…should be classified as a disease. It’s a public-health tragedy that hasn’t long been. To think that we shouldn’t fight it because it’s “natural” is the naturalistic fallacy. Nature is not our friend.
9 thoughts on “Aging”
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…should be classified as a disease. It’s a public-health tragedy that hasn’t long been. To think that we shouldn’t fight it because it’s “natural” is the naturalistic fallacy. Nature is not our friend.
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“A public health tragedy that hasn’t long been”…what? Death is a part of reality. EVERYTHING dies.
When I lived in the UK, one of the employees at the business down the road drove to work in a Model-T Ford that had been made nearly a hundred years earlier. The vast majority of those cars in Britain had ‘died’ long, long ago, but his was still working because he replaced the parts that broke.
There’s no reasons humans can’t be the same. Particularly as our bodies have the ability to rebuild themselves, unlike cars.
Oh, and there’s a jellyfish which appears to be immortal; it doesn’t die from ‘natural causes’, if it survives long enough without being killed by predators or other hazards, it rolls itself back to a larva and grows into a young jellyfish again.
People are already working on doing something similar for humans by rolling back the DNA in our cells to an earlier age. It’s been done in mice and seems to work there for rejuvenating them.
Thinking there are “natural causes” of death is part of how our culture ignores certain things. Being eaten by a lion or struck by lightning are just as natural as anything else.
In his Barsoom books, Edgar Rioce Burroughs says the “natural” lifespan of Barsoomians is a thousand years, but between one thing and another, the average age at death is 300. Then he periodically introduces characters who have lived much longer, in the case of I-Gos the taxidermist, said to be about 2500. It’s also said he doesn’t get out much…
A guy killed a local deputy and his dog several years ago. Cornered, he had a shoot out with a bunch of deputies that unloaded everything they had in return. Our sheriff said he died of “natural causes” because anybody hit over a hundred times in under a minute is just naturally going to die.
Aging and death are different things. Aging leads to death, but so does cancer.
I have to say, as I roll toward my 70th birthday, so far aging is indistinguishable from any of the other chonic illnesses I’ve had. I feel like I could get better somehow.
Just like this?
Aging is the manifestation of biological processes that are not under the influence of natural selection: “Natural selection” is at work only up to, and through, the reproductive years of organisms. Offspring carry the genes of parents that, by definition, had “successful” DNA. Since successful DNA can only be passed on via reproduction, there is no mechanism to select for, or against, any expressions of the genes that later in life result in a long, healthy life, or conversely the conditions we attribute to aging. So, if someone is blessed with genes that allow them to live healthy until 90, beyond the age of reproduction, there is no way for that characteristic to be selected for any more than selection against characteristics that lead to earlier death. In a nutshell, healthy young adults are the result of the pressures of natural selection; the deterioration of aging is biology that results without natural selection.