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.
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.
>> That advantage is increased diversity within a species.
Actually evolution doesn't really work like that. Traits will rarely evolve to the benefit of a species. Evolution operates much more strongly at the individual level & even more strongly at the gene level.
It's discussed some place in the video belos but I don't remember which part (of 6). Worth watching if you're interested anyway. Otherwise, the evolutionary reason given there for aging is an evolutionary bias for 'fixing' diseases that affect the young. A disease, deadly at 5 years old is more of a problem for lifetime reproductions then something deadly at 20 which is more of a problem then something at 30 etc. I'm not sure if this explains aging in it's entirety, but it seems like a logical part.
None of your ancestors died at infancy. Very few are likely to have died younger then 15. You can probably trace some that died younger then 25. It would be unusual not to have some within memory that died younger then 50.
Since ancestral humans probably rarely lived (reproduced or contributed to the reproduction of their offspring) past 40-50, it's not surprising that there are many issues unique to this life stage that have had very little evolutionary tweaking done.
What I would like to ask/say (Richard, if you're reading, speak up) is that this might explain why old age illnesses are more severe. It doesn't do much to explain the discrepancies in young/old illnesses.
Evolution is still happening. It's not weeding out what you call the weak and the stupid, but that's not its job - it only selects those who are best adapted to their environment, whatever that may be.
Some people are still having 8 kids, some are having 2, and some are having none. This is not randomly distributed across genotypes, so some are being selected.
Interesting points. I agree that it is most certain that evolution from a natural sense is something we have forced ourselves out of.
I worry though that the further down that path we venture, the more likely we are to hasten our demise. A few thousand years is nothing to evolution. As long as we are completely reliant and subject to its rules - and we are, we are at it's mercy. Our insistence on protecting our weak, and encouraging their procreation is almost certainly a dead end, evolution wise. The clock is already ticking, and it's not if, but when and how bad. Hell, segments of our population die from immediate peanut exposure - good grief!
We are not so brimming with extra talent that we can just throw it away after a few decades.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think we are. What our current society is poor at though IMO is recognizing and developing that talent. For every Feynmen, there are thousands that "drop out" due primarily to artificial pressures.
Good point, but I would just add that evolution doesn't go away just because we are affecting it consciously. At best it just means we are responsible for our own evolution, which of course leads to the question, "do we collectively think it's best for reproduction to decrease and lifespans to increase?"
You've answered one way by citing the best and brightest. I would answer another way by saying that I think the best and brightest are outnumbered 100 to 1 by greedy individuals leveraging their wealth to consolidate power.
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.
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.
" To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a tool maker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert - he even manages to live in New York for heaven's sake - and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says 'I'll have it off him!'"
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!
"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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.)
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.
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.
It depends on what you define as "you". Honestly, I don't think the question is that interesting. It's like asking whether Linux 2.2.17 can be considered the same project as Linux 2.6.28. All we can say objectively is that they share a history and a name. Whether they are the same project is a subjective opinion.
The point is that -- given that you will in objective fact not exist tomorrow -- if you can find a reason to care about the impostor who tomorrow will take your place in society and pretend to be you, you should be able to apply the same reasoning to caring about your community as it might exist after you pretend to "die". That you are related to both is objectively confirmable.
In short: if you care about one, logically you should care about the other.
The "you" now shares a common history with the "you" a second ago. Other individuals do not. Your conclusion only follows if there is no objective difference between your past self and other individuals, and there clearly is.
I'm talking about the personal history an individual perceives through his memories. The history that connects the "me" of the now to the "me" of the past.
So, you would feel sensible in caring about (having altruistic feelings for) someone who could remember being you. Yes?
Would you feel sensible in caring about the future-you if (the present) you knew that he was going to have amnesia?
Me: "I'm going to drain my bank account and run wild, having a good time, because I know that tomorrow (and forever after) I won't remember having done such a dastardly thing to myself."
It's not about what _I_ feel sensible about caring about. We're talking about a hypothetical individual who cares only about versions of himself that share a common ancestor or descendant state.
If such an individual were given advanced knowledge of an irreversable amnesia, then logically he would commit acts that benefit him and cost the individual inhabiting his body in a day's time. So yes, it makes perfect sense.
But given the same circumstances, I'd behave differently, as I'm not a sociopath.
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.