There's probably no way to prove that this hasn't happened. Anyone who realizes they're not aging normally would likely have taken on a new identity elsewhere for fear of:
1. being burned at the stake
2. being trialed in repeated experiments
3. being deified, and then subsequently being burned at the stake.
---
I realize my comment sounds like a joke, but I'm entirely serious. If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives?
When the team went on an offsite morale event jet skiing, he was told by the proprietor that he couldn't participate because their policy requires you to be at least 16 years old. He was 27 at the time. He never lived that down with his peers. When he tries to go to a bar with friends, he's sometimes accused of trying to pass off a fake ID. These experiences are deeply embarrassing for him.
Imagine trying to get promoted to a senior director position at a company while looking like you are fresh out of college. In that case ageism takes a different meaning.
I recently worked on overhauling the reporting system for one of the largest police departments in the US, and every step along the way I was asked who was in charge, how did I enter the workforce so young, how I got an internship while attending high school (I had already graduated college), etc. I even got those types of comments from other employees at companies where I worked full-time. Of course, I don't really have the luxury of getting too offended by it all the time, otherwise I'd be really bitter, but the classic "Oh well you'll be glad you look young when you're older" gets tiring.
You have to be careful not to come across like "a suit" in the engineering circles, it's a tricky balance, but it's worth it.
My Dad is in his mid 80's and plays four hours of sports a day, or at least he was before the pandemic hit.
When I was in my mid-20's I had to impress the hell out of potential clients to get work, as I looked like I was 15, and girls my own age wouldn't look at me as I was too young. I never drank, so bars weren't an issue. When I was in my early forties, 15-20 year old girls were still coming on to me. I will be 50 next year, and I finally look like I'm in my 20s or 30s, and still get those looks from University-aged girls whenever I venture where they hang out.
A couple of years ago, my now 43 year old partner was mistaken for her teenage doppelganger and asked to the high school prom by three different boys while walking home from work.
It was annoying earlier, but now I look forward to turning out to be one of the immortals.
In general I’ve seen a lot of people that look young for their age but when looking at their skin up close on their face, neck or hands it gives it away. Women are also at an obvious advantage through their use of makeup.
Pretty sure I saw this movie in the 80s.
I've read that when Scott McNealy met his future wife (they married when he was 40) she thought that he was a Stanford undergraduate.
"You look so young."
"I have this portrait in my attic."
It was nice. I can't grow facial hair though so I have no choice. What worries me is when I'm 45, I'll look like the world's oldest 30 year old or something.
It's rather fun for me and I enjoy these kinds of interactions. Can't say it really ever hindered or embarrassed me in any way.
I suspect that if those people who feel embarrassed because they look young were looking older, they'd find something else to be embarrassed about. It's easy to find any number of shortcomings with yourself.
We did a Dexa scan a few months back and it put her age based on body composition at 14.
She gets annoyed about it sometimes as she feels people don't treat her seriously. Because of this she's quite conscious of what she wears, and how she presents herself.
For anyone curious you can find her on youtube - search "Good Paleo Life"
Although I didn't realize until I commented that Jerome Bixby the author of The Man From Earth was also a Star Trek writer.
[0] https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1188295183130955778?s=21
I was routinely told I looked 25 at the age of 45, and can assure you I felt no need to start accumulating secret identities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_for_wi...
Quite a number were burned for (obviously alleged) witchcraft. (grep page for 'burn')
That's where I derived that first bullet.
Of course that was hard to prove or disprove, but we have examples of alleged witches accepting payment for harming/killing other people using whichcraft - like a contract killer. So at least the intention to cause harm was there in some cases.
There are numerous accounts of people having (alleged) supernatural abilities who was not persecuted, e.g ascetics surviving without eating for years and such. These were generally held in high regard, and could end up as saints.
Of course people could be accused for maleficium on really flimsy evidence so it could also hypothetically happen to the hypothetical slow-aging person just like it could happen to anybody else.
> Of course people could be accused for maleficium on really flimsy evidence so it could also hypothetically happen to the hypothetical slow-aging person just like it could happen to anybody else.
Yep, hence points 1 and 3.
Thanks!
My point was just that unusual aging patterns would not put you at any particular risk of being burned at the stake.
It's about a very small number of people who are immortal, in the sense they stop ageing at 25 (iirc). They can be killed like anyone else, but smaller damages do heal faster. Also, they never get sick. Some are thousands of years old, some less. Some smart, some not so much. How they handle their immortality is very interesting though. I won't spoil it for you though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_of_a_Million_Years
Some of my favories:
Coherence (scifi)
Garden Party (sleazy young adult Los Angeles drama)
Murder Party (low budget horror comedy)
How English sounds to non-English speakers (youtube)
Circle 2015 (scifi)There's some play adaptations which have few characters and mostly dialogue: Carnage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Glengarry Glen Ross
Linklater's "Before" trilogy is also heavily dialogue-based, but the there are multiple locations.
"Perfect Strangers" (2017) [1].
And so is, mostly, "Rope."
Let's assume the mutation happens when the person is in their 20s, which would be ideal. If this occurred any time in history up to the 1800s, would you not still be likely to die of disease, cancer, or other injury? Life expectancy hasn't increased because we are better at slowing aging, it has increased because we are better at not dying of the things that kill us.
If the mutation happened invitro, did the child survive birth? If it did survive but never grew, it wouldn't reproduce, and may have been abandoned if it were too much of a burden.
There are many scenarios where this mutation could have occurred but was never passed on.
As for more extreme cases, I could believe that a few people discovered that they weren't aging and hid it, but not more than a few people, especially in modern times. Switching identities isn't exactly easy and the probability of every one of them successfully carrying it out gets exponentially suppressed as the number of people increases.
And the same argument applies to true magicians btw.
When you could summon real magic, why should you reveal that to others?
(or care to claim a million dollar
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranorma...
)
But I doubt it.
From a perspective of evolution, aging and dying and new borns, make sense, because the environment changes. And youth is able to adopt better to new changes.
FWIW, it doesn't need to do this. It just need to result in more surviving children and grandchildren. Looking 5-10 years younger when you're a female between the ages of 25 and 40 could A) get you access to a higher status mate who can better provide for your children, and/or B) keep your mate more interested in you, reducing the likelihood that they will continue to provide for the children you have with them.
There would almost certainly be a continuum, perhaps following a power law. The top quartile might be the "40 not looking a day over 25," while the top 0.1% might be true Dorian Greys.
Aside from that, it's only in the last millennium or so that we have record keeping that we could plausibly consider credible enough to prove the existence of such a person - in ages before that we have countless myths of immortality or unnatural longevity that we immediately disregard as fictional. So if Methuselah really had lived 969 years due to this mutation, we'd all be none the wiser!
So, if you want to tell if someone is 25 or 40, maybe their skin will give it away?
The Man From Earth and its sequel are on Amazon Prime Video.
edit: I should have did a ctrl+f man from earth
It's a great show everyone seems to have seen it. I never knew about it until I saw it in my Amazon Prime Video suggestions.
Excessive smoking and UV light exposure can easily make a 25-year old look older than a healthy 50-year old who exercises regularly, uses sunscreen when they go out in the sun, and didn’t get scars from accidents.
>There's probably no way to prove that this hasn't happened. Anyone who realizes they're not aging normally would likely have taken on a new identity elsewhere for fear of:
>1. being burned at the stake
>2. being trialed in repeated experiments
>3. being deified, and then subsequently being burned at the stake.
---
>I realize my comment sounds like a joke, but I'm entirely serious. If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives?
1, 2 and 3 are very astute observations about human nature. ALL people who disagree on 1,2 and 3 are just naive in what they think human nature is. History repeats.
Not aging is as slow as aging, and by the time you realise and accept there is something special with you, everyone else around has already figured it out. Disappearing at that point might be a pretty conspicuous move "that guy [or woman, I wonder why all immortals must always be men... :)] who is 70 but actually looked thirty went missing".
Go take a look at her photo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-107-this-artist-just...
But yeah, wow.
I once met a 102 year old man who lived alone in a big patch of private forest in BC that he bought in the '20s. He was still driving a car and doing jumping jacks.
"The Ouroboros, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, has been said to have a meaning of infinity by depicting the cycle of birth and death. The Ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal."
Waiting for my deification now...
The socially desirable scenarios like this aren't really the interesting ones. How about looking 5 when you reach 25?
Roughly speaking, it boils down to the fact that you need 90 out of 100 subsystems in your body to be working. Your lungs, your heart, your skin, your brain, etc.
They interact, but each part also needs to work on its own for you to live. Every one of those systems can fail and leave you dead.
Since evolution only "cares" about you to the point where you bear children and raise them, what are the chances that it engineered ALL those systems to last FOREVER?
And then it created a single hormone to control every system and make them stop decaying?
Such a fantastic over-engineering can't occur purely by chance, 100 times over.
-----
In fact ANY mutation that decreased life expectancy but increased fitness during the reproductive years would be selected FOR.
So it seems possible you have multiple mutations that prevent you from living much longer than "expected".
(I'd even conjecture there's a sexual selection effect going on in the "live hard die young" people, like rock stars, athletes, etc. Their hormones are selected for "living on the edge", and that strategy has proven useful over millenia... i.e. a tendency toward self-destruction is not necessarily something that gets weeded out by evolution)
-----
That said I think it's definitely possible for some treatment to make someone who would have lived 60 years last until 70, or even 100. It's harder to imagine going from 100 to 200 (especially with productive life).
This sentence turn things into such an anthropomorphic way, to the point that the concept of evolution en engineering don't make sense anymore.
In the (scientific) evolution theories, evolution doesn't "engineer" life. It shapes life forms by environment constraints alone. And these constraints are in no appearing way optimized for fostering life, which appear more like an accidental byproduct. No conceptual framework nor any concern for conscious parsimony of implementation or sense of elegance are underlying evolution forces.
Indefinite youthfulness span would sure seems impressive. But it is nothing compared to other challenges that should be overcome to attain an exceptional life span: an unswerving immune system, not being killed by any domestic accident, human social violence or natural catastrophe, and not suicide yourself over psychological disorders.
There are scientific papers, BTW, which engineer solutions by evolutionary algorithms. Is that evolution or engineering? Clearly there's an engineering setup, made of all the constraints you speak about for the evolution process to take place, and that evolution process is also defined artificially, yet just like the real stuff, it follows a set of rules, so where's the divide? Why nature couldn't be engineering life with evolution, but humans could?
Your last point OTOH is quite relevant.
Humans are highly social beings that naturally live in large kin groups. Knowledge and culture form a huge part of our survival strategy. Who among us have the most knowledge and experience to pass on? Elders.
Take a look at the role of elders in traditional hunter/gatherer cultures. Huge importance. Is it not implausible that natural selection would favour increased life expectancy so that elders can maintain and transmit the group's body of knowledge?
I'm more talking about people who want to raise life expectancy from 100 to 200, not go from 70 to 100 (not sure where the original article fell on this).
70 to 100 is clearly possible and we've already gotten a long way there in the 20th century (antibiotics, etc.) The "problem" now seems to be that not everyone actually cares if they live that long... i.e. there are plenty of people who don't want to live to 100, and might not even if they maintained the health of a 60 or 70 year old.
Evolution works in small steps, over long periods of time (given the humans slow grow up process). Mutations in any of those systems may increase or lower the chances of such failure. Evolution takes care of both, albeit by a small margin. Currently, cause of death number one worldwide is the ischemic heart disease¹ (i.e. the famous "coronary"). Now guess what, there are genetic mutations that work on this out there already, one of them being the Gilbert's syndrome². Yes, forever is unattainable, but (humanity scale speaking) I'm glad having lived past twenty four and willing to take any blessing coming after.
"I'd even conjecture there's a sexual selection effect going on in the «live hard die young» people, like rock stars, athletes, etc."
I hope you're aware of survivor's bias here. Assume a lot more of those to be weeded out. Also, the stars made it not only because they were risk inclined but also because they they have that value they were recognized for.
I find the gradual improvement that one may gain having a bit of time to be a very useful edge over the young and inexperienced, in the game of life. Especially for a male (that is not that restricted by an inherent fertility age limit), this edge fits perfectly in the reproductive selection window you mention.
¹ https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%27s_syndrome#Cardiovas...
And Gilbert isn't "free" -- it comes at cost. The body is a machine, and engineering is full of tradeoffs.
People with high abilities in one area (geniuses) often have low abilities in others. Optimizing some protein for your heart isn't neutral for the rest of your body, etc.
The point about the stars is that evolution has "determined" that it can be optimal to take a ton of risks and die early than to live safely for 200 years (in some cases, of course evolution favors diversity too, which is why you see centenarians).
If you could get reward without risk, then it wouldn't work that way -- the "stars" would live forever creating great music and not drink themselves to death. But life is full of tradeoffs and reward involves risk.
> A handful of girls seem to defy one of the biggest certainties in life: ageing. He has identified four girls with this condition, marked by what seems to be a permanent state of infancy, a dramatic developmental arrest. He suspects that the disease is caused by a glitch somewhere in the girls’ DNA. His quest for immortality depends on finding it.
The key is that the mutation would prevent reproduction. If you never age, you never reproduce.
You can think about different cancers. A mutation that causes fatal childhood cancer doesn't get passed on. A mutation that causes prostate cancer can spread.
Aging is weird. Maybe there’s something to be learned from these cases, but it’s very unlikely to be straightforward. Unless you’re a roundworm. We can make those live hundreds of human-relative years. But in those cases it’s a tiny number of genes involved, we have near zero evidence that the same is the case for higher organisms.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/17077/why-does-e...
This will sound callous, but some older people really should be allowed to die. There's definitely points of diminishing returns for all involved; I hope that under certain conditions (eg dementia) I'll be allowed to die when I'm decrepit.
Maybe the people who don't age just died of something else eventually.
Parabiosis does not substantially extend lifespan (possibly not at all), based on the experiments done so far. Even if it did, it definitely does not double it, which is what would be predicted by naively looking at the halved DNA mAge on the clock.
This paper is very likely intended as another validation of Horvath's mAge clock. The clock shows that there is a strong association between epigenetic state and both chronological age and morbidity risk. Exactly why that is, and what it means, is highly controversial.
Mainstream aging field does not really care about lifespan much anymore. Increasing amount of focus is on so-called "healthspan" - approximately the duration of healthy life, or incidence of morbidity. You would think that you could not affect one without the other, but in fact you can, to a frustrating and surprising degree.
Therefore when you read about "rejuvenation", we are increasingly finding that you can find treatments which improve a broad spectrum of unrelated health markers, that these treatments will affect epigenetic loci predictive of age, and all of this without any substantial effect on lifespan. (From a public policy perspective, this is considered highly desirable, as for public expenditures it would be ideal if people lived perfectly healthy until the moment they keel over, even if we cannot extend the time until they do)
One possibility to keep in mind is that rodents die almost entirely of cancer. So it is possible that some treatment which improves "everything except cancer" would not show any lifespan effect in rodents. This would be one way of reconciling this paper with Horvath's earlier finding that the clock predicts all-cause mortality in humans.
That would be between solar cycles and lunar cycles: seems enticing. That would make Methuselah 80yo when he reportedly died; but there are problems still as Seth (for example) became a father at 105, which if it were months would be 8¾ years.
Another possibility is that when it says Methuselah it just means "Methuselah's blood line" or "Methuselah the tribe"; it's a Hebraic thing (elsewhere in the OT) to refer to a tribe as if referring to the founding person.
Or, the person writing down the numbers used a different system, through error or otherwise.
I don't remember anyone mentioned living for _thousands_ of years. There are plenty of characters that live for hundreds, though. It is believed that Abraham lived to the age of 175, while I believe there was one character that lived into the 300's, but I do not recall their name. It has been a while since I delved into the old testament.
> Said to have died at the age of 969, he lived the longest of all figures mentioned in the Bible.
The other story mentioned in the Quran is about a group of people and their dog who slept in a cave for 309 years and woke up afterwards. I believe they died shortly after. There is an actual chapter in the quran about this called the cave[1].
edit: Found it on the wikipedia page you linked. I was thinking about Enoch, Methuselah's father, who lived to be 365 years old according to the bible.
But train wrecks would allow for significantly higher populations per experiment.
I must ponder this.
They call me Mr...
In 1850 the leading cause of death in the US census was "zymotic diseases" and cancer caused death in the triple digits. In 2020, almost none of the diseases in the "zymotic" category are significant in the US, but we're still dying. We've cured croup and scarlet fever, so we don't die of those much any more--instead we live long enough to die of heart disease and cancer. Cancer didn't kill many people in 1850, but that's only because "zymotic diseases" killed them before they could develop cancers.[1]
I think it's likely that there are many causes of aging, and they will behave the same way: as we eliminate some causes of aging we'll live long enough to die of other causes of aging that take longer to potentiate.
Given most people who reproduce do so before the age of 50, there's not really an evolutionary pressure to not age--in fact, there may actually be evolutionary pressure to age so you die off and leave more resources for more efficient (younger) organisms carrying your DNA. Ghengis Khan, the most evolutionarily successful person in history, died at 64 or 65. So if a person did produce these signaling molecules, they wouldn't necessarily gain any evolutionary benefit from them.
[1] Obviously "zymotic diseases" is a nonsense category in modern medicine--most were bacterial infections, some other forms of infections, some completely misattributed to infection. The point here is that most of them weren't cancers or heart disease--the things that kill Americans today.
Seems likely this is a gradient, not a binary thing, so perhaps someone with a beneficial mutation would just live a little longer. There’s not a ton of evolutionary pressure at the old age side of the spectrum, you’re not reproducing a lot, so it may not get picked up.
Wilder speculation: it could be that indeed this has been happening and is why humans live about 2x as long as chimps and gorillas.
Personally I think it’s quite unlikely that in humans single genes would have large deltas on age. There are maybe a few hints from supercentenarians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_into_centenarians) that telomerase and other genes have some effect, but the “one gene for aging” in humans is elusive. As a result, it’s hard to predict how all this would play out evolutionarily.
Meanwhile if there was an entire community like this then the people living longer still wouldn't be at a disadvantage, the community would just have a different equilibrium. The surviving communities could e.g. have fewer children on average (you only have to replace people who die in accidents) or would expand their territory over time (expanding population can control more territory).
But if everyone lived longer than required, i.e. the minimum ideal for raising viable offspring, then this population stood to be out-competed by another population that aged at a more efficient rate. Individuals in a population aging at an optimal rate is an evolutionary advantage to the population.
Are you trying to provide an evolutionary justification for aging by using aging itself as a reason?
Also, if it takes 4 different mutations (assuming each of 4 injections is a different substance), it might be very unlikely for all 4 to happen in one individual, and any 1 mutation may not give that individual any particular reproductive advantage.
I think it's more likely that, as many others in this thread have observed, longevity is ignored while evolution optimizes for other things, which I would distinguish from something that specifically evolved like vision. Things can die perfectly well on their own without dying needing to be optimized. It would also be more plausible to me that death was evolved if it had some clear, functional, deliberate mechanism by which it was enacted, the way that eyes or lungs are clearly purposeful and functional. Death happens as an interference with function rather than as someone handled by an organ or internal system.
This is more than speculation, how is this not beneficial?
A more interesting approach to me seems almost feasible with current technology, assuming CRISPR will soon be able to replace DNA without causing more side effect DNA damage than it fixes.
Take a healthy human blastocyst, derived from healthy young relatives of the patient (likely to have compatible mitochondrial DNA). Now, determine the patient's original DNA structure. This would occur by sampling various cell lineages and using a statistical model to estimate the original DNA of the patient as a baby. Now, take some stem cells from the blastocyst and replace the DNA with the patient's DNA. Generate a culture of different stem cells and inject them throughout the patient's body. The patient now has cell lineages with fresh telomeres that will be actively dividing for another 6 decades. Perhaps additional signaling regulation would be necessary to prevent types of growth that would be unwanted in adults.
Any experts want to poke holes at this idea? I have no formal training in biotech but I always thought this seemed like the cure to non-structural age related diseases. The harder part seems like cleaning and regrowing new veins and arteries, and brain repair.
FWIW, I'm pretty skeptical of this announcement, but (assuming it's correct), it's possible that you need multiple signalling factors to achieve the age-reduction and that one single mutation might not do the trick.
Let's say that you needed four precise mutations to achieve the age reduction, then the probability of getting all of them in a single individual would be quite low.
But like I said, this announcement has a bad smell to me. In particular, the fact that they are not revealing the "rejuvenating factors" as well as the fact that they have not demonstrated age prolongation.
Finally, the complaint about the aging field being focused on cellular damage feels a little "straw-man-y" to me. I'm certainly not an expert in the field, but I imagine there are numerous researchers hunting for age-related signalling molecules.
Because evolution is a random-driven process. (in the same way that we carry a number of traits that made our survival harder)
How would we know? What fraction of people in the past actually dies from old age and complications of old age, and not disease, infection, or strife such as wars or other conflict?
In the past, I imagine not degrading due to age would be at best an extra few decades of time until you got a bad flu, or pneumonia, or an infection, or were killed on a battlefield, or if you were female, died from complications of giving birth.
We could have age-proof people living among us today who happen to die in car accidents or any number of other causes.
Evolution happens at all scales, not just the creature scale.
Parabiosis is one of the most striking (and just weird) phenomena in aging research, so efforts to understand what's going on with it are liable to bear interesting fruit. I'm just pointing out that there's good reason to doubt that this particular "breakthrough" is the "cure."