By deciphering the molecular signatures of millions of mouse cells, Junyue Cao has found that aging is not haphazard wear and tear but rather a “remodeling of the cell society.”
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Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.
You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...
a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.
b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.
In an properly-managed world (not ours), we'd figure out how many factories we need to keep the process knowledge fresh and safe, then have those factories build items that last exactly as long to keep their production steady. Then other factories could make other things. End result: more and better stuff.
Like instead of 1000 washing machine factories that make washing machines that last 5 years each, have 100 that make washing machines that last 50 years.
Instead we get hyper-fast planned obsolescence, pushing the frontier of unreliability and waste creation, so number can go up this quarter.
Waste and inefficiency is the cost of anti-fragility that's necessary to not go extinct when the unexpected happens.
Your world would also slow down innovation. Those old machines were much more energy hungry and only rapid iteration has made them dramatically more efficient.
birthing was necessary at least to maintain population, but preferably to expand it. it's only now that we consider "too many" a possibility, and we didn't evolve for this moment.
our history does not show potentially perpetually compounding gains that our children would evolutionarily need a genetic defense against, we already had looting, stealing, and killing.
I think the answer, if there is a programmed obsolesence, is because the genetic admixing of the next generation through sexual reproduction is so useful and important.
[1] Their risk of death does not increase after reaching adulthood. I.e. every year after adulthood has the same risk of unexpected death. Humans and other animals that age have their risks of death climb in "old" age.
OTOH, you'd accumulate uncurable disease, injuries, etc as well. Maybe you become a disease resevoir inside your own growing family. Or you pass on as-yet-unknown genetic anomalies that are unhelpful, and you do so forever.
Granted that's a modern take, and in particular a modern rpg-like take. Regardless though getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward if natural selection is driving "forward".
If we were managed by the interwar generation, little of what's happening today would be happening today.
Lack of experience is critical for risk taking. Even great successes like Jensen Huang have said that if they knew how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't choose his path again.
Memory blocks you from experimentation as much as it protects you from making recurrent mistakes. A species or civilization with too much memory will eventually wither away towards complete inaction and decay.
The earth is a bad term here, how about human civilization?
Your DNA, epigenetics, and a ton of other subconscious intelligent processes are well aware of the risks and contain a massive set of tools to overcome them.
The problem? Many of these tools have to run from zero in an egg to work in the changing environment.
Doubtful. They were the ones who created the world we live in today.
If we were managed by the colonial generation, slavery and segregation would still be the norm, only rich white men would be able to vote and a king would still have the final say.
On the other hand, always being around as a sort of Protector to protect your kids seems like it would generally be good for your genes. (Of course, you'd have to fight off other Protectors who are doing the same...)
But 1000 generations of unassailable, un-evolving, 40IQ lions doesn't get you to the galaxy.
Hey, maybe this is the fermi paradox.
How this number is going to change in the future with exponential growth in the environment is left as an exercise to the reader.
I think we underrate the value of a fresh perspective. People living longer lifespans would dilute that benefit, imo. Sidenote: this is also an underrated issue with LLMs and their application to science - collapsing to single modes of thought over time.
This is the real feature of aging, death, and dying. Progress is measured in funerals, not years. If everyone lived forever, nothing would ever change.
Including our fundamental biology.
If we want a chance at improved, more resilient biology, aging and death have to be a part of that.
I don't know how the antagonistic pleiotropy theory is doing. If true it would be a satisfactory explanation from an evolutionary point of view but I recall that it had some problems.
Otherwise I don't find the other evolutionary explanations of programmed aging to be satisfactory, especially when you consider that genes are selfish and act on the individual rather than population level.
Perhaps reproductive aging (egg quality) is the ultimate limiter, and then overall aging is adaptive downstream of that because hunter-gatherer families benefit (in terms of evolutionary fitness) from fewer old people to increase the percentage of people at reproductive age? That would fit the modern evidence of early egg freezing significantly increasing reproductive success in older women, showing that the problem of fertility decline by age is primarily cellular.
Or perhaps the aging mechanism is leftover from pre-human ancestry and there simply wasn't enough time in our evolutionary history for humans to evolve longer lifespans, maybe because it's slightly helpful but not nearly as helpful as other traits like intelligence, and lifespan is hard to improve via genetic adaptation due to bottleneck effects?
Each galaxy and any planets/life it contains are just artifacts of an "existence run." That's why life feels like a simulation so often (and human history repeats itself): we're inside of an organic (human word) "program" that's trying to perfect itself by running similar, but consistently tweaked "logic" over and over. Things like evolution are just an algorithm embedded in the system.
If the theory discussed in the article is correct, then aging is (in the scope of the above thought) just one program among several that we interpret as existence/life.
Just a daydream but fun to think about.
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