellular pathway was piggybacked onto when multicellular life was formed. Cells couldnt just decide on their own to become cancerous within the first multicell organisms but rather just complained to the central system. So a central system develops that keeps the cells virulency under control, allows/forces them to be stressed without allowing them to become virulent all for some greater purpose of the entire organism(like movement to feed or sexually reproduce which require cooperation and sacrifice of certain cell populations). After exertion cells are rewarded with nutrients and perhaps proliferation signals. That's how life evolved and aging systems evolved on top of each other, each new one controling the death drive of the old one. Piggy backing onto it.

Edited by addx, 27 March 2014 - 10:00 AM.


#56 twc111

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Posted 06 July 2014 - 02:42 AM

I really would love to see a more realistic goal put forth. I have one big issue here and it will show up in a lot of what I have to say.  New age business is infiltrated with charlatans.  for example:

 

Talking to a Chiropractor friend of mine had some great sobering stories about how he and friends of his started as a sincere loving humanitarian that only cared about stopping human suffering and that took them to the goal of stopping the disease inflammation aging process of humans. ------to cut this short--he had a large following-of people and combined with his coop ,it reached out across USA--and his company had 2 products-----

 

 product- 1- one had real healing issues but only related to a smaller population- product-2- was a noted as bringing alive new skin cells to anyone over 40.-------------------------The research proved 1 viable while -research was flawed with product 2-----My friend said the meeting put the decision in our hands. Push product-1 we go home with nothing--push product 2 ,the company, us, becomes Gold-------by the time truth get known many of these individuals were beginning a new gimmick or retired.---this happens more times then we know.

 

 This is going back 45 years but the desire to live forever was just as strong. My chiro friend said he sold out as his soul. Too tempting. I lived like a king for awhile. As he explained---"he knows researchers scientists now loving the game of fooling people into believing life can be forever-------because its tied into a product his company has produced and is feeding the frenzy of greedy egomaniacs. My Chiro friend quit all that and still has a small --practice-"just did not have a stomach for that.

 

     The real shame loss is that a real living attainable truth is before us {longer healthy happier life's} but its being torn apart by the few flies in the soup



#57 JohnD60

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Posted 10 July 2014 - 12:08 AM

Peter Nygard is featured in a YouTube video claiming stem cell technology being developed in the Bahamas is making him look and feel younger. http://www.cbc.ca/ne...hamas-1.2555831 Hei is probably just full of it http://corporate.nyg...rger-than-life/ marketing his clothebrand.
“From the woman’s egg, we took out her DNA, put my old 70-year-old DNA in its place [and] grew it in vitro,” he says in the video. “I may be the only person in the world who has my own embryonic stem cells growing in a petri dish.”
Then, Nygard makes his boldest claim.
“This is huge. This is a game changer. This could eliminate all disease. This perhaps is immortality,” he says.

 

Thanks for the link. I think this should be a seperate thread. He still looks 70 to me, particularly his skin which what they focused on. But he has lost weight and appears to be in better shape. It seems likely to me that he is on TRT and HGH, his 'improvement' is consistent with that.
 



#58 HighDesertWizard

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Posted 17 August 2014 - 01:13 PM

I'm hoping that Kurzweils longevity escape velocity is a reality..since no cures for aging or cancer are on the horizon.

 

Seems to me that Telomere Lengthening is among the key components of achieving Longevity Escape Velocity. I've posted this video a couple of other places at Longecity. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the science around Telomerase had been leveraged in the last few years. Interested in hearing others' thoughts about it.

 



#59 corb

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Posted 29 August 2014 - 10:32 AM

Species that encounter more environmental stress ARE pressured to breed(and mutate) and die faster in order to evolve ABOVE(and around) this environmental stress.

 

You seem to think evolution is important to humanity. It is not. Here are some reasons:

 

1.We've already evolved above and beyond our environmental factors. We don't have predators. We have the knowledge to produce an almost infinite supply of food and water and shelters and whatever else we might need.

 

2.If you think evolution can save us from an asteroids ramming itself into earth at 50000km/h, or a solar flare igniting our atmosphere, etc. I think you should stop reading super hero comic books. There are environmental factors which evolution cannot handle and those are the ones we will have to deal with and survive, from now on.

 

3.Humanity has already subverted natural selection one of the most powerful mechanisms of evolution - by inventing medicine, the nuclear family model, etc. We've basically subverted evolution as it is.

 

4.Evolution isn't an intelligent process, it's quite possible for a very detrimental trait to remain into a population for centuries or to even get "selected" for depending on some factors.

 

5.With advances in genetics we might be able to directly affect our genetic traits in the not so near future, achieving an "evolution" by demand.

 

And so on.
Evolution isn't a good argument against life extension, or anything else for that matter, it will only be beneficial for us to marginalize it's effects as much as possible in fact.


Edited by corb, 29 August 2014 - 10:36 AM.

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Click HERE to rent this BIOSCIENCE adspot to support LongeCity (this will replace the google ad above).

#60 addx

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Posted 29 August 2014 - 11:57 AM

Species that encounter more environmental stress ARE pressured to breed(and mutate) and die faster in order to evolve ABOVE(and around) this environmental stress.

 
You seem to think evolution is important to humanity. It is not. Here are some reasons:
 
1.We've already evolved above and beyond our environmental factors. We don't have predators. We have the knowledge to produce an almost infinite supply of food and water and shelters and whatever else we might need.
 
2.If you think evolution can save us from an asteroids ramming itself into earth at 50000km/h, or a solar flare igniting our atmosphere, etc. I think you should stop reading super hero comic books. There are environmental factors which evolution cannot handle and those are the ones we will have to deal with and survive, from now on.
 
3.Humanity has already subverted natural selection one of the most powerful mechanisms of evolution - by inventing medicine, the nuclear family model, etc. We've basically subverted evolution as it is.
 
4.Evolution isn't an intelligent process, it's quite possible for a very detrimental trait to remain into a population for centuries or to even get "selected" for depending on some factors.
 
5.With advances in genetics we might be able to directly affect our genetic traits in the not so near future, achieving an "evolution" by demand.
 
And so on.
Evolution isn't a good argument against life extension, or anything else for that matter, it will only be beneficial for us to marginalize it's effects as much as possible in fact.



Well I don't get why you point out most of these points while quoteing me, there seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding.

I don't think of evolution just as biological evolution, we are still and forever will be "evolving" only we are not evolving more knowledge and less genes. But the rules are the same, knowledge is replicated, extincted via selection processes (which are tied into the experience of the body-built-by-genes in the real world around this body)

Read this for example to see that what I'm saying deserves to be read.

http://sciencedigg.b...experience.html
 

Fearful memories haunt mouse descendants

. He and Dias wafted the scent around a small chamber, while giving small electric shocks to male mice. The animals eventually learned to associate the scent with pain, shuddering in the presence of acetophenone even without a shock.
This reaction was passed on to their pups, Dias and Ressler report today in Nature Neuroscience. Despite never having encountered acetophenone in their lives, the offspring exhibited increased sensitivity when introduced to its smell, shuddering more markedly in its presence compared with the descendants of mice that had been conditioned to be startled by a different smell or that had gone through no such conditioning. A third generation of mice — the 'grandchildren' — also inherited this reaction, as did mice conceived through in vitro fertilization with sperm from males sensitized to acetophenone. Similar experiments showed that the response can also be transmitted down from the mother.
These responses were paired with changes to the brain structures that process odours. The mice sensitized to acetophenone, as well as their descendants, had more neurons that produce a receptor protein known to detect the odour compared with control mice and their progeny. Structures that receive signals from the acetophenone-detecting neurons and send smell signals to other parts of the brain (such as those involved in processing fear) were also bigger.


I would also point out that nervous system development is modulated by opioids meaning mu-opioid receptor activation causes neurone stem cell division and kappa opioid receptor activation causes differentiation. So, how you "cultivate" your nervous system during your childhood determines your ability during adulthood and you can't change it much after cca 21 years of age.
We all know this to be true, but fail to give it importance. All of us have had their childhood. I learned english from watching TV and playing the computer as a kid, I dreamt in english. This knowledge was adopted while the brain was still growing and no adult learning of language can ever compare to a kid learning it while playing. Same thing with cell phones or computers. I learned to programm at 11 years old, it's built into my brain, my understanding of code is like a mothers tongue compared to programmers who learned to program later.

Now, if you want a population of only adults that all have their brains developed in a certain way - and will never look at things much differently since they can't - and you think this is civilizational progress then I simply can't agree. That's it. As per the quote/url above, there's much we don't know and much more that we just don't want to see.

Given the examples above, new situations, new knowledge, new tools, new contexts will be evolved by humans, and if there is no children to grow in these contexts, they will not be evolved further as the children who adopt such knowledge at a younger age are able and even compelled to evolve it further so humanity will be stuck without them. If we evolve immortality there will be no or little room for children.

If you sum this up, you can see how of much the adaptive nature of humans will be wiped out by lack of new generations. And you can see I'm not really thinking about asteroids or anything. A simple mobile phone is a good example, most 70 year olds can never learn to use them. Most 2-3 year old babies use them better than most 70 year olds. These babies will grow up with an intrinsic understanding of this technology and will make more use of it than would a 70 year old if he remained alive instead of being replaced by a baby. So, not asteroids, but "any circumstances".

Edited by addx, 29 August 2014 - 12:10 PM.





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