Evolution is not smart at all. It trends toward reproductive success and that's all. At the most basic level, natural selection is an emergent phenomena of an energy-scarce environment. That is no longer the case for humans. A single human now has access to orders of magnitude more energy than any of our ancestors. It no longer matters if keeping an individual from aging requires ten times the energy input of creating and raising a child. That entire realm of biological innovation is completely invisible to traditional evolution.

Now, but it's not clear at all how it will evolve in the fairly near future :-).

But I generally agree with your point on evolution: it is a random process. We tend to "personify" it ("evolution chose to make us like this"), but that's wrong: species that evolved to being less fit died, those that evolved to be more fit survived. Pure chance.

I guess my point is that there is a tendency to say "evolution chose to make this because that's the optimal solution", where actually evolution may have "missed" the optimal solution.

But evolution is not an active process (of something choosing what's optimal), but a passive process (it does change, and some of those (random) changes win).

Or am I missing something?

In general it's unsurprising that selection misses hypothetical universal optima for the same reason it's unsurprising we didn't evolve wings even though that'd be an optimal way to escape lions. Evolution moves traits around fitness landscapes heavily contrained by exaptation. But interestingly many highly conserved mechanisms, e.g. essential cell machinery or metabolic pathways shared widely across the tree of life, have been shown to be maintained at absolute energetic and informational optima.

Do you have a link for your number, would be very interested.

This is rando google search for it (so double check) but material looks correct to me:

"An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate into more readily imaginable equivalents, it is as if an average Earthling has every year at their personal disposal about 800 kilograms (0.8 tons, or nearly six barrels) of crude oil, or about 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal. And when put in terms of physical labor, it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be, depending on the specific country, mostly between 200 and 240."

So looks like my number was quite low.

The references to "Earthlings" makes me suspect this quote was pulled from "How the World Really Works", since it starts out with a thought exercise using an extraplanetary observer watching the progress of human civilization over millennia. If you like this kind of information, I would highly recommend Energy and Civilization, it's a fantastic and eye-opening book.

Edit: confirmed, above quote is from "How the World..".

To be fair, in the "eyes" of evolution, once you stop breeding, you are effectively dead weight and a resource sink - there's been no benefit to evolving hyper-age solutions. I guess mayflies are the ur-example here - they grow, they breed once, they die and leave all the resources to the new crop.

Even if you kept breeding, as your age goes up, your ability (absent modern medicine and luxuries) to get your children to breeding age goes down (a 20 year old has a much better chance against a sabre-tooth tiger / flu / cold weather / etc. than a 70 year old...)

Nowadays people don’t have kids until 30, so maybe there is some pressure towards 30+30+10?

Evolution’s response to massive physical trauma can be things like wariness of heights rather than a body that can fall arbitrarily distances.

Anyway - there are dangers we've evolved resistance to. We have powerful immune systems that fights off tons of diseases. But they fail against some diseases, and medicine helps us there (sometimes). Some of these diseases are extremely widespread and threaten populations.

Am I misunderstanding your comment?

For example Rabies has close to 100% fatality rate when untreated and has been a threat for vastly longer, but COVID more people over the last 100 years. So what’s a serious threat to an individual doesn’t necessarily mean a major threat to a larger population.

In that context there was likely significant protection offered by our aversion to the ill when we were primitive tribes with limited contact to each other. Such aversion could act as an external immune system causing most excessively deadly to burn out and pushing for ever less deadly strains over time.

“Pathogen avoidance: Uncanny stimuli may activate a cognitive mechanism that originally evolved to motivate the avoidance of potential sources of pathogens by eliciting a disgust response. "The more human an organism looks, the stronger the aversion to its defects, because (1) defects indicate disease, (2) more human-looking organisms are more closely related to human beings genetically, and (3) the probability of contracting disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and other parasites increases with genetic similarity."[8] The visual anomalies of androids, robots, and other animated human characters cause reactions of alarm and revulsion, similar to corpses and visibly diseased individuals.[9][10]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

People’s near universal aversion to the smell of rotting flesh and human shit are similar examples. Of course at the individual level this is less universal. Another possibility is heightened pain response around minor skin damage compared to larger injuries. Aka thorns and paper cuts hurt so much because that kind of injury was actually more dangerous than moderate blunt force trauma which damages more flesh but doesn’t risk infection.

PS: That said it’s not like we can actually test these theories. It’s mostly an interesting idea that seems plausible.

Also, species level survival is based around fairly large families you see before birth control. Not everyone needs to make it.

A frog egg would presumably prefer an evolutionary strategy that involved fewer eggs and a more caring parent. But having more kids and a smaller percentage survive to adulthood has advantages in terms of rates of adaptation to environmental changes.

Humans do use a similar strategy where sperm are subjected to an extreme environment which weeds out many cellular issues.

> Evolution’s response to massive physical trauma can be things like wariness of heights rather than a body that can fall arbitrarily distances.

It can be either or both. Cats tend to survive falls very well, as do insects, but for different reasons.

For a lot of history dying young was common due to forces that have nothing to do with our own biology. So maybe it's more that environmental conditions did not give any reason for evolution to select for longer life, or select against cells that age. Also it might be that there are trade offs about selecting against cells that age that may have been sucky in the past and not led to fast reproduction, but that those trade offs don't matter now.

I think the reason this isn't a pretty solid argument for its infeasibility is that evolution optimizes for different things than we might choose to.

Among them the Naked Mole Rat, a mammal.

So it looks like evolution can do it. But it usually doesn't.

For these species most of the new born are babies of very old females.

[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-figure-...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenoptosis

That's what we call a "patch". A systemic patch, in this case.

For all we know ageing might be an evolutionary process to free future generations from crappy dictators and absolute rulers.

We are not slaves to biological statistical optimization. Haven't been for what? half a million years.

I think it's related to reproduction - immortality would mean you're competing against your offspring for resources.

It also touches on a theme of The Hydrogen Sonata (and elsewhere in the Culture series): with unlimited time to practice, how far will one go to perfect one's art (music in this case)?

It’s just better for you to die. Your DNA sucks, make room for your superiors (your children).

I jest, but dying is the smart choice. It’s like a giant AGI system letting a few of its minor instances being cut off: no problem, we’ll fork a few new ones. They might even be better.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

I fail to see many win-win scenarios in a world where population density only increases.

Bad stuff also has more opportunity..

Evolution has two things over us: it has infinite time, and infinite resources. It can afford to wait 200000 years, and to kill millions of individuals, to produce a change.

That's impressive, but it is also the opposite of smart.

as far as your genes are concerned, it's just as good if two of your children carry them on as if you carry them on yourself; there is no particular reason a priori for evolution to favor one over the other

however, your gametes form a genetic bottleneck which reduces genetic diversity (chimerism) among the cells of your children compared to the genetic diversity among your own cells

due to mutations during your lifespan, genetic diversity within your body increases, which increases the prevalence of genes that cause individual cells and tissues to compete with one another rather than cooperating; in the extreme, we call this 'cancer'

so we have genes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53 which both cause aging (by suppressing stem cells, so you can't regenerate) and suppress cancer; more generally, many aging processes are known to suppress cancer directly

but more generally you can see genes' investment of resources in your offspring, rather than in you, as a way to protect that investment from cancer: if you get cancer, it almost never kills your offspring, so your genes can toss your worthless body onto the trash heap and continue on their merry way unmolested

of course you may feel differently about the importance of your own body surviving than (the optimization goals of the natural selection process selecting) your genes do

This is a good summary. Only thing to keep in mind is that an increase in genetic diversity need not imply a unidirectional march towards cancer, but an increase in risk. One of the most interesting paradoxes of cancer initiation research currently is the presence of "cancer-causing" mutations in phenotypically normal cells for decades prior to the appearance of the first cancer cell (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27059373/ for instance).

What's remarkable to me about this aging study and others like it is that they are able to reverse some aspect of aging despite the accumulation of genetic diversity with age as you point out. Perhaps what they're reversing was never really dependent on mutation accumulation with age, or that the presence of mutations does not fully explain the age-related degeneration they're interested in reversing.

The article title is unfortunate. A better description of what may be possible, per language deeper down in the article -- and what would be arguably much more feasible -- is "drugs that slow the aging process".

I don't think we are smarter than evolution, in this regard.

Evolution "designed" us to drop off by age 45 or so due to some combination of poor nutrition, opportunistic infections, etc (and other factors, like violence from other humans). Yet we've managed to tweak that built-in expiration date, not just by qualitative factors (like better nutrition, basic healthcare) but to a significant extent by "structural" interventions like antibiotics, antivirals, and vaccines of various sorts.

I suspect that -- if indeed anti-aging treatments become available -- they'll eventually be seen as part of the latter category. As with these, there will be side effects (and just the same, the hope will be they can also be managed).

Eventually, it'll be just another pragmatic thing that people do (alas, the wealthier among us at first most likely).

With that in mind, there's no need to anthropomorphize evolution any more than necessary. It's just a mathematical framework to describe what's been happening over billions of years. There's no hidden "intelligent design" (sorry to use the phrase) behind it, on whose toes we need to be leery of stepping upon.

It may be more helpful to think of evolution as, if anything -- more of a giant hack, on top of an endless series of kludges. Some of which may turn out to be easily patched, or otherwise mitigated.

Evolution only prioritizes lifespan as much as it needs to vs other reproductive goals.

I get it, for example, in botany where genetic diversity is crucial for the survival of a plant species.

We could engineer away things that might eventually in some future crisis prove to be a deciding factor in our survival. We could easily engineer away genes that might have gone on to outlive us as humans, and then end up outcompeted by them. Or we could engineer ourselves into different variants, and compete with each other.

In the end you can’t second guess evolution.