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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.
This just kind of sounds to me like a PID controller tuned for the short term that goes out of control in the long term. Probably just falsely applying what I know to something completely unrelated...
Otherwise, you'd end up with a perpetual system where people who are slightly older are always in positions of authority. This never gives the new generation an opportunity to grow up. Sort of like now, where boomers didn't retire to make space for new workers.
Ok. I'm a mathematician, so I think I have some degree of expertise relevant to comment when someone says that they have a mathematical proof of something. You cannot give a mathematical proof of something in the physical world. At most, you can give a mathematical proof that something is true in some model of the physical world. Your model may or may not match expectations. This occurs all the time; there are all sorts of proofs of security in cryptography (generally assuming certain computational complexity assumptions) and yet the crypto systems are frequently broken by using clever side-channel attacks or other clever tricks that couldn't be done in the context of the model of computation being used. In this case the fact that some other species can live much longer than humans is by itself a pretty big sign that the model is by far from a perfect one. And from glancing at the article in question, it looks like the scientists actually didn't claim nearly as big a deal as the summary suggests.
So it's either aging or cancer? I don't buy it. Someone in their teens isn't aging (in way we're all talking about it), quite the opposite. But neither is their rapid renewal of useful stuff like cartilage, collagen, etc., blowing up as cancer for all of them. This mathematical proof that you can't have it both ways is based on a premise of there only being two ways. Something as complicated as a mammal body never operates in a one-way-or-another set of only two possibilities. We're the sum of many, many processes. There's room to tweak the nature and damage of aging skin, joints, brains, and hearts and thus mitigate some of the hardships of aging without assuming that it's only successful if we become beautiful young immortals.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I remember for years the phrase was "mathematically a bumblebee can't fly". I hardly think we know all the nuances of cellular mechanics yet.
I always liked this bit of dialogue. It'd be more scientifically accurate if Batty had suggested telomerase and Tyrell had warned it would cause cancer. Or if Batty suggested stem cells and Tyrell mentioned teratomas. Still you can sort of live with that. What was interesting was that you get the impression that the four year lifespan isn't artificial crippling as is suggested earlier but it was the best Tyrell Corp could do. Or maybe Tyrell was bullshitting. Blade Runner being Blade Runner, either interpretation is possible.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
Roy: Had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What..? What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you...
Roy: I want more life, fucker (father).
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries a mutation and you've got a virus again. But this - all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal son. You're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time!
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for. [kisses Tyrell and kills him]
Roy: [to J. F. Sebastian] Sorry, Sebastian. [Sebastian panics] Come. Come.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
I guess immortal jellyfish will need to start dying off now, to satisfy this mathematician's proof.
Well I guess nature has already proven them wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
TLDR:
Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish, is a species of small, biologically immortal jellyfish found in the Mediterranean Sea and in the waters of Japan...
It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation, which alters the differentiated state of the cells and transforms them into new types of cells.
That's the key word "hypothesis".
The mechanisms of aging are not understood and therefore, anything they may have discovered is most likely horseshit.
The only thing I see that's of any interest in the study is possible mathematical methods for simulations.
The immortal jellyfish begs to differ.
It's not really new this, what would be more helpful is if we could calculate an upper bound on a human lifespan based on the network size, damage/repair rates or what have you. Of course, being able to extend human life (if it's resource intensive), will lead to the mother of all inequality blow outs. At any rate replication is the only path to significant time span existence, and digital looks like the only way to do that with some preservation of an "I". It's time to relinquish your flesh!
Um, no offense, but University of Arizona? The only things they are good at is basketball and tapping beer kegs.
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.
Because theoretical physicists say they have mathematical proof you can, in fact, stop aging
That's a mathematical argument. Those always take the form of a proof; otherwise they're a priori bunk.
The next step is review, and seeing if papers that cite this one appear. If review finds the proof broken, or the proof is such that it leads nowhere (i.e. there's no citations), then we can say that the argument is bunk. Until then nothing has been "proven".
On a lot of days, I am thankful that life doesn't last forever because it means that dealing with the collective madness of humanity is temporary. Who would want to live forever with that? I mean if you look at life objectively, what is the primary source of psychological suffering for you? I guarantee it's either your own actions or the actions of other human beings. Once you correct your actions, you're left with the others you can't control. We are greedy, manipulative and frequently sadistic because we only care about our own self interest. Nature is not perfect but far less negative than humanity. On occasion, with nature there are some unpleasant things like colds, winter weather, critters eating into your dwelling but nature, even a natural disaster every now and then is by far the minority of annoyances of life. A rainy day is nothing compared to a selfish, malevolent human being.
This reminds me of the song Eclipse by Pink Floyd:
All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy,
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
We'll make great pets
Proving that the current favorite method for trying to stop ageing is infeasible, is not the same as saying stopping aging is impossible. Human flight was impossible Wright up until the moment it was not (phun intended).
we'll use it in a few years when the exact opposite article (aging might be stopped) is released.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
This is why we don't invite mathematicians to parties.
These guys have absolutely no clue what the hell they're on about. They start out grossly misunderstanding how aging works and what its role in biology is, then go on to grossly misunderstand how cancer is generated. Then they grossly misunderstand how replication works, followed by grossly misunderstanding evolution (strong enough? Who at a university+ level would say something like that?).
Any freshman biologist can answer all these questions easily.
Aging is the result of a) your body adapting to its current needs (growing, reproduction etc) and b) your genetic material accumulating errors from the replication used to build new cells. This is not a theory, this is not "controversial", this has been the settled conclusion for a long time. If the mathematicians at Arizona can't pick up a textbook...
The carcinogenesis process is also well understood (though there are many details, such as the newfound roles of both micro- and lnc- RNA, that are still a mystery).
There are X number of established ways, all involving knocking out tumor-preventing pathways or hyper-activating growth pathways. It is not a result of aging, but of the previously mentioned genetic errors that come with replication + plus external factors that may play some role (infection with HR-HPV is considered a requirement for cervical cancer, and plays a major role in some other cancers including penile, vulvar, anal, head, and neck). If it were a result of aging, or if cells got "hyper-competitive" later down the road, we wouldn't see kids with leukemia, nor teenagers with melanoma (from tanning all day long, something that causes massive buildup of genetic errors in the skin cells).
Our cells never actually wind down. They do the best they can with the resources they are given. As our machinery accrues more and more faults over the years, the functionality deteriorates. Just like an 8 year old computer will have some problems and some 'ticks', so too will cells based on old DNA. But there is no in-built wind-down parameter, there is no "give-up and die" gene.
At most we have something called telomeres attached to our chromosomes that tells us how many times the chromosome has been replicated, giving an indicator of how "reliable" the chromosome DNA is. Extending the telomeres leads them to be used for longer. This allows more errors to accrue in the chromosome, which increases the risk of a cancer blocking pathway on the chromosome to be knocked out. Hence, if you want to live forever, you have to both extend the telomere as well as prevent replication errors.
And to answer the final (ridiculous) assertion -
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. /quote
There is only "competition" inside the body when something has already gone horribly wrong. There are more than 10 "anti-compete clause" pathways active in each cell. If a cell "competes", it will receive an apoptosis signal to commit suicide, and it will be destroyed by the body's own immune system. It is only when these anti-compete pathways have been destroyed already that any classic evolution-based competition can occur.
In short, these guys really should have asked a biologist before spouting nonsense.
Mathematical proof you can't stop aging. Can I post it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences?
It would be a lot more useful if you could keep your brain.
https://www.facebook.com/help/...
Take off every 'sig' !!
I had some discussion points I was going to post (including this reference), and then I came across this wiki entry.
Can anyone confirm or deny if this "Paul Nelson" is the same "young earth creationist" described in the above wiki entry or is he an actual scientist with a very unfortunate name?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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/...
So... are we ignoring mathematical or proof?
All I see from this research is a reasonable hypothesis that there is another important variable to consider. I couldn't see anything that looked like mathematical proof of anything.
Mathematical proof requires :
a) There is proven math
b) It is used to prove a hypothesis
Then there's the issue that we barely have a clue what's happening within a cell. So far as I know there are statistics we use to justify our beliefs of how cellular functions occur, but that's basically saying "If we roll the dice 2000 times, 1990 times, it's the same". Maybe 2000/2000 like "If we microwave a cell, it stops functioning after 10 seconds"... except with Cockroaches... we can't kill them by nuking them.
With regards to the functions of a human body, using the term mathematical proof is horrifying.
In the future we should write "A scientist hypothesizes with what appears to be logical reasoning based on the very little we understand cellular biology that anti-aging may be impossible if we don't also account for other poorly understood and possibly previously not considered variables."
There will be riots. :-)
You cannot "mathematically" prove anything about physical reality. It is just not possible. There are always 2 translation steps and these always introduce errors. Hence to claim that this was "mathematically prove" is just a lie, intended to make it sound absolute. It is not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Living forever is not mathematically possible according to prevailing cosmic expansion-contraction model. When Universe finally collapses, time ceases to exist. So we will have to settle for simply living very long time no matter what.
However, the model in this article does not put limitations on longevity. It simply outlines one mechanism of eventual demise, without even putting a number of that eventual.
So if my choices to live about 100 years naturally, or 1000 years and eventually die from cancer... I know I will pick cancer.
I know we sometimes post old stories here on slashdot, but really we knew about this in 1961... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"You cannot give a mathematical proof of something in the physical world. At most, you can give a mathematical proof that something is true in some model of the physical world."
Thanks for saying that. This Slashdot story is about a nonsense article with a click-bait title.
Any theoretical model of biochemical aging must include all facts that have already been gathered, such as these:
Longest-living animal species
400-year-old Greenland shark 'longest-living vertebrate'
Longest-living mammal: Bowhead whale. Quote: "... over 200 years."
I think this study may have been too bounded by what we currently know and see as limits.
Perhaps once we better understand cancer, it will be the key to making this all work; a "mild" and controlled cancer might solve the cell regeneration issue, especially if coaxed by nano-scale machines, which present another possibility: replacing and/or supplementing the failing parts of our bodies. Theoretically, a very careful balance of repaired telomeres, nanotech-supplemented systems, and controlled cancers could establish an equilibrium that would buy enough time for us to come up with another form of immortality (mind transference, fully artificial cells, or something more fantastical and yet to be imagined). You can't really disprove that with math since there are too many variables and suppositions.
(We are the borg?)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
With sufficiently advanced cancer treatments you wouldn't have to worry about the downside. You might need nanobots or a periodic cyberknife style cancer eradication but it'd be doable.
That depends - are you capable of having more offspring? Are you capable of helping your grandchildren prosper?
A more accurate statement would be "Evolution only cares about how many descendants you have."
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What was that guy's name?
Lord...
Lord Kelvin, or something like that?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Jellyfish have no brain; or even a central nervous system. They are essentially a colony of specialize cells and are certainly not sentient. So they are immortal only in the sense that the colony lives on. Big deal!
COE
This does not speak to reintroducing engineered, properly functioning cells.
When you simplify a cell to something that has a positive and negative output to the overall organism, and add in an effect that increases the amount of negative output over time, you're going to find (surprise, surprise!) that aging "is a fundamental feature of multicellular life." That's not a conclusion, that's an assumption you've made at the start of your study!
To be fair, the authors of the study do cite two 50 to 60 year old papers discussing the (pre-modern-genetics) theory of aging that they are out to debunk.
Well, they have a mathematical proof, and you know what Feynman says about scientists who rely solely on mathematical proofs: prove it! Real world, now.
Because they for sure don't know that.
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.
So destroy those cells and bulk-replace them with younger cells that were pre-created in a different vat where they didn't have to compete.
There's a case that enabling onco genes just gives people cancer and disabling them causes people to die quickly.
But since this is slashdot where everything is seen through the eyes of government euthenizing everyone and taking their money to help DC fat cats get fatter, I'm not giving much benefit of the doubt that they factored in all avenues here.
Who the bloody hell wants to live forever, anyway? That would mean and eternity putting up with other people's shit that drives you more and more crazy decade after decade, except then it'd be forever. Quality of life > quantity of life.
there are plenty of multicellular organisms that are essentially immortal (no set lifespan) except for accident, predation or disease
No. It merely means that using natural methods, and the science we have RIGHT NOW, there's no way to control the aging process without paving the way to cancer. Mostly because there's no currently feasible way to control trillions of differentiated cells in an ongoing, medically safe basis.
That doesn't mean that, 100+ years down the road that SOMEONE won't perfect a way to do so.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
SO we need to changes ourselves into Immortal Jellyfish then.
Kind if a Dr Who redo...is that what you're saying?
End of Line.
Can somebody shoot the journalists and then read the PNAS article and report on what it really says?
This has been hyped and distorted to a ridiculous degree
by pop science journos.
Proofs only work for pure math.
These researchers simply proved a theorem in their model which IMHO does not look very biological to begin with.