jordanozang

If you use pip without protection, it will gladly and malevolently mess up your system. Every Python user learns quickly about the virtual environment work around. Various distributions (e.g. through Homebrew on Os X, Arch Linux, Ubuntu Linux) ship pip without the ability to make system-wide installations (externally-managed-environment). Even on Windows, where there is no standardized package management system, doing a pip install will place a bunch of dlls in the system's PATH that could get in the way of any program on your system.

The anti-solution of ignoring the problem is what got us here.

Brenner claims "Animal gene sets have been subject to genetic selections for guile, strength and famine-resistance but have not been directly selected for longevity because". This is case 2 in my classification.

He writes, "Indeed, experiments done in flies that were selected for the ability to reproduce late in life suggest that hundreds or thousands of genes, not single dominantly acting genes, are modified to allow every organ system to function better over time in the resulting long-lived flies (Burke et al., 2010)." The case of sirtuin genes, however, is disctintly different from this. The hypothesis there is that increased expression of sirtuins increases longevity. This is a change to the epigenome, not to the genetic content itself, which is what is what Brenner comments on.

Also, what this says is not that "evolution never had any reason to favour another approach", but that evolution (at least in this controlled environment) was not able to stop aging. Perhaps you have other data to support that claim. Also, what this says is not that "evolution never had any reason to favour another approach", but that evolution (at least in this controlled environment) was not able to stop aging. Perhaps you have other data to support that claim.

From the perspective of maximizing reproduction, maximizing fertile population is oviously ideal. Surely, if it's possible for a member of the species that is fertile to continue to reproduce and live longer, this would increase the species' overall reproductive capacity. Obviously, post-reproductive age individuals do not have this benefit. However, it doesn't seem improbable that loss of reproductive ability is caused by aging.

I think that the tradeoff you mention between reproductive age fitness would make sense in the context of other adversity though. If survival in general is very difficult, surviving long enough to reproduce, reproducing as fast as possible, and being able to survive long enough to finish the process while it's placing various stressors on your body is desirable.

How do you suppose that is? If a species were completely able to avoid the effects of aging (including age-related diseases and degeneration) what evolutionary reason would there be for death at such an early age. Especially in the case of mammals, the process of rearing the young is a large investment of resources which takes a long time to produce a return. Surely it would be better to minimize that expenditure and have members of your species who've had time to learn from their experiences. If population were to become a problem, there are already plenty of instances of species killing their own for various reasons so some form of population control doesn't seem to be an entirely unexpected adaption. Sure there may have been other things that were more prescient at the time such as disease, lack of food, etc. But I don't see why not aging would be evolutionarilly unfavourable?

I'd split things into 3 cases: (1) aging is something for which there is a strong evolutionary pressure, (2) aging was dominated by other factors and is more or less indpendent of evolution, and (3) aging is something that is strongly unfavourable in evolution. In case (1), it may be that there are strong genetic mechanisms for evolution which we cannot reverse without changing genetic data. In case (3), we have to ask the question of why we age, given evolution has worked against it. If there were some compound that could prevent aging significantly, why don't more of us naturally produce it. Case (2) is where I'd expect the problem to be the most attainable. The existence of certain compounds that seem to alleviate aging significantly might be interpreted as evidence against the third case. If such (often naturally ocurring) compounds exist, then why don't we produce them? Of course, more evidence would be necessary to say anything conclusive.

Alternatively, this could be taken to fall into the bucket of brainteasers, where a good answer might be "e", since it's the most frequently occurring letter in the alphabet in english texts.