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Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

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Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#51

Post by wazoox »

Retric wrote: post #33
AngryParsley wrote: post #12

Mortality rates follow a Gompertz curve. This blog post explains it pretty well: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-w... 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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#52

Post by zavulon »

Ruudjah wrote: post #3

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 ( 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.

Don't understand why you're getting downvoted.. if this was Reddit, then yeah, but I expected more from HN crowd.

I was about to post the same thing - this is no surprise to us Jews. As the saying goes - may you live to 120 years!

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

Ruudjah wrote: post #3

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 ( 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.

[deleted]

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#54

Post by w1ntermute »

wazoox wrote: post #50
w1ntermute wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).

I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible…

If you can create a medium compatible with the human brain, it may be possible to hold our consciousnesses in it.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#55

Post by scythe »

shawndumas wrote: post #46
mdonahoe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#56

Post by jaredmck »

Ruudjah wrote: post #3

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 ( 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.

Now translate this directly from the original source.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#57

Post by joshuacc »

wazoox wrote: post #50
w1ntermute wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).

I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible…

I realize these aren't direct responses, but here are a couple of interesting historical points.

1. Mind/body dualism also arose in pagan Greece (Plato being the clearest example).

2. When most people think of dualism today, they are thinking of Cartesian dualism where the mind and body have a very tenuous connection indeed. But that is a relatively recent idea. Within the Christian tradition, something like Hylemorphic dualism[1], which maintains a very tight connection between mind and body, long predated it. (Probably due in part to belief in the Resurrection of the Body.)

[1] http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/dso/papers/Hylem...

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#58

Post by tokenadult »

wazoox wrote: post #50
w1ntermute wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).

I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible…

I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity

Historically, the idea was present in Greece, certainly in the writings of Plato, before Christianity. The ancient Hebraic idea, reflected in early Christian writings, was much more that the mind and body were intimately linked. But Platonic dualism taking over in Christianity is an example of one meme outcompeting another.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#59

Post by tokenadult »

jinushaun wrote: post #45
JoshTriplett wrote: post #16

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 underst…

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…

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?

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

api wrote: post #32
Udo wrote: post #21

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…

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 superi…

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