Maybe. But why in this case do we not see bugs and failures in this program, i.e. no one lived 5 times more than the average or did not live forever at all, for example? I'm not making a statement, just a guess.
I'm not a biologist. But it seems to me that this is at the level of one cell. Yes, a cell can become immortal, but cells live much less than a whole person. Over the course of a person's life, many many cells change. And the program for human life, rather than individual cells, is perceived differently.
Lots of models could explain this. For example, let's say it's not just one program, but thousand of programs running in your body, trying to get you to age or die. The chances that all of them bug out would be astronomically low.
Because the whole system is quite resilient and self-repairing, and probably requires a great deal of consistency between the various genes? Aging is quite fundamental to life, and a "bug" in that area would almost certainly cause severe problems in other areas, probably death. Cancer might be an example. And systems of many components tend to narrow the standard deviation of the composite.
But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
aging doesn't seem fundamental to life to me. There is known complex life that doesn't age. I expect age is a huge driver of evolution in many cases so it makes sense that most life has it.
Such arguments go both ways. For example, if aging is accumulation of damage and not programmed, then why don't we see lucky people who live 5 times longer. Also how come the patterns of aging are so similar between individuals and even between different species (wrinkly skin, grey hair, fragile bones).
How do you propose someone would "luck out of" the wear and tear your body undergoes just to function? It's accumulation of damage to the very systems that work to prevent and repair damage, leading all organs to accumulate the damage they would have hidden by fast repair in "youth". It's unavoidable and accelerating by definition, and that reflects what we observe in aging.
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
But aren't there a lot of processes that could drive accumulated damage that are hard to avoid (so you can't realistically get lucky)?
E.g. if metabolic processes produce harmful products in low quantities that build up ... How would you possibly survive many decades without doing at least a certain amount of metabolizing food etc?
Think this is a statistical thing. Your body is made of lots of cells. But one exceptional one wouldn’t outlive the whole system’s failure. You’d need a hell of a lot of cells to survive that long.
Because the odds of something 5x the average that's more or less normally distributed are really, really low.
It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.
It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
It's because age isn't normally distributed. The annual odds of dying go up by a factor of 2 every 8 years. This gives tighter bounds on age than a normal distribution would give.
hyperman1|7 months ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
NoOn3|7 months ago
csallen|7 months ago
dotancohen|7 months ago
tgv|7 months ago
But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
rowanG077|7 months ago
piombisallow|7 months ago
JPLeRouzic|7 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people
And another was 76cm high:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_dwarfism
kkoncevicius|7 months ago
blargey|7 months ago
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
abeppu|7 months ago
crinkly|7 months ago
0xcafefood|7 months ago
landl0rd|7 months ago
It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.
It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
DevelopingElk|7 months ago
oneshtein|7 months ago