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Scientists Have Mathematical Proof That It's Impossible To Stop Aging (sciencealert.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Alert: Mathematically speaking, multicellular organisms like us will always have to deal with a cellular competition where only one side will win. And ultimately, that means our vitality will always come out as the loser. We have a pair of researchers from the University of Arizona to blame for this depressing conclusion, who crunched the numbers on a hypothesis involving the weeding out of unfit cells and found it amounted to a catch-22 situation. Aging -- and all of the biological changes that come with it -- is more or less the result of cells slowing down and losing their functions. But what if there was a way to encourage the more active cells to stick around at the expense of their sluggish siblings? Surely if we knocked off those old cells we could keep making pigments and collagen a little longer. Researchers have pinned hopes on reversing the inevitable decay of biochemistry by repairing DNA or extending the shrinking bits of chromosome called telomeres, for example. While it's good in theory, there is a catch. Another feature of aging is a number of cells start to populate like there's no tomorrow, reproducing in uncontrolled ways that look too close to cancer for comfort. According to the researchers, this means we're damned either way.
The way we grow old poses something of a mystery. If replicating biology is good enough to continue for generations, why do our own cells wind down after just a few decades? A simple answer is evolution isn't strong enough to weed out genes that only cause us grief after we've popped out a few offspring. But this model of aging adds a new element to the existing hypothesis -- even if evolution did select for eternal youth, competition inside our own bodies would see us to an inevitable grave. In other words, since multicellular organisms are the cumulative effect of bunches of cooperating cells, we logically can't have it both ways -- if you clear the way for 'younger' cells to keep your skin baby-smooth, you're just asking for the big C. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The way we grow old poses something of a mystery. If replicating biology is good enough to continue for generations, why do our own cells wind down after just a few decades? A simple answer is evolution isn't strong enough to weed out genes that only cause us grief after we've popped out a few offspring. But this model of aging adds a new element to the existing hypothesis -- even if evolution did select for eternal youth, competition inside our own bodies would see us to an inevitable grave. In other words, since multicellular organisms are the cumulative effect of bunches of cooperating cells, we logically can't have it both ways -- if you clear the way for 'younger' cells to keep your skin baby-smooth, you're just asking for the big C. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Making an absolute claim like this is always a great way to make yourself look stupid. I remember at university chips were currently being fabricated using a 24micron process and a lecturer claimed it would be impossible to go below 8microns (I may be getting the numbers wrong here) because it was below the physical wavelength of light. Nearly two decades later, here we are at 10nm with further process shrinkages planned.
You could have claimed it was mathematically impossible to reduce the fabrication process further due to the wavelength of light, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways around problems. To claim something is impossible simply because you don't know the solution is a great way to make yourself look stupid in the future.
They've shown mathematical proof that one particular concept for defeating the symptoms of aging won't work.
Obviously, no matter what you do eventually entropy wins... but there's no law of physics of which I'm aware that shows you can't re-engineer biology from scratch to make it much more entropy-resistant.
It's just really, really, really difficult. However, we already have examples of organisms that are highly cancer resistant, and others that live extremely long lives compared to ours, so we know even without a fundamental re-engineering there's a lot of room for improvement just copying what already exists in nature.
I remember for years the phrase was "mathematically a bumblebee can't fly".
Well, that myth that theoretically a bumble bee can't fly is mostly a myth, you know.
Here's a longer explanation of where the myth comes from: http://www.abc.net.au/science/...
Sure, it sounds like it, because they oversimplified the problem. One issue with engineering education is that in order to make problems solvable, they teach you to make a lot of assumptions to simplify the problem. It's a useful tool for making control systems on a small scale, but for more complex systems like biology(even single celled organisms), politics, economics, weather, climate, psychology, it doesn't work. I think this disconnect leads to a lot of arrogance(I myself had to learn the hard way) about what we have the ability to control or even predict. I think this arrogance, the over simplification of complexity, is largely why engineers tend to be the most likely candidates for terrorism. They have immense power to understand and control simply systems, so why not big complex systems too? https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Sort of. The article starts by talking about terrorists, but when they get into talking about engineers specifically they shift to talking about "leaders of extreme right-wing groups".
In other words, that article is political propaganda that we've become accustomed to seeing from the Washington post or in Slashdot terms: "nothing to see here,move along."