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

http://www.slate.com/id/2299256/

by jessekeys • 15 years ago

80 85 15 years ago

Ruudjah• 15 years ago

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 (<3000 years) claiming to be aged over 120 years are either questionable or not verified.

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.

chc2• 15 years ago

Jeanne Calment, mentioned in the OP, lived to be 122. But yes, I think most people in the field agree that 120 is roughly our shelf life.

ern• 15 years ago

Could there be some deeply ingrained idea, possibly derived from Genesis, that leads to dimished care for people as they approach 120, and hence increases mortality? I doubt it, but I wonder if this possibility has been explored.

jacques_chester6• 15 years ago

In any book composed of random fantasy elements, written by hundreds of authors, it is pretty much inevitable that some bits will, merely by chance, be correct.

Genesis is the same book that puzzlingly fails to mention the big bang, for example.

glimcat5• 15 years ago

In the beginning, there was light.

On second thought, do we have to count "the beginning" as the moment of the singularity or as the time when the universe became transparent to photons? Gonna end up with a holy war over that one.

Wait, it's all good. You start out with a dark and formless void, then you get your "fiat lux" afterwards. The Bible was right again!

stan_rogers• 15 years ago

Well (he said somewhat flippantly), in a manner of speaking it does, if one can consider the condensation first of energy (fiat lux) then matter (the separation of the waters) out of chaos to be a pretty decent neolithic understanding of the process. (Not a believer in any sense -- I've actually used this point against 6-day creationists, realising that I was wielding a sort of double-edged sword.)

ciupicri• 15 years ago

Speaking of the Bible, Adam lived 930 years ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam ) and if I remember correctly Eve also lived nine hundred years.

demallien• 15 years ago

Pfft. Martin Silenus does better than that in Hyperion. Of course, the age of fictional characters doesn't really have much impact on the debate about the maximum possible age of a human being, does it now...

shawndumas4• 15 years ago

Not that it matters but... If you take it in context the 120 years are referring to when the flood was scheduled to occur, not the upper bounds on human life. (See Calvin)

zavulon• 15 years ago

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!

jaredmck• 15 years ago

Now translate this directly from the original source.

glimcat5• 15 years ago

Because when you mix a lot of random variables together, the variance tends to decrease.

lkozma• 15 years ago

Exactly, and the variance of the maximum will decrease even faster than the variance of the mean.

sebkomianos• 15 years ago

This is very interesting, can you point me/us to any explanations about it?

shabble• 15 years ago

I'd guess at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem - Combined distributions tend towards Gaussian (bell-curve)

robryan• 15 years ago

Apart from a few fringe people there doesn't seem to be a real great push towards increasing longevity. Average lifespan through better treating illness yes but not much to help those that have managed to dodge everything and make it to 115.

From the little I have read on the subject it does seem like this is one area where we have a long way to go to really make progress as we don't really understand all the variables yet.

AngryParsley2• 15 years ago

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.

Retric3• 15 years ago

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.

wazoox3• 15 years ago

> 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.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

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 understand yet, though I doubt that alone would fix the general problem.

More importantly, we need people to care, and for some insane reason people don't. How do we manage to not treat this as pretty much the most important unsolved problem in humanity? (Mostly, I suspect, due to a combination of perceived futility and ingrained cultural problems.)

jinushaun• 15 years ago

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 are a lot of unforeseen implications to a world where everyone lives past 150.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

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?

scotty793• 15 years ago

I have a riddle for you that I came up with few years ago:

Given as little as you need to make this problem solvable and nontrivial calculate how often (on average) oldest human in the world dies.

glimcat5• 15 years ago

Either once or about six times a year (guestimating from Google) depending on how you want to interpret that.

It depends on whether you want the oldest person as an individual or as a class. Good riddles shouldn't be forked.

scotty793• 15 years ago

Maybe I was too lax in my description.

This is a math task. Given whatever you need (size of human population, probability of death at any age and similar statistical data) and assuming whatever you need (population distribution is such that it does not change over time or sth. like that) calculate average time between deaths of oldest individual in the world.

In other words instead of:

<google_search> therefore oldest man dies every 6 years.

I want:

<given_this_data_and_assumptions> -> <calculation_and_reasoning> -> oldest man dies every 6 years.

simonsarris• 15 years ago

Well, taking it as a riddle, once.

The very first human is the oldest human and they died once.

scotty793• 15 years ago

Where's the calculation? Also this is this would be trivial.

Besides, when human dies he's no longer old. He's dead. His corps might be oldest corpse but he's no longer oldest human.

Udo2• 15 years ago

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 messing with the parameters of life in a profound way. The main problem here is that the human body, like all higher life forms on this planet, is designed to be a disposable object from the ground up. 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.

Contrary to disease, aging isn't one factor going "wrong". It's a million little modules coming to the inevitable end of their cheaply designed life. Of course, we'll tackle this eventually - we have to if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect - but it's going to be slow, slow progress.

Intuitively, I'd say we might have some very limited success in scaling up that X axis within the next 20 years, but it'll be a long time before we actually solve this issue. Which is sad, because I wanted to be around for much longer and now I most likely won't get to do that. Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.

w1ntermute2• 15 years ago

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).

broot• 15 years ago

But W1ntermute, wont William Gibson be mad that you're cheating on Neuromancer with Ghost in the Shell?

wazoox3• 15 years ago

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 fiction, similar with faster-than-light travel.

sixtofour5• 15 years ago

I know little about either side of the argument, but it seems to me that we'd have more chance of success (however small) extending the life of a complex body that supports a mysteriously complex brain and intellect, than to ever hope that we can extract consciousness at all, much less have it operate anywhere near its current level without its supporting body.

How much consciousness is in the physical body, and not just the brain but the rest of the body? Do we really know?

iwwr2• 15 years ago

On the other hand, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.

Only from the Malthusians.

sixtofour5• 15 years ago

What do we do with people who live to extreme age, but do not operate at the speed of the current economy? How do we keep them occupied? How do they make a living? How do we use what they can contribute? Are we as a culture, today or on the next two generations, ready to deal with those issues?

ez773• 15 years ago

if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect

I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal or not does not tackle any of classical intellectual conundrums.

Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.

I'm not sure about life extension, but effectively ending retirement would be met with hostility! But then again, we're getting both things (end of retirement/pensions and the resulting unrest) without indefinite life extension.

[1] http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

[2] http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

JohnLBevan2• 15 years ago

With regards to the retirement problem, that's only an issue because people are still thinking like mortals. Were we immortal I'd expect gap years to replace retirement. Many people would choose to live their lives in cycles, retraining every 50 years for a new job / change of scene, getting to a proficient level, then taking a break for a few years until ready (or out of funds) to retrain & start anew. Once they'd done a few cycles people would likely begin to specialise, picking up stuff they'd touched on in the past & taking it to the next level / mixing it with their other skills. The issues then arising are the capacity of the mind (mind rather than human brain since who knows what form it will have taken by this point). I've assumed that with immortality we maintain physical (if still relevant) and mental fitness, as without those, extending life becomes torturous and pointless, causing people not only to not enjoy their lives, but also to become long suffering burdens on their families, just for the sake of a larger number of sun circuits.

Udo2• 15 years ago

> Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana?

Not at all. I'm talking about biological reality. Right now we're not really a part of nature anymore but we're not yet independently functioning entities either. By developing intellect and the deeper consciousness that goes with it, we stopped being a mere collection of genes. In fact, in quite a few respects our genes and our minds have opposing interests now. In order to grow and embrace the aspect that we have minds, we need to totally master the biological substrate that gave birth to us or maybe we even move completely beyond it. In practice, it's probably going to be a combination of the two.

When I say we're hanging in a weird half-state between nature and intellect I'm referring to this kind of existential identity crisis. A lot of people do believe we're first and foremost genomes walking around. A lot of people do believe that this discourse is irrelevant because they have religious views that already have a monopoly on the meaning of life. But at the same time, there are some people who would like to keep moving forward towards a far horizon that we can already glimpse. In fact, for some of us it is an ethical imperative.

In the end, it simply boils down to the value that we assign to a mind, to a consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call the complete essence of a human being. Tell me how valuable a human mind is to you and I can predict your stance on the future development of mankind.

api2• 15 years ago

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 superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem. This characterization also lacks respect for the difficulty of many-dimensional optimization problems on non-fixed fitness landscapes, which is what evolution has to deal with. (Mathematically, the problem tackled by natural evolution is effectively infinite-dimensional. By comparison, the problems tackled by human engineers are toy problems.)

It would be more accurate to say that evolution, when faced with a problem, finds a working solution. There is no way to know how close or how far that working solution is from a theoretical optimum, since the theoretical optimum is non-computable. (If it were straightforwardly computable, evolution would find a gradient to ascend and discover it rapidly.)

"Life doesn't work perfectly. It just works."

That being said, it is likely that our mortality represents a hard compromise between the survival value of longevity, adaptations to prevent cancer (many of which have aging side effects, like telomeres), and the species-scale (or selfish-gene-scale) survival value of getting oldsters out of the way to make room for the next generation.

The fact that humans can live substantially longer than is merely necessary to reproduce is due to the fact that we're a K-selected species rather than an R-selected species. (Cicadas, for example, are an R-selected species. Dolphins, Elephants, and Humans are K-selected.)

valisystem• 15 years ago

I have no authority on the subject, but, the fact that we cannot prove nor properly evaluate solutions that emerge from evolution does not change the fact that the first solution that fits is the one that will be kept. Intuitive reasoning that not work on such a subject, but still, I have hard time to accept that it is the best. The only proper qualifier, as you state, is that it is the existing one.

The same way I am not comfortable with using dynamic verbs when describing evolution. Evolution does not find a solution. It's just that a solution that fits emerges. After producing many dysfunctional living individuals. It's still the only way life can evolve by itself, and I wouldn't dare to say if it is a laborious or great way to sustain ifself.

AngryParsley2• 15 years ago

There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem.

There's plenty of evidence that evolution is extremely inefficient. Due to its very nature it can't look forward, it can only hill-climb. Since evolution can't re-architect things, it gets stuck in local maxima all the time.

We can be reasonably sure of evolution's inefficiencies after looking at some some examples. Problems like the laryngeal nerve and backwards vertebrate retina are commonly brought up in these sorts of debates, but they forget that evolution doesn't even look at the vast majority of solution-space. It limits itself to squishy things in the discipline of biology. For example, neurons run at 10-200Hz and conduct signals at 0.000001c. Other substrates like silicon and diamond are much faster.

A human visual cortex has billions of neurons doing complicated procedures (edge-detection, FFTs, motion-detection, etc). But only a tiny fraction of humans can multiply two 4-digit numbers without the aid of pen and paper. Had the human brain been designed by a human, every programmer in the world would scream, "Why didn't you give us an API you idiot?!"

Of course, we'd also complain about the brain's lack of 4G, since evolution never invented a radio.

derleth• 15 years ago

First, for those unaware:

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/the-long...

That is the kind of thing we mean when we say evolution doesn't find the best solutions all the time. The horrible job evolution did with the human eye is another example.

Now:

> There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better

I think the point is that it's difficult to imagine anything doing worse.

zargon• 15 years ago

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.

This is a great synopsis of the situation. There is little research going into actually extending the human lifespan. It's fascinating to hear people like Aubrey de Grey describe some of that research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).

rweba• 15 years ago

Here is one problem with life extension that I haven't seen mentioned - can we just assume that people who grew up in vastly different time periods will just be be able to coexist comfortably?

To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters.

Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly.

So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past.

Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural.

Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people.

Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" has some good exploration of the nature of "Future Shock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War

Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.

Hyena• 15 years ago

The article addresses this at the end: Kurzweil, et al are banking on dramatic changes in medicine on the level of the introduction of antibiotics. Right now we're possibly at the farthest end of the antibiotics-and-surgery technology suite. Much longer life expectancies or actuarial escape velocity will need to come from a disruptive medical technology.

suprgeek2• 15 years ago

I am unable to find a citation for this but I recall having read that Scientists had started to notice a pattern - The life span of a mammal is typically a function of the age of maturity. The function was a factor of 6. In humans age of maturity is approximately 20. So it is believed that the maximum lifespan is about 20*6 =120 years for humans.

smiley325• 15 years ago

This paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/05315565939... seems to contradict that claim of a simple ratio between life variables.

Abstract:

A regression analysis was made of age at first reproduction in female mammals, as a function of body weight, using the data of Wootton. Data on maximal life span, also expressed as a function of body weight, were used to calculate “adult” life span, wherever possible, by subtracting the cognate value for age at first reproduction. Then a regression analysis of adult life span as a function of age at first reproduction was made. In both cases global regression lines (i.e., for whole data sets) were computed by standard least squares and by a robust method, as well as local regression lines for subgroups classified by taxonomic and ecological criteria. The slopes of the various regression lines were found to vary widely as a function of the method of classification. This result argues against the notion that the ratio of life history variables is a constant, or that one life history variable is likely to be a simple function of another. The results for bats are anomalous, in that age at first reproduction appears to be independent of body weight (over about two orders of magnitude). It is concluded that a full understanding of life history variables, such as maximal life span and age at maturity, is likely to depend on combined physiological, ecological, and evolutionary insights. Keywords: maximal life span; age at maturity; regression analysis; mammals

suprgeek2• 15 years ago

Thank you for the link - this is good to know.

paganel• 15 years ago

I was just reading this morning an archaeological report about a 14th century cemetery dug up somewhere in the Balkan area. Around 40% of the skeletons belonged to children aged 0 to 7, while out of the rest no skeleton was found having belonged to a person older than 60. In the following 2 centuries the situation got slightly better, as the percentage of children 0-7 decreased to ~30%, and they were able to find a few skeletons that had lived beyond 60.

The point I'm trying to make is that we tend to very easily forget that we've come a really long way, but these things take time and they don't involve only science (the fact that the area I was studying was ravaged by the Ottoman expansion definitely had an impact on how long the people in the Balkans lived, as do today's not so healthy diets for most of the Western-populations). This is why I think that making bold and unsubstantiated predictions such as "in 20 years' time we will have reached indefinite lifespans" doesn't really get us anywhere, it only helps confusing us.

shawndumas4• 15 years ago

Interesting quote: [S]upercentenarians owe their longevity more to freakish genes than perfect health; the 122-year-old Calment smoked cigarettes for 96 years [...]

mdonahoe2• 15 years ago

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

shawndumas4• 15 years ago

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

bradshaw1965• 15 years ago

The most important thing to focus on is not life extension, but extending healthy vitality longer or compressed morbidity. Life extension is way too much of a tax on humanity if we can't solve the problem of frailty in the extreme old.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

The submitted article reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a child, "Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garrett, in the anthology Men and Machines edited by Robert Silverberg.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3PSTqQrrzjEC&pg=PA141&#...

The premise of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it. The protagonist (and first-person narrator) of the story is an assassin whose job is to murder the immortal oligarchs who rule a future United States--it is pretty apparent that the target of his assassination plot is J. Edgar Hoover in a far-off future. That has always caused me to pause and think about whether I would really like society to discover an effective longevity treatment. Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the treatment?

bumbledraven• 15 years ago

Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the [life extension] treatment?

Magic 8-ball says: "it is likely". Typically, new technologies are at first available only to the rich and powerful, but eventually they become cheaper and more widely available. Consider cell phones, televisions, and the internet. Today, the poorest person with an internet connection has access to information on a scale which far surpasses anything available to even the kings of old.

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

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