
Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older? - jessekeys
http://www.slate.com/id/2299256/
======
Udo
It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as
people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and
scaling the entire X axis on the other. The first one is what we're currently
doing with modern medicine, and it boils down to debugging the most common
causes of premature death.

The second one is completely separate from this and way harder to tackle
because it involves messing with the parameters of life in a profound way. The
main problem here is that the human body, like all higher life forms on this
planet, is designed to be a disposable object from the ground up. We now know
that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when
faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution
that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code,
literally.

Contrary to disease, aging isn't one factor going "wrong". It's a million
little modules coming to the inevitable end of their cheaply designed life. Of
course, we'll tackle this eventually - we have to if we ever want to move on
from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect - but
it's going to be slow, slow progress.

Intuitively, I'd say we might have _some_ very limited success in scaling up
that X axis within the next 20 years, but it'll be a long time before we
actually solve this issue. Which is sad, because I wanted to be around for
much longer and now I most likely won't get to do that. Then again, the
subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to
argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.

~~~
api
_We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process
which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible
solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty
spaghetti code, literally._

As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to
this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no
evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done
better-- see the no free lunch theorem. This characterization also lacks
respect for the difficulty of many-dimensional optimization problems on non-
fixed fitness landscapes, which is what evolution has to deal with.
(Mathematically, the problem tackled by natural evolution is effectively
infinite-dimensional. By comparison, the problems tackled by human engineers
are toy problems.)

It would be more accurate to say that evolution, when faced with a problem,
finds a _working_ solution. There is no way to know how close or how far that
working solution is from a theoretical optimum, since the theoretical optimum
is non-computable. (If it were straightforwardly computable, evolution would
find a gradient to ascend and discover it rapidly.)

"Life doesn't work perfectly. It just works."

That being said, it is likely that our mortality represents a hard compromise
between the survival value of longevity, adaptations to prevent cancer (many
of which have aging side effects, like telomeres), and the species-scale (or
selfish-gene-scale) survival value of getting oldsters out of the way to make
room for the next generation.

The fact that humans can live substantially longer than is merely necessary to
reproduce is due to the fact that we're a K-selected species rather than an
R-selected species. (Cicadas, for example, are an R-selected species.
Dolphins, Elephants, and Humans are K-selected.)

~~~
valisystem
I have no authority on the subject, but, the fact that we cannot prove nor
properly evaluate solutions that emerge from evolution does not change the
fact that the first solution that fits is the one that will be kept. Intuitive
reasoning that not work on such a subject, but still, I have hard time to
accept that it is the best. The only proper qualifier, as you state, is that
it is the _existing_ one.

The same way I am not comfortable with using dynamic verbs when describing
evolution. Evolution does not _find_ a solution. It's just that a solution
that fits emerges. After producing many dysfunctional living individuals. It's
still the only way life can evolve by itself, and I wouldn't dare to say if it
is a laborious or great way to sustain ifself.

~~~
api
The first solution that fits isn't necessarily kept, unless it can be refined
to a high enough level of development to compete with other emerging
solutions. The eye, for example, evolved separately many times.

BTW, in human engineering the first solution is also often kept. Look at
nuclear power. We probably should be using the thorium cycle, but we kept
light water reactors because they were the first big reactor commercialized
(for military reasons). Another example would be x86 architecture. I am not
arguing that evolution is magical in any way, just that human engineering
doesn't show signs of being much better in many cases.

I see a lot of engineers who are ignorant of biology claiming that "evolution
is slow" and that we should be able to snap our fingers and do better. It's a
popular point of view among the singularity crowd.

Engineers are trained to be arrogant about their abilities. This is probably a
good thing, since it causes them to fling themselves at problems fearlessly.
But it's also not necessarily realistic.

------
AngryParsley
Mortality rates follow a Gompertz curve. This blog post explains it pretty
well: [http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-
body-w...](http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-
built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/)

There are many suspected specific reasons for why this is (telomeres
shortening, mtDNA mutations, protein cross-links, etc), but it boils down to
this: accumulating damage accumulates faster as self-repair mechanisms are
damaged by accumulating damage.

~~~
Retric
That's not strictly true, you are more likely to die at age 2 than 10. And
even if you have a ~50% chance of dieing at 100 there are people who make it
to 120 or so.

~~~
wazoox
> _there are people who make it to 120 or so._

About one in 45 billions. How many people in history did reliably make it to
120? exactly one, Jeanne Calment. One other did it to 119, and that's about
it.

~~~
Retric
The idea that we had accurate birth records for every single person in human
history that reached 120 seems dubious.

~~~
wazoox
That doesn't change the fact that we have enough data to know you're more
likely to win the national lottery than making it to 120. And you're probably
more likely to fly by flapping your arms than making it to 130.

~~~
Retric
I am not going to argue that living that long is anything but the tail end of
a huge bell curve. My point is simply there is no need to extrapolate when
there are some actual numbers to work with. And when you look at the numbers
you find that just like IQ the bell curve for lifespan is a little fatter at
the tip than you might expect. At the same time there is a dip in rates of
deaths ~10 so you are more likely to die at 1 than 21.

------
JoshTriplett
Diminishing returns. If you address some of the top causes of death, you can
significantly increase lifespans. If you address some of the smaller causes,
you can somewhat increase lifespans. However, in the limit you need a solution
that doesn't just solve individual problems one by one. Biologically, "fixing"
telomeres would probably address many of the nonspecific "died of old age"
cases that we don't fully understand yet, though I doubt that alone would fix
the general problem.

More importantly, we need people to _care_ , and for some insane reason people
don't. How do we manage to not treat this as pretty much the most important
unsolved problem in humanity? (Mostly, I suspect, due to a combination of
perceived futility and ingrained cultural problems.)

~~~
jinushaun
There's a great TED talk a few years ago on this. We have the technnology and
know-how to significantly increase life expectancy and to do research to make
it even better, but why don't we? Curing cancer and Alzheimer's is not the
same thing. Why don't we explicitly research life extension? The speaker
brought up several philosophical, political and economic reasons why society
has chosen to ignore the problem. There are a lot of unforeseen implications
to a world where everyone lives past 150.

~~~
tokenadult
_We have the technnology and know-how to significantly increase life
expectancy and to do research to make it even better_

For what value of "significantly"? And at what cost, in a world in which many
people live on five dollars a day or less?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I'm not sure why that makes any difference. The level of medical care I can
get (and have gotten) as a middle class American blows away what these people
can get now. The disparity is so huge that adding 100 years to my life barely
makes a dent in the disparity.

------
glimcat
Because when you mix a lot of random variables together, the variance tends to
decrease.

~~~
sebkomianos
This is very interesting, can you point me/us to any explanations about it?

~~~
shabble
I'd guess at the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem> \-
Combined distributions tend towards Gaussian (bell-curve)

------
paganel
I was just reading this morning an archaeological report about a 14th century
cemetery dug up somewhere in the Balkan area. Around 40% of the skeletons
belonged to children aged 0 to 7, while out of the rest no skeleton was found
having belonged to a person older than 60. In the following 2 centuries the
situation got slightly better, as the percentage of children 0-7 decreased to
~30%, and they were able to find a few skeletons that had lived beyond 60.

The point I'm trying to make is that we tend to very easily forget that we've
come a really long way, but these things take time and they don't involve only
science (the fact that the area I was studying was ravaged by the Ottoman
expansion definitely had an impact on how long the people in the Balkans
lived, as do today's not so healthy diets for most of the Western-
populations). This is why I think that making bold and unsubstantiated
predictions such as "in 20 years' time we will have reached indefinite
lifespans" doesn't really get us anywhere, it only helps confusing us.

------
Hyena
The article addresses this at the end: Kurzweil, et al are banking on dramatic
changes in medicine on the level of the introduction of antibiotics. Right now
we're possibly at the farthest end of the antibiotics-and-surgery technology
suite. Much longer life expectancies or actuarial escape velocity will need to
come from a disruptive medical technology.

------
tokenadult
The submitted article reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a child,
"Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garrett, in the anthology Men and Machines edited
by Robert Silverberg.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=3PSTqQrrzjEC&pg=PA141&#...</a><p>The premise
of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and
it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it.
The protagonist (and first-person narrator) of the story is an assassin whose
job is to murder the immortal oligarchs who rule a future United States--it is
pretty apparent that the target of his assassination plot is J. Edgar Hoover
in a far-off future. That has always caused me to pause and think about
whether I would really like society to discover an effective longevity
treatment. Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and
influence scale as HN readers will have access to the treatment?

~~~
bumbledraven
_Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence
scale as HN readers will have access to the [life extension] treatment?_

Magic 8-ball says: "it is likely". Typically, new technologies are at first
available only to the rich and powerful, but eventually they become cheaper
and more widely available. Consider cell phones, televisions, and the
internet. Today, the poorest person with an internet connection has access to
information on a scale which far surpasses anything available to even the
kings of old.

------
bradshaw1965
The most important thing to focus on is not life extension, but extending
healthy vitality longer or compressed morbidity. Life extension is way too
much of a tax on humanity if we can't solve the problem of frailty in the
extreme old.

------
scotty79
I have a riddle for you that I came up with few years ago:

Given as little as you need to make this problem solvable and nontrivial
calculate how often (on average) oldest human in the world dies.

~~~
simonsarris
Well, taking it as a riddle, once.

The very first human is the oldest human and they died once.

~~~
scotty79
Where's the calculation? Also this is this would be trivial.

Besides, when human dies he's no longer old. He's dead. His corps might be
oldest corpse but he's no longer oldest human.

------
robryan
Apart from a few fringe people there doesn't seem to be a real great push
towards increasing longevity. Average lifespan through better treating illness
yes but not much to help those that have managed to dodge everything and make
it to 115.

From the little I have read on the subject it does seem like this is one area
where we have a long way to go to really make progress as we don't really
understand all the variables yet.

------
shawndumas
Interesting quote: _[S]upercentenarians owe their longevity more to freakish
genes than perfect health; the 122-year-old Calment smoked cigarettes for 96
years [...]_

~~~
mdonahoe
I wouldn't be surprised if nicotine proved to be important for longevity.

~~~
shawndumas
Can you think of anything that might be informing that hunch?

~~~
scythe
Well, nicotine is an anorectic (reduces appetite), and calorie restriction is
the most proven life-extension technique known (in rats), so there is the idea
that nicotine --> unintentional calorie restriction --> potentially longer
lifespan. Nicotine is a lot easier on the body than other anorectics, which
sounds like a weird claim but "other anorectics" means nasty things like
methamphetamine and fenfluramine; nicotine is a walk in the park by
comparison.

The dangers associated with _smoking_ make it an obvious negative, but
nicotine itself is not considered carcinogenic.

It remains to be seen if any of those currently experimenting with intentional
calorie restriction will achieve similar results to those seen in animal
studies; this would be quite impressive if true.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Primates>

~~~
shawndumas
Anorectic; yeah, no kidding... I smoked for 13 years and am 6"1' and weighed
in at 160 lbs. I stopped at 28 and shot to 205 in less than a year.

~~~
sixtofour
Anecdote of one.

------
suprgeek
I am unable to find a citation for this but I recall having read that
Scientists had started to notice a pattern - The life span of a mammal is
typically a function of the age of maturity. The function was a factor of 6.
In humans age of maturity is approximately 20. So it is believed that the
maximum lifespan is about 20*6 =120 years for humans.

~~~
smiley325
This paper
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/05315565939...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/053155659390041B)
seems to contradict that claim of a simple ratio between life variables.

Abstract:

A regression analysis was made of age at first reproduction in female mammals,
as a function of body weight, using the data of Wootton. Data on maximal life
span, also expressed as a function of body weight, were used to calculate
“adult” life span, wherever possible, by subtracting the cognate value for age
at first reproduction. Then a regression analysis of adult life span as a
function of age at first reproduction was made. In both cases global
regression lines (i.e., for whole data sets) were computed by standard least
squares and by a robust method, as well as local regression lines for
subgroups classified by taxonomic and ecological criteria. The slopes of the
various regression lines were found to vary widely as a function of the method
of classification. This result argues against the notion that the ratio of
life history variables is a constant, or that one life history variable is
likely to be a simple function of another. The results for bats are anomalous,
in that age at first reproduction appears to be independent of body weight
(over about two orders of magnitude). It is concluded that a full
understanding of life history variables, such as maximal life span and age at
maturity, is likely to depend on combined physiological, ecological, and
evolutionary insights. Keywords: maximal life span; age at maturity;
regression analysis; mammals

~~~
suprgeek
Thank you for the link - this is good to know.

------
Ruudjah
Genesis 6:3

3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he
also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

AFAIK, all people in recent history (<3000 years) claiming to be aged over 120
years are either questionable or not verified.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment> If this is true, [i]Men[/i]
still did not exceed 120 years by 128,99 days. Interpreting the bible is hard,
determining as literal and figure of speech is the hard part.

~~~
jacques_chester
In any book composed of random fantasy elements, written by hundreds of
authors, it is pretty much inevitable that some bits will, merely by chance,
be correct.

Genesis is the same book that puzzlingly fails to mention the big bang, for
example.

~~~
glimcat
In the beginning, there was light.

On second thought, do we have to count "the beginning" as the moment of the
singularity or as the time when the universe became transparent to photons?
Gonna end up with a holy war over that one.

Wait, it's all good. You start out with a dark and formless void, then you get
your "fiat lux" afterwards. The Bible was right again!

~~~
jacques_chester
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Oops, there's water before there's light. Better retcon that sucker.

~~~
lelele
> 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Big Bang.

~~~
jacques_chester
Evidence suggests that energy preceded matter -- ie that light preceded earth,
heaven and water.

Look, the Bible is an anthology of twisted fairytales that's been an absolute
bonanza of story fuel for the western tradition. But it's not exactly replete
with reliable scientific information.

~~~
glimcat
I'm actually rather fond of certain portions of Leviticus which describe
diagnostic rituals.

~~~
jacques_chester
I like how detailed the builder's specs for the tabernacle are. Paaaaages and
paaaaages of expensive building materials. "The curtain tassels should totally
be gold-plated platinum. PS my brother gets all the juicy cuts of lamb, God
only likes the organs to be burnt".

Meanwhile, explicating the meaning and purpose of the Ten Commandments in all
the thousands of odd corner cases -- including big ones like war -- are left
as an exercise for the reader.

Wow have we gotten off-topic. Sorry HNers.

~~~
sixtofour
In so far as this sub thread has been polite and respectful (70% of it), it's
an enjoyable digression.

I see nothing wrong with the occasional gold thread in a red tapestry.

