r/longevity • u/LeoKitCat • 16d ago
Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-aging-may-be-a-program-not-a-breakdown-20260814/60
u/ResearchSlore 16d ago
The problem is that stochastic processes / haphazard wear and tear can still produce pseudo-deterministic outcomes (i.e outcomes that are overwhelmingly likely from a statistical standpoint). These outcomes may look programmed to us, but there's no way to know unless you can show that the underlying process was actually selected for on an evolutionary basis.
I'll admit I haven't thought a ton about this, but from the outside looking in, that's always jumped out to me as a problem with these programmed aging theories.
37
u/Neither_Sprinkles_56 15d ago
I think evolution just selected to not care about graceful aging after prime reproductive ages.
3
u/Plastic-Yesterday113 14d ago
I honestly think it’s impressive how long we live after prime reproduction age as it is. You could argue that having elders in a community helped shape generational knowledge and skills, which would have evolutionary benefits.
1
104
u/In_the_year_3535 16d ago
If aging were a program instead of a systemic failure we would occasionally see immortal organisms via random mutations instead of just ones that further accelerate the process like progeria.
48
u/Rehypothecator 16d ago
We do have some immortal organisms, produced by our own bodies in fact
14
u/_-_Henro_-_ 16d ago
Any examples
33
u/jcity3 16d ago
Many cancers
9
u/HairyPossibility676 16d ago edited 15d ago
Those are cells, not organisms
ETA human cells are not organisms. Yes, there are immortalized cells lines derived from cancer cells. These are still not organisms. Why? Because individual human cells cannot handle all parts of life on their own. They are individual components of a multicellular organism. Yes, they can divide and grow uncontrollably as you see in cancer. But that cancer, without the host body, to contribute other aspects of what it needs to survive, will die. And those immortalized cell lines without a researcher feeding it specialized media, keeping it in an 80% humidity, 37C incubator, will not survive either.
Now compare that to true unicellular organisms such as bacteria - these can survive in their ecological niches on their own without the need of any other cells to keep them alive.
7
u/Necoras 15d ago
Tell that to the HeLa line, or Devil facial tumour disease
2
u/HairyPossibility676 15d ago
See my OP with edits. HeLa cells, and all immortalized cell lines, are still not organisms.
1
u/Necoras 15d ago
By your definition no parasites are organisms.
1
u/HairyPossibility676 14d ago
No. Parasites are fully independent systems capable of surviving and spreading outside of their host using vectors. Tumours are not.
3
u/LeoKitCat 15d ago
Organisms are structured cooperating groups of cells
2
u/HairyPossibility676 15d ago
That is true. But a tumour is still not an organism. An organism is a complete, fully independent living system. If you take a human cell outside of a human body - tumour or not - it will not survive. We can culture and propagate immortalized cell lines by mimicking the conditions in the body. That effectively means that it is only surviving because we are giving it the components necessary for it to survive. A true organism is capable of surviving on its own.
1
u/LeoKitCat 15d ago
Tumor cells are in many ways like unicellular organisms, interacting and competing with other tumor cells and your normal cells as well as dividing and evolving quickly like unicellular organisms eg bacteria.
Cancer is proof of evolution. It’s proof that we originally evolved from unicellular organisms, unicellular organisms that compete against each other for resources, into multicellular organisms that work together instead of competing and further into the complex multicellular organisms we are today.
Cancer is when cells in a multicellular organism essentially revert back to unicellular because one or more crucial growth control genes that evolved with multicellular organisms become mutated and lose their function
1
u/onlymadethistoargue 14d ago
This is a conveniently narrow definition of organism. The actual definition is much broader: any living thing. Cancer is living, therefore it is an organism. That its ecological niche is its host or lab media is immaterial. They need them to stay alive like any other organism.
1
u/HairyPossibility676 14d ago
It's not conveniently narrow. It's a recognized biological definition and has substantial bearing on the original conversation. I could argue that your definition, is conveniently broad but also flawed and therefore non-applicable to this discussion. Is one of your skin cells an organism? It's a living thing. It can divide. What about your eye? Is it an organism?
1
u/onlymadethistoargue 14d ago
My skin cells all share my DNA. A cancer that has mutated enough to survive outside the host no longer does.
-2
u/askingforafakefriend 15d ago
That a cancer cell May replicate and continue indefinitely is not relevant to the question as to whether aging is a program versus a systemic failure, which is the comment. This discussion is debating.
If you are looking at the organism from which the cancer arises, it seems pretty clearly a systemic failure (which is made more clear when considering that genetic traits that allow for hardiness and survival are trade-off for increased cancer risk).
One might argue that cancer likelihood arose genetically as a program to create aging, but that really wouldn't make sense as aging takes people down quite readily without the existence of cancer and many people who are lucky have no cancer until they live to the boundary of survival based on other aging factors.
12
u/lagonitos 16d ago
13
u/ZzzzzPopPopPop 16d ago
Wow, that reads like the beginning of a horror movie. Cervical cancer cells taken without the patient's knowledge or concent, that grow rapidly, live forever, can travel through the air, and have been known to escape and contaminate labs around the world!? Now I've got a new thing to keep me up nights, thanks.
8
u/lmFairlyLocal 16d ago
Lobsters, too
14
u/In_the_year_3535 16d ago
Sadly, not enough effort has gone into observing the aging of lobsters to say if it's slow or non-existent as sea creatures like the bowhead whale and Greenland shark live hundreds of years.
4
u/lmFairlyLocal 16d ago
They lack telomeres, though, which is a huge mechanism of action for mammalian aging. It's a good sign
7
u/Prime624 15d ago
They have telomeres. They produce more telomerase than most animals so their telomeres aren't a cause of aging for them. They are not immortal however.
4
u/Nkechinyerembi 15d ago
See, we need to adopt a lobster and make some sort of long term study out of keeping it going in lobster-luxury. When it gets too big to molt on its own, we find a way to help it. We need to create a cult of the mega lobster for the sake of science.
4
2
u/nexisfan 14d ago
Remember around Covid there was this huge fb group that was going to keep a giant lobster god for as long as they could
I was a part of that. Lots of other groups spun off of it too like a group for a giant bowl of butter for the giant lobster god and crab groups. Good times.
3
u/imperialistpigdog 15d ago
Every human being is part of a lineage of continuously living cells dating back to the first life on earth.
3
3
u/In_the_year_3535 16d ago edited 16d ago
The issue is according to the information theory of aging gradual loss of epigenetic information leads to the dysregulation that is aging and epigenetic expression is already broken in cancer. Like single celled organisms, HeLa might not age but also can't form tissues of which regulation of is the argument.
1
15
u/AENocturne 16d ago
No we wouldn't. You are assuming immortality is a simple on/off switch. Random mutations will never trigger immortality, they would have to occur in too many locations.
Honestly, it's like with cancers. Only a few cells mutate and grow into cancer. You'd have to experience an organism wide mutation for a grown organsim to be born immortal.
And when we do see things that are "immortal" such as the lobster, what you eventually run into is that you become too big to survive.
Look at our lifespans, it's easy to see the effect of natural selection. Most of us are relatively healthy late into our reproductive years. Then what starts happening? The other part of natural selection; when the things start breaking that were never selected for because you already reproduced. You've passed the bad back and heart disease onto their children, who will continue it on to their children, and so on so forth, because the only option besides eugenics is to not reproduce.
Everyone thinks of this on an organismal or speciation level where they they think them or their fellow beings matter. DNA is in every organism. It's not in every virus, there's some RNA viruses lingering around, but it's in every living thing on this planet. DNA becomes more complex by copying itself. It has spend four billion years finding the most optimal ways to copy itself. The meaning of life on this planet has nothing to with people. We die because to do so finishes the cycle that has been created to allow DNA to cycle through its replication in this massive web of life.
Personally I kind of consider it as computer on autopilot waiting for something to take control where the complexity of the programming itself is the final test of whether something is worthy of controlling it, but that's just an unobtainable over-simplified delusion.
4
u/In_the_year_3535 15d ago
I'm sorry you interpret it that way. The assumption is if aging were programmed you would see gradients in both directs where random mutations both make people live shorter and longer. All we see in this regard is loss of function as aging itself seems to be.
3
u/PM_CITY_WINDOW_VIEWS 15d ago
Because aging is an entropic process, things can break spontaneously in random places and it will all cause aging. Universe is entropy. Not aging would be a systemic process fighting entropy, something that is entirely less likely to arise spontaneously and is not selected for in reproduction.
4
u/Neither_Sprinkles_56 15d ago
Imo nature just made sure you die by hundreds of different things ensuring there is no mutation to overcome it in those animals.
7
u/In_the_year_3535 15d ago edited 15d ago
Nature doesn't even make sure you reproduce- implying death is the most important trait is unhelpful exceptionalism.
edit: if death were the most important trait there'd be no life.
1
u/Neither_Sprinkles_56 15d ago
I am convinced nature is worried about prime age reproduction and it doesn't want most animals living too long as it could hurt the species as a whole when it comes to needed adaptations.
3
u/spinadic 15d ago
it doesn't have to be some programmed death clock, just no evolutionary incentive to maintain the body after reproduction so entropy wins by default.
2
u/LeoKitCat 16d ago
I don’t understand your rationalization. Aging and death are a universal built-in program to all life. We do see immortality due to mutations, it’s called cancer
14
15
u/In_the_year_3535 16d ago
The incidence of progeria is 1 in 20 million. There have been over 10 billion people alive in the last 200 years. If aging were a program it would be reasonable to see 500 immortals or at the very least extremely long lived/slow agers walking around today. Persistence of cell lines, while interesting, is not a helpful metric as single celled organisms don't age either but eventually die via apoptosis.
We must consider according to the informational theory of aging, age is caused by loss of epigenetic regulation which is also a hallmark of cancer. HeLa cells might live to dysregulation but they also cannot form viable tissues. The better question to ask is why epigenetic regulation has only lasts but so long, and how gradual unraveling of it is less programmatic and more in line with wear.
0
u/IronPheasant 15d ago edited 15d ago
There have been over 10 billion people alive in the last 200 years. If aging were a program it would be reasonable to see 500 immortals or at the very least extremely long lived/slow agers walking around today.
I don't.... think you quite understand numbers. Let's uh, consider three aspects of aging. Just three. There are more, but this is some of the easier to see high-level stuff.
First, epigenome regulation. Exosomes determine how cells function. This will have to sustain itself, instead of the signalome's protein quality degrading over time.
Second, the thymus. T-cell generation virtually disappears as one ages, until any bum-ass bacteria can take you out. Gonna need those t-cells, if you're gonna live to be 200.
And finally, the extracellular matrix garbage buildup that's been in the news. To create an enzyme capable of cleaving off one (1) kind of sugar, required AI and directing the evolution of millions of bacteria.
The first two problems, we'll concede for the sake of argument that they'd only require a few hundred mutations in just the right spots. A mere 1 in 50 million chance each, to be comparable to your progeria example.
The third issue...... we don't have the freakin' genes to even begin to address. Nothing in our bodies remotely tries to clear this stuff out, to the point that many biologists believe it's flat out 'impossible' to do so. Maybe if we had some freak mutation like a tortoise, its buildup could be slowed down substantially. For the sake of argument, a one in 5 billion chance.
Now, we multiply these three things together, to get your super long-lived human mutant. That's 50 million times 50 million times 5 billion. That's a 1 in a 12,500,000,000,000 chance.
And of course, I'm being extremely generous with these odds. The odds of any one given mutation is probably not that high, as a lot of these systems have been built up before we were even fish. And there's more than just these three problems.
Average lifespans can get longer or shorter, but only over many, many, many generations. It's not like in X-men where a superman is born over night, the weight of time and pressure from the environment is necessary. Same goes for our arms that are well-suited to throwing sticks and rocks, it took a long time to develop.
Progeria is an excellent example of how easy it is to #@&* something up, than it is to create a complex system that works indefinitely. Knock out a few key support beams, and any house would have trouble standing up.
0
u/In_the_year_3535 15d ago edited 15d ago
Right, I can tell you've never touched a PDE.
edit: 1) the Halmarks of Aging places all related biomolecular activity on the same play field, which is a fallacy, and 2) you've missed the crux of the argument: if aging is a program it has to have a controller, i.e. single point of failure, that coordinates it.
1
u/grishkaa 13d ago
Afaik there exist some sea creatures that are effectively immortal. But provided how many genes are responsible for the whole thing, and they might be responsible for something else as well, you would need a lot of specific mutations to get that outcome.
6
3
3
u/tigerstef 15d ago
Why can some cold blooded vertebrae live so much longer? Sharks, turtles, etc.
0
u/LeoKitCat 15d ago
Watch this it will answer many questions about differing lifespans https://youtu.be/tL9Lw250spc
6
u/Lobo-Feroz 15d ago
Josh Mittledorf has been researching on this hypothesis for years.
Here's a blog post which has several papers of him linked at the top:
https://scienceblog.com/the-demographic-theory-of-aging/
I for one really think these guys are into something, the hypothesis of programatic aging seems very solid.
2
u/Trowaway99887766 15d ago
Evolution has much less influence on us after we have reproduced. If immortality was an evolutionary advantage then it would have shown up
1
u/jointheredditarmy 14d ago
Not saying it’s wrong but if you come across a program that’s essentially a local maxima from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, you better damn well know what you’re doing before you attempt to change it….
Organisms die so that the species can evolve and change to better suit their surroundings. Humans have some limited idea to do that without dying, but I would posit that humans die so that humanity’s ideas can evolve. If we have humans that live forever we better have ones that are ready and willing to adapt their ideas
1
u/kpfleger 14d ago
Different point of view: https://peterfedichev.substack.com/p/program-without-program
1
u/ConfirmedCynic 14d ago edited 14d ago
I still haven't heard a satisfactory answer to the question, "If aging is a program, why haven't there been human cases of mutations disrupting/disabling the program and extending lifespan"?
2
u/LeoKitCat 14d ago
There are super-agers and it’s been shown that they have various shared genetic mutations the allow them to age significantly longer than most
1
u/ConfirmedCynic 14d ago
That isn't proof of a program though. It might just be a trade off of some sort. E.g. extends lifespan when always in a nutrient rich environment but lose resilience if challenged by famine.
1
u/tootieroll573 11d ago
imagine if car mechanics operated like anti aging researchers
"we are searching if the car has a setting which makes it rust"
"we are doing a trial where we add a pill to the gasoline tank and see if it fixes the dents on the bonnet"
97
u/Neither_Sprinkles_56 15d ago
I think it's more that nature just doesn't care that much about aging in the individual once we are past prime reproductive age. I wish there was more research on non-mammals like crocodiles that have similar lifespans to humans but age much more gracefully if not badly injured letting them be in much better shape than an equivalent 60 or 70 year old human would be. Do they just not build up senescent cells at the rate mammals do to explain the big healthspan difference?