RE: [DIYbio] Re: Prospects of anti-aging research

> -----Original Message-----
> From: diybio@googlegroups.com [mailto:diybio@googlegroups.com] On
> Behalf Of Andreas Sturm
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:00 AM
> To: diybio@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: [DIYbio] Re: Prospects of anti-aging research
>
> If it was that easy, I suppose evolution would have done it.
>
> Well, that not, too.
>
> Evolution just cares that you can be healthy for 25-30 years. By that
> age humans had already children. So their genes were passed ahead, and
> aging had no influence on evolution, so it was not counter-selected...

Humans are comparatively long-lived for their size as mammals, requiring
something like the grandmother hypothesis to explain how selection continued
to operate at older ages to create that state of affairs - such as by
selecting for mechanisms of stem cell decline to balance increasing cancer
risk.

The "it's a simple change, so evolution should have done it" view fails for
all species we can easily gene engineer. Mice, flies, and worms all have
numerous single-gene changes that can extend life by 10% or more. In worms
and flies there are single gene changes that extend life more greatly than
calorie restriction. None of these changes have been selected for by
evolutionary processes.

In humans, should we expect there to be analogous single gene changes?
Probably not by current thinking.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/06/significant-single-gene-longevity
-mutations-in-humans-what-are-the-odds.php

The changing nature of the environment operates on timescales that are long
in comparison to the lifespans of lower animals, but short in comparison to
a human life span. So there are good evolutionary reasons to expect lower
animals to have more plastic lifespans in their present genome (e.g. larger
calorie restriction effects to better survive famines) and the potential for
more plastic lifespans through genomic alterations. But that cuts both ways
- shorter can be better from the point of view of natural selection.

Reason

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