Six Siblings Reached 100, Shows Genetic Engineering Would Work for Antiaging

65 thoughts on “Six Siblings Reached 100, Shows Genetic Engineering Would Work for Antiaging”

1. That 1 thing would be bags and bags of money!

2. At least you can take some comfort in the fact that your posts are appreciated as intelligent and insightful, even if not to your original top percentile standard.

   Either way, sorry to hear that chemo has taken its toll.

3. It is really hard to say whether genetic potential IQ is diminishing or not. Just because some lower IQ people have more children does not mean the parents’ IQ genes were bad. You can end up with low IQ for a variety of reasons that have nothing to with the genes for intelligence. Nutrition is major…and they still have not bothered to find the optimal amounts of various nutrients during gestation. It may even differ month to month during development. And we have no idea what things are diminishing IQ and by what amount. We know some: lead, arsenic, mercury, polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), triclosan, toluene, phthalates, too much manganese and fluoride maybe, and even glycyrrhizin in black licorice.
   There are hundreds of thousands of chemicals out there, man-made and natural. We have only investigated a small fraction for the effects on IQ and behavioral issues. And some toxins could be affecting people with one gene or another. And effects may not be that direct. Being lactose intolerant for example when exposed to lead may be worse than for someone who is not because calcium helps remove lead and you are more likely to get more calcium if you have more dairy products.
   And it is not just nutrition and toxins. Viruses especially, can cause damage, as can head trauma (even small head injuries can accumulate to a lot of damage), hypoxia, high fever, high stress childhood, abuse, neglect. And there are positive things like education, encouragement, naps and activities.

4. Some of what would require reasoning in a human might be hardwired in the crow. It is hard to know. Sometimes what they do is repeating happy accidents. You have probably heard of the crows using cars to crack walnuts. But chances are a crow dropped a nut by accident and a car crushed it. It ate the meat and this just positively reinforced the behavior. I doubt it saw something else crushed by a car and thought to itself…”I bet if I put a nut there a car would break open this nut so I can eat it”. Conditioning is not really very advanced. Mice do it. Even cockroaches, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
   Would any bird have the detachment necessary to recognize that the car crushing the nut it was carrying a good thing? Probably not. But the fact that it has experience eating roadkill without getting squashed, is probably a factor.

5. That’s true: It’s rather ironic, given that our society is utterly dependent on having around at least a modest minority of really smart people, and that job opportunities for people who aren’t rather clever or declining rapidly.

   But, yes, the evidence is that natural selection has been running backwards for a while because life is now easy enough that *reproducing* doesn’t require being smart. It requires it less all the time.

   This has been obvious for decades, see for instance Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51233

6. There are two problems with larger brain size. It can be very difficult to give birth…potentially even damaging the brain by deforming the skull. I suppose there might be some genes somewhere we can tweak that can increase brain development after birth. There is a second problem too. If baby’s head is too heavy, it could be very difficult for them to lift their heads, and it could make falling injuries while learning to move around more prevalent negating advantages.
   The reality is that brains have been shrinking since we developed agriculture maybe even starting before that. Things got easier. I suspect the domestication of the dog was the first trigger, as the dog could help us hunt. The bow and the net also made things much easier. We don’t think of our lives as being easy, but the reality is that we are just talking about how much brains it takes to stay alive and have children that have a decent chance of also having children.

   We can gain a whole standard deviation in IQ with just figuring out optimal prenatal nutrition and insuring every pregnancy gets that, along with not being exposed to lead, other heavy metals, other chemicals, and pathogens.

   Cro Magnon (AKA early modern human) had larger brains than we have. https://phys.org/news/2010-03-cro-magnon-skull-brains-shrunk.html
   And Neanderthal had an even larger brain. Though most of the size advantage it had was in the visual area in the occipital lobe.

7. Scandinavia also spends just about nothing on national defense, relying on us for the last 75 years to keep the Soviets/Russians out of their lands. If they actually had to defend themselves, they wouldn’t be so prosperous. They also have had (until the last 10=15 years) largely homogenous populations, with the able-bodied working and not sucking on the government tit because they don’t feel aggrieved at the majority, thinking that the majority “owes them” for some problems of the past. Homogenous populations also generally don’t have high crime rates, which require serious spending on police, courts and prisons. So the Nordics have had the perfect storm for prosperity over the last 75 years DESPITE Socialism.

   Again, Socialism has NEVER worked, ANYWHERE.

8. “Half of the populace was on the brink
   of starvation, many were eating from garbage
   bins, only one person in 5 had a job”

   It would be nice if you actually used some facts when formulating your opinions. The simple fact is that at the worst, unemployment was 25%. NOT 80% (because math matters, and only 1 in 5 having a job implies 80% unemployment – unless you’re counting children, old folks and women who – then – generally didn’t enter the workforce at all). So right there you’ve discredited your argument.

   Higher taxes = more prosperity? What a crock! The economy did well during WW2 because we had enormous amounts of borrowed funds, in addition to higher taxes, used to buy stuff. Oh, and we also had 16 million men in the armed forces, not in the normal labor force – had they been in the job market, instead of being consumers of all of that hardware, etc., things would have been a lot different. Tax cuts have proven – on several occasions – to have produced prosperty…in the 1960s, the 1980s, the early 2000s, and now. If higher taxation made for prosperity, then the USSR would’ve won the Cold War, and we would have gone bankrupt.

   Prosperity after the war – yeah, we had that. We also had all of our international competitors’ factories literally blown to smithereens in the prior 6 years, and much of their best workers and engineers literally killed off. Of COURSE we prospered.

   You really need to think before spouting this Socialism nonsense.

9. You might ask them if they think they’re socialist. They’ll tell you that they tried it, and rejected it. They’re just a liberal welfare state now.

   https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-scandinavian-socialism/

10. My spelling is great on this forum relative to people who didn’t come within a few points of acing the verbal portion of the SAT in the mid 70’s, and only because this forum allows editing. I now frequently mix up homophones, and even words which are merely close in sound, something I never did before the chemo. Fortunately I can see the mistakes after I make them.

    As for the math, I don’t have any difficulty at all performing mathematical operations, I merely get the digits out of order on occasion. Say “1234” and write down, “1324”, that sort of thing. Clearly a form of acquired dyslexia, not acalculia, since I do the same with letters in words now.

11. But you look at some birds, crows for instance, and they’re pretty good at general reasoning and problem solving.

    But even for specialized tasks, we could really use a math and logic co-processor. Math and logic are something humans have to do all the time, and we’re barely up to it. I’m sure a relatively small dedicated bit of brain tissue could rock that task.

12. … The most severe punishment we use other than the death penalty is solitary confinement and still we are moving toward a society that as a side effect increasingly create this condition outside of prison.

13. We have had many thousands of years of non-science. What did that achieve for longevity? You just got stupid mercury swallowing and other lunacy. “Simple minded” science is finally hitting the topic hard, and we will see results. Where are the old healthy mice of non-science? Science has extended the lives of mice in many ways. Somehow I don’t think more social interaction will make them live longer…unless some are prevented from eating much by their associates.

14. I think you mean you got “Acalculia” from your chemo,
    not “Dyslexia“.
    Your spelling has been great on this forum for the last few years.

    Dyslexia has a mathematical equivalent, Dyscalculia,
    which is of innate, genetic or developmental origin.
    And an acquired equivalent, Acalculia.

15. Birds get away with good performance from a small brain because various parts are highly specialized for the tasks they do. Part of the point of the frontal and prefrontal cortex is that it is not highly specialized, so that it can be adapted to do what you need it to do. We do a lot of things that 100,000 years ago no one did. That is all naturally not going to be efficient, even if we think we do those things well…they probably could be done 100x better. The best human calculators can only do a very limited number of calculations. Tesla’s autonomous driving computer gets two trillion operations per second done with 1 Watt. We couldn’t do 1 trillion operations in our entire lives…never mind in a second. Though who knows, trying some of those 168 protocadherin genes cephalopods have that we have a small fraction of, could add a lot of efficiency. Maybe we could do a trillion operations in 20 years of computation 😉

16. Another thing. Scandinavia is socialist, free
    and prosperous, and never risked becoming
    communist.

17. There are genes that protect people from tobacco smoke and genes that protect from liver damage from alcohol. That is why there are always a few people that drink and/or smoke who make it over 100. And there are genes that protect people from Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. And there are genes that reduce muscle loss in the elderly. But I don’t know if there are any variants that protect vision, hearing, skin strength, swallowing (many elderly have difficulty swallowing food), sleep, balance, reaction time, age related cognitive decline, the decline of the immune system, leaky gut, and continence. Even if you never got cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or issues from tobacco or alcohol…these other things collectively could reduce your quality of life to zero very easily, especially sensory loss.

    There is no replacing eyeballs. Vision is very complex all those millions of nerves need to go to exactly the right places. It may not even be possible 100 years from now. Retina? Maybe.

    I don’t think genes alone, at least those genes resident in the human genetic pool are sufficient for 200 years, but I could easily be wrong. I think we will have to borrow from other species, use antiaging drugs, engineer genes.

    That engineered mouse designed to respond to some chemical and start killing all its senescent cells certainly sounds like it could increase lifespan. That was not the point of their experiment, but there is no reason this could not be done in embryos.

18. That nation was the United States. It seems
    that you dont know what the Great Depression was. Half of the populace was on the brink
    of starvation, many were eating from garbage
    bins, only one person in 5 had a job, and before
    Roosevelt came in office, it was getting worse
    every day. There was PANIC in the air, national income had been cut in half, people didnt know
    what to put on the table, how to heat homes, to
    pay for medical care, to pay for rent, the situation was even
    worse than reported in history books.
    FDR was able to stabilize the situation, but
    the depression lasted 7 years more, and not
    because taxation was too high, but because
    was too low. The proof is that the economy
    expanded enormously when taxes were
    raised to finance war production, and after
    the war they stayed much higher than before,
    and there was unprecedented prosperity and
    the baby boom.

19. “And a lot better than the dont-do-anything, cut-the-taxes, balance-the-budget, laissez faire, the
    market-will-heal-itself that almost wiped out a nation.”

    Which nation was that, Venezuela? The USSR? China? North Korea? Cuba?

    Laissez-faire capitalism, for all of its faults, has produced the greatest amount of good in the shortest period of time of ANY economic system EVER devised and implemented in all of human history.

    Communism (the inevitable result of a socialist economy with no revolt as it flies off the cliff) has only produced mass imprisonment and mass carnage. The Left creates NOTHING – it only destroys. What those phuckers in Russia did to my family (including murdering my great grandfather) – among MILLIONS of others – is not the exception, it is the unalterable RULE.

    I’ll take capitalism over any other system, any time. Even being poor in a capitalist society is better than being upper middle class (if there is such a thing) in a Communist/Socialist economy.

20. Yes, I agree. But let’s not give any to politicians…they do enough damage while being (in many cases) as dumb as a bag of hammers. No – I am not joking. Imagine a guy like Stalin with a 150 IQ.

21. There are plenty. Stalin and Fidel Castro come to my mind immediately.

22. “With the possible exception of Franco of Spain, how many dictators actually *get* to die of age-related reasons?” – how about Salazar in Portugal?

23. Ah, right. That’s what put the “Great” in the “Great Depression”; Much better policy than the “the market will heal itself” policies that had previously left depressions lower case.

    Eh, what the heck, I give up: Keep your delusions about socialism, I’m too old at this point to end up in the camps if you get your way.

24. Go away, leave me with Altaira.

25. Beware of monsters from the Id!

26. And a lot better than the dont-do-anything, cut-the-taxes, balance-the-budget, laissez faire, the
    market-will-heal-itself that almost wiped out a nation.

27. The Roosevelt economy was as socialist as he could get away with.

28. If the cost of the cure is X, the rich pays X, and then buys a yacht, the middle class pays X, and
    tightens his belt, the poor doesn’t get the cure.
    The businessman who made the cure earns 2X.
    If the State pays the cure for everybody, the businessman earns 3X. Moreover, there is a lot
    of useful basic research that doesn’t yield near
    term profit, and that no capitalist would invest in.
    We wouldn’t have exited the Depression, nor
    defeated Hitler, nor gone to the Moon, without
    public intervention. The profit motive is strong,
    but it could be not enough. Luckily even the
    rich know that a long life is better than wealth
    and hopefully they will donate a part of it for
    research, if not for themselves, as a legacy to
    their children.

29. Read “The Dictator’s Handbook”.
    According to that, it is not greater decency of democratically elected leaders, but having to please millions of people rather than a few cronies that makes them less harmful.

30. In practice, any central direction that can prevent duplication of efforts becomes centralization of power, because it gets to define what is duplication of efforts.

    Seriously, the inefficiencies of capitalism are a lot better in practice than the theoretical benefits of socialism. They always remain purely theoretical.

31. The Roosevelt economy was a capitalist economy, after all.

32. The socialist taxation money should be used to
    reward the capitalist enterprises who show the best results. This pays for R&D. The citizens then
    pay for the production of the new cures with the money left after taxes. Multiple power centers
    are good, but with a central direction to prevent
    duplication of efforts.

33. We are going to put our brains in impregnable
    fortresses, and link them to flesh and blood
    avatars. Broken body? Change body!

34. I think we’re better off with the capitalist model here, now that businessmen are starting to see profit potential in life extension tech. Non-profits, too, are part of the capitalist model.

    It’s the socialist model that doesn’t permit multiple power centers, after all.

35. Eternal youth is generally understood as meaning you remain young all your life, but are still subject to dying by misadventure or disease.

36. But “eternal” doesn’t mean “forever”?

37. I simply meant heavy taxation for high incomes, Victory
    Bonds, everything to find resources for research.
    For me, even a few centuries of life would count as a victory.

38. Maybe a very ‘left-wing’ policy in terms of some hypothetical alternate history left-wing. Not in terms of this universe’s left wing, which once in power tends to view people as expendable units.

    And we’re all going to become casualties in this war, whether we like it or not. Eternal youth is a physically realizable goal, immortality not so much.

39. Dick Cheney? What has he done?

40. To reach indefinite life ASAP, it requires a very left-wing policy, similar to that
    implemented in ww2, with the money used for research instead
    of weaponry. We are all going to become casualties in the War
    against Death, if we dont try and fight it.

41. To assess how surprising this event is, one should in principle also take into account the number of families in the world. Hence the following small addendum.

    Given an arbitrary partition of the world population into groups (`families’ ) of size 13, let P be the probability that at least one such group contains at least six people living to the age of 100. Generously assume that over the last century the world has been inhabited by at most 10^11 people. so that our partition contains roughly 10^10 groups. Furthermore, assume that for each person, the probability of living to age 100 is 1/6000, and that these probabilities are independent.

    Then the probability P is at most
    10^10 * sum_{i=6}^{13} (13 choose i) * (1/6000)^i * (5999/6000)^{13-i}, which is of the order 10^{-10}.

    In other words, the probability that something similar would have happened by pure chance (somewhere in the world and somewhere during the past century) is sill very small, namely at most one in ten billion.

42. The thing that saves us is that is not all in the same direction.

43. Vitamin D also prevents cognitive decline, and elevates the sense of well being. As for the neural implant, you should be able to turn it off,
    it cannot be worse than a communist re-education camp. Everything
    that we read, watch, and listen, is already meant to warp our judgement.

44. You sound like every budding dictator willing to kill most of humanity just to create a better peaceful world in line with your superior vision.
    Oh, well. All this has happened before.

45. It’s a question of what would benefit me most, vs what would benefit my wife most (21 years younger) vs what would benefit my son most, (50 years younger) vs what would benefit his children most, his grandchildren most.

    I don’t care only about benefit to myself. I want humanity transformed into eternally youthful gods, even if it takes generations to accomplish. I want my distant descendants to have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

    There’s no reason to accept any limits for humanity except the laws of physics.

    But, yeah, put some work in on near term therapies, too. I’d appreciate that!

46. We could use an expansion bus, that’s for sure. I could use a math coprocessor: Chemo made me dyslexic, which is pretty bad in an engineer.

47. I personally find neural enhancements like that somewhat terrifying, due to the potential for malware sneaking into your brain. Given how almost all tech giants are warping their products to advance left-wing politics, (FB and Twitter banning people, Youtube putting right wing political videos on restricted lists meant for porn, Google and its politically skewed search results.) the prospect of letting them get a crack at my brain is scary.

    OTOH, my brain is declining with age, and in another decade I might need something like that just to be functional.

48. I’m on board with redesigning the human race to be longer lived, essentially immortal if possible. Sure, I’m unlikely to personally benefit, but it’s a worthy goal. Indeed, we should be plundering the genome of every species on Earth for potential improvements to our own, and not just in the area of longevity.

    I mean, look at how much birds get done with tiny brains. I expect there are a lot of potential improvements to the human brain available there. Size AND efficiency, no reason we can’t have both!

    And along the way we might find some therapies that work for people who already exist, not just the next generation.

49. Because, if genes didn’t play a pivotal role in aging, the chances of 6 siblings out of 10 reaching the age of 100 or more would be astronomically small. Statistically, only one in 6000 lives to the age of 100. So in this case, the probability would be something like (10 choose 6)*(1/6000)^6*(5999/6000)^4 which is of the order of [1/1000]^6 = 10^-18.

    It at least shows that gene engineering should be a viable path for longevity, but it doesn’t show just how healthy you would be at old age. That is a different question altogether….

50. The simple mind keeps looking for a simple and obvious cause and effect solution without taking into account who and what we really are. There is nothing these six siblings that shows that genetic engineering will work, not even a single genetic marker pinpointed. Here is a big Harvard research that has just been published that shows that people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80 as the single most important cause.

    https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/an-80-year-harvard-study-says-this-1-thing-will-make-you-happier-healthier.html

    https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness

51. Sure that it wasn’t the Life Clock of Belarus?

52. I can’t account for the discrepancy between the data in that actuarial life table and the “life clock” i used due to a lack of info on their sources.

    Their site simply states
    “…Life Clock compiles the data of many health studies to build a life expectancy calculator..”

    If anyone knows best about life and death it would be the social security administration.

53. Life expectancy for the US of an average person who is 72.
    https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
    This shows 13.7 years. But a more accurate estimate can be made for individuals. The person in question may not live in the US.

    A 72 year old japanese female would have an expected 16.5 years.
    https://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-hw/lifetb21th/dl/data.pdf

    so gender, wealth, zip code, smoker or not, current health etc…

    Those factors can swing the expectation by a large amount. From birth different zip codes in the US can have over a 20 year variation in life expectancy.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2626194
    In 2014, life expectancy at birth for both sexes combined at the national level was 79.1 (76.7 years for men, and 81.5 years for women), but there was a 6.2-year gap between the 10th and 90th percentile, a 10.7-year gap between the 1st and 99th percentile, and a 20.1-year gap between the lowest and highest life expectancy among all counties.Several counties in South and North Dakota (typically those with Native American reservations) had the lowest life expectancy, and counties along the lower half of the Mississippi and in eastern Kentucky were bad. Counties in central Colorado were good.

54. At 72 his life expectancy is 13. He can do a lot better or worse than that, obviously.

55. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

    Being 72, your current life expectancy is around ~6yrs 329days 18:42:54.
    It would probably benefit you more if they work on this instead of indirectly on enhanced intelligence.

56. It would be very difficult to prove or disprove your statement in a short dialogue or debate. However, I’m most certain if one could adequately compare a cohort of a dictator(s) and their corollary masses of asses, they would find your supposition astoundingly true.

57. With the possible exception of Franco of Spain, how many dictators actually *get* to die of age-related reasons?

    They generally end up on the wrong end of a bullet (self-administered, in at least one instance), a noose, or at some point they realize the game is up, and get out of Dodge with as much of the country’s treasure as they can.

    Remember, it’s not just those you oppress who want to be rid of you, but those around you who want to *replace* you. They aren’t always patient now, they won’t be patient in an era of life extension, either. And you enemies in either group may be as long-lived as you…

    No, I refuse to reject the ability to extend the life and health of myself and those I care about (and everyone else), just to insure that bad people can live only so long, as well. As noted above, there are other ways to see to that.

58. Since you are averse to superAI, I thought you liked Elon’s solution
    to the problem, transforming AI in an extension of our brain, like
    Forbidden’s Planet machine.

59. A neural link is the next best thing to a enhanced intellect, but it is still not as good. Besides a neural link like they are talking about would require neural surgery. With enough intelligence we could design a noninvasive neural link. Or perhaps a genetic engineering feat that would give us a all a bio grown in place neural link.
    With a enhanced intelligence we would appear as a cro magnon man to a modern day man.

60. You should worry less about the likes of Kim il Jong, Putin, GWB and Cheney, far more carnage and suffering is perpetrated by the irrational and the inept masses.

61. So, all the rest of humanity that is relatively OK and not a murderous tyrant/hated politician deserve to continue dying earlier than they would with SENS?

    Because that’s what I get from these concerns about the hated powerful also getting to live more.

    By the way, that has already happened with regular medical improvements, and AFAIK nobody raises objections to new antibiotics just because Kim Jon Un will also get them.

62. Elon’s to make Neuralink announcement in a short time.

63. Eternal Castro orders eternal castration for all his eternal subjects. And it’s the right
    thing to do, since there is no more place for new entries.

64. I am 72 yrs old and would love to experience this technology but it would be MUCH better to enhancing intelligence first. Once we enhance intelligence significantly for everyone, all the other achievements, including longevity will quickly follow. If we extend longevity the only thing we really achieve is longevity, little else.

65. Interesting.

    My grandmother turned 100 last year. She will be 101 this July.

    However, I never met my great-grandparents (her parents), as it seems both died in their 60s-70s. (which I guess were the 1950s-1960s)

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