Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.