Comments on: Aging is bad for fitness. Why has evolution put up with it? https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it Safeguarding Humanity Sun, 14 Jul 2013 14:21:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Tim Tyler https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it#comment-169498 Sun, 14 Jul 2013 14:21:10 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=8545#comment-169498 Group selection is not contrary to the idea of “selfish genes”. If, hypothetically, genes spread through group selection it is often because they have traits that result in better success of the groups they are in — and so are selfishly promoting their own interests.

For counter-examples to the idea of “selfish genes”, one should look for genes that are suicidal — or genes that only promote the survival of other genes (which don’t in turn return the favour). Of course there are such genes — but naturally, they are rare — as the idea of “selfish genes” predicts.

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By: John Thompson https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it#comment-169008 Sun, 07 Jul 2013 03:48:46 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=8545#comment-169008 Famine is easy. Society is tougher.… Society has destructive over- competition and uses fear to destroy democracy and also has biases, like pro-aging acceptance. 8-)

I like comparing us to hydrozoans more than locusts. Hehe.… Because, we are techo consciousness creatures, so we’ll become like the human hydrozoans, living very very long, instead of being the like the over-competitive short lived no birth control locusts — but with cyborg super brains.

So surviving with team work is a great point. We don’t have to be dumb like locusts… Well said.

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By: Josh Mitteldorf https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it#comment-168899 Fri, 05 Jul 2013 13:23:10 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=8545#comment-168899 Robin — You raise two big issues. First: Yes, aging is even OLDER than multi-cellular life. There are two forms of programmed death in which protists participate. A protist is a eukaryotic protozoan — larger and more complex than bacteria, with a cell nucleus and other cell structures, but still a single cell. Examples are amoebas and paramecia. Paramecia have a form of aging called “cellular senescence”, the mechanism of which involves telomere shortening. I recommend two short books on the subject by William Clark: “Sex and the Origin of Death” http://books.google.com/books?id=p30GijKiU64C talks about programmed death in protists. “A means to an end” http://books.google.com/books?id=zcpzyjYD_CkC tells the story of how programmed death continued into multi-cellular life forms.

The second question you raise is about human life extension and how it relates to the thesis of overpopulation. Throughout evolutionary history, aging has been essential to preventing overpopulation. In just the last 200 years, mankind has used technology to greatly extend human life expectancy. And one result has been that humans have disrupted ecosystems the world over and caused the fastest mass extinction in the history of the planet. I am all for human life extension, but it is also true that we as a species MUST get our birth rate down to keep from destroying the world’s ecosystems on which we depend. Otherwise we could easily be “supercompetitors” that go the way of the Rocky Mountain Locust.

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By: Robin https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it#comment-168884 Fri, 05 Jul 2013 09:07:07 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=8545#comment-168884 In one word: I’d say this is interesting.

So if I get this right, aging makes sure the individuals of a species die off in managable numbers, rather than put huge risks on the entire population with disasters such as starvation. It makes me wonders how old life has had aging, though. Does it go all the way to the first multicellular species?

And last of all, since we’re an intelligent species with the ability(I say we can, not that we are, because we have been irresponsible with ecosystems many times through history) to understand population control, we are, so to say, going to take aging out of us since it no longer serves a purpose and only brings us mental and physical pain?

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By: Josh Mitteldorf https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it#comment-168879 Fri, 05 Jul 2013 08:37:57 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=8545#comment-168879 This is the kind of comment I used to receive routinely when I started publishing in this field 15 years ago. Yes, the idea of an evolutionary program for aging and a fixed life span is still deeply discordant with the predominant strain of evolutionary theory, which recognizes fitness as a property of individuals only, not groups. But there is a growing community of well-respected researchers in the field who have discovered the mountain of evidence pointing to programmed death in nature. Evolutionary theory will have to adapt or die. The introduction to my forthcoming book is here: http://SuicideGenes.org . A more technical summary of the case for programmed aging is here: http://tinyurl.com/7m53ogd

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By: David https://lifeboat.com/blog/2013/07/aging-is-bad-for-fitness-why-has-evolution-put-up-with-it#comment-168877 Fri, 05 Jul 2013 08:27:02 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=8545#comment-168877 There are so many scientific inaccuracies and other mistakes in this piece it almost defies belief.

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