Mathematics, Philosophy, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Aging

7 Comments

I’ve always believed that there is no law of physics that makes it inevitable, that it’s a matter of learning how to continue doing the cellular-level repair that occurs when we’re young. But here is an article that says it is caused by thermal chaos.

Not sure I buy it (it still doesn’t take into account artificial techniques for doing error checking in transcription), but it’s an interesting read.

7 thoughts on “Aging”

  1. “in the absence of external energy input, random thermal motion tends to destroy order” is certainly correct, but its interpretation in this article isn’t.

    This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this interpretation of entropy, but it is the first time from a non-creationist. I’m not sure whether “Animals are certain to die, unless they intake energy somehow” is more or less hilarious than “Evolution can’t happen unless the world intakes energy somehow”. Is it more stupid to ignore the existence of food or to ignore the existence of the sun?

  2. I’d be interested in seeing a graph of longevity of different mammal and bird species against body temperature, I think thermal chaos or not, the rate at which different species age is mostly down to how effective their cellular-level repair systems are.

    1. Just checked body temp and longevity for:
      Elephant, Man, Horse, Cat, Cow, Dog, Pig, and they lined up in that order for both (I cheated a bit with elephant and Man, but I figure 60 – 70 years is better than humans usually do in the wild).

  3. I don’t buy it either. There simply weren’t evolutionary pressures to make sure that a 35 year old has the same biological resiliency of a 15 year old. And as far as evolution is concerned, a 45 year old is already dead so it’s not surprising things quickly go downhill after that for most people. If there was such evolutionary pressure, I have no doubt that, over the long term, evolution would have granted us much longer and healthier lives. After all, evolution had no problem producing Redwood Trees that regularly live multiple thousands of years or a tortoise that may live multiple centuries.

    Since we didn’t win the evolutionary lottery, we now have to use our smarts to give us what evolution didn’t. It won’t happen quickly as some (or many) of us may like, but we’ll figure it out eventually.

    1. Sure, but the issue isn’t whether or not aging is universal, but whether it is required by the laws of physics. I agree with the commenter who noted that this thesis is structurally similar to the Second Law “argument” against evolution.

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