191–200 of 240 posts
Richard Feynman, because he showed me through his writing that we all, no matter our backgrounds, can be enthralled by the mysteries that surround us.
And that through charisma, you can become more famous than physicists that do better physics than you.
The guys who did the moon landings. What an amazing display of engineering and courage.
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That's a semantic argument. But what it means for aging is functionally the same; we're programmed to last a certain amount of time (when there is pressure) and when the pressure runs out... we break down. This is essentially the same as having a programmed break down time. Secondly, the argument on tarantulas does not rest on group selection at all. For any one male tarantula, he spreads his genes better by living 2…
So what if there's pressure? You argue that we must rewrite the source code -- so? Genetics = source code. So rewrite the source code.
The engineering approach of periodical repair seems like the only game in town.
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I conceded nothing. You're confusing investment on an evolutionary timescale with investment on an individual timescale. A male spider couldn't spontaneously decide to live another 6 years- it would take hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to achieve that. On a physiological level, increasing investment in the individual is difficult because so much about how we are built is developmentally fixed. You can't c…
Here's you've just shown that you have no idea what Aubrey and SENS are proposing. Maybe, like with Hofstadter's book, you've just "read the introduction" and then stopped? >We have no idea which genes contribute to aging, and how, and even how many. In all likelihood a simply astronomical number of genes would have to be altered to extend life. The whole point of SENS is that it DOESN'T try to fiddle with metabolism…
Sure, you can replace blood cells, but do you really think we can replace all your cells, including your neurons? If you want to go in for a complete brain transplant, be my guest.
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Are you saying the end justifies the means?
If he is, then so did the mob revolutionaries. In fact, so did an HN poster right here in this thread: > The French Revolution was a step forward for humanity, no matter how messy it was. (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868344 ) The idea that the government should kill protesters might seem far too disrespectful of human life, but then, doesn't the word "messy" in the above quote evoke the same reaction?
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It's true that individuals that live a little bit longer but have the same end of their reproductive period do no better in the gene pool. However, if it were advantageous to live longer, and those folks had a slightly longer reproductive period, then we would expect the lifespan-while-fertile to increase. Presumably this would also increase the overall lifespan as well, but really that's irrelevant to this discussio…
1) For most of history, humans and their ancestors didn't live very long. When you die at 30, there's not much selection for biological mechanisms to fix the problems that happen in someone who is 60. Natural selection is looking for genes that are good at reproducing themselves, not genes that are good at giving an individual long life. Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots…
Again, this is completely irrelevant to your argument. You can still evolve to live for a longer time while reproductively viable.
>Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).
Again, it's all about trade-offs. For some organisms, it's most advantageous for them to reproduce as much as they can all in one go, and for others it makes sense to live a really long time and reproduce throughout that time period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity_and_iteroparity
I own The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.
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Gorbechev did not kill the people gathered at the White House to demand their freedom from communism--he dissolved the Soviet Union and allowed liberalization. Deng may have not had the power to dissolve the communist system in China, but a recognition of the rights to free assembly and free political speech, combined with a concrete plan towards devolving power away from the Communist Party, would have been a better…
would have been a better option than killing people for asking for it. The people who died were people who refused to vacate a public area after occupying it for weeks, accumulating automatic weapons, defying orders to disperse, and burning buses and using them as blockades. These were not peaceful reformers, but power seeking revolutionaries, in the mold of revolutionaries that have destroyed nations for the past th…
David Chappelle I hate that he has faded so much from the public eye. If you've never seen Dave Chappelle's Block Party get it and watch it, whether you enjoy hip-hop or not. If you've seen that and are otherwise interested his Inside the Actors Studio interview is pretty solid too. He is basically the type of role model I wish I could be someday.
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I conceded nothing. You're confusing investment on an evolutionary timescale with investment on an individual timescale. A male spider couldn't spontaneously decide to live another 6 years- it would take hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to achieve that. On a physiological level, increasing investment in the individual is difficult because so much about how we are built is developmentally fixed. You can't c…
Here's you've just shown that you have no idea what Aubrey and SENS are proposing. Maybe, like with Hofstadter's book, you've just "read the introduction" and then stopped? >We have no idea which genes contribute to aging, and how, and even how many. In all likelihood a simply astronomical number of genes would have to be altered to extend life. The whole point of SENS is that it DOESN'T try to fiddle with metabolism…
No you don't know "exactly" what he's proposing, and you don't understand what senescence is, as you've made clear many times here. I'm starting to feel this isn't very productive so we should probably stop this conversation.
> Sure, you can replace blood cells, but do you really think we can replace all your cells, including your neurons? If you want to go in for a complete brain transplant, be my guest.
Here you show again that you have no idea what SENS is proposing and you are making up strawmen. If you want to criticize something, please learn about it first.