> If humans didn't age, weaken and die, would you vote to introduce it?
No. My advocacy of aging is based on the fact that it was a balance achieved by evolution. Every piece of evidence we have about aging points to it being a well-balanced and curated process of either evolution or design, whichever you prefer.
There are plants on this planet that live thousands of years. Animals that live hundreds. We are not among them. If you think that's a result of bad luck or some such thing, then I'm sorry, you need to go read a bit about evolutionary biology.
Longevity is a trait, crafted by an evolutionary path and the environment. Our life-spans are not an accident. They are not random. They are optimal.
They might change over time. Get shorter. Get longer. Whatever the optimal solution, I'm for it. However, I'm definitely against treating various parts of our nature as if it is some sort of a disease.
Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.
Evolution doesn't have a purpose. It's just stuff that happened to work out. The fact that really long lived humans don't exist now doesn't mean they shouldn't, it just means they didn't happen to exist in the past and show a particular advantage then that was bigger than the advantages other groups had. It doesn't mean they ever existed, so they may be far MORE optimal.
Evolution trends towards local fitness maximums for given solutions when there is competition for scarce resources. It doesn't find global solutions necessarily, nor does it even get to local maximumums even.
> Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.
There is a difference between a malfunction and a trait. A malfunction happens to some people, but always a minority. All of the things you mention are malfunctions.
Aging happens to all of us. It is a trait. At this point, I'm sounding like a broken record, but there is a mountain of evidence that suggests our lifespan is highly selected for by evolution. Please look up the Red Queen.
Yes, these are all age related. And they're all things we leave in. We also prevent tooth decay, which killed a large group of them. Etc.
I DO judge a book by the blurb the writer puts on the cover, yes. If they want to call out a controversial theory (by their own words), I'll wait until real scientists who are in that area look at the idea, not a pop-sci treatment of an idea that isn't actually being tested, especially a book advocating the death of billions.
What if the human brain is nothing more than evolution's play for an immortal creature? Create an animal with the capacity to make itself immortal, churn through them until one of them does. Seed the universe with them. Win.
> What if the human brain is nothing more than evolution's play for an immortal creature?
This makes no sense. There is no intelligence behind evolution. It simply selects for the most optimal outcome. It can't plan for anything. To say that we were imbued with intelligence to achieve some future goal makes no sense. Intelligence was selected for immediately apparent benefits.
If you need to believe in some grand design and intelligence, G-d is your answer. Evolution is not.
As I already said, there are animals and plants that are for all intents and purposes without any upper limit on their lifespan. We are not them. There is a reason for that.
This is not a reasonable conclusion, and is anthropomorphism as well.
Evolution is the process of changing traits by the process of slightly or greatly more fit creatures for a certain environment happening to survive and breed while less fit creatures did not.
There is no reason behind the way anything is, other than it happened to survive better than the alternatives which tried in the circumstances they were tried in. Things are not optimal at all.
And if death were inevitable but we got to pick the average live expectancy, what would you vote for? 80 years? 100? Perhaps go for a more natural 60-but-with-high-infant-mortality thing? Or perhaps if we push it out to 200 years, that would be more fun. Or 2000 years.
Ideally, when you want to. If we could actually live "age" 20 indefinitely, we wouldn't be decrepid and weak and tired all the time. We could work to pay our way. We could collectively solve big problems like food and space in innovative ways.
