the art and observations of Ranjit S. Mathoda

Talking about slowing down or stopping aging seems like talking about magic, something unnatural, the substance of a movie, a sign of excessive fear of the inevitable, a foolish desire to avoid a promising afterlife, an attempt to sell something to the gullible, or just a short cut to losing all credibility. Aging is baked into our understanding of the world, into the structure of families, the unfolding of human history, the forms of our storytelling, and into how people decide upon their beliefs.

Yet because aging has been inevitable does not mean it will continue to be. David Hume once pointed out, “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” Human history has been filled with the white swan of aging, and it makes us doubt the black swan of a method to halt aging could actually exist.

There are reasons to believe that aging at the rates humans experience isn’t inevitable and could be modified. The first reason is that different species age at different rates. Charles Darwin explained that species evolved from common ancestors, through the pressures of selection and time. The rate of human aging may therefore be an evolutionary accident or due to selection pressures humanity could use its creativity to escape.

A second reason is that some human beings have diseases which cause them to appear to age significantly faster than normal (see wikipedia article on progeria). If the process of aging can be modified by a genetic abnormality in one direction, it could possibly be modified in the other direction.

A third reason is that aging has already been slowed down significantly in many creatures by severe caloric restriction. This appears to effect metabolism, which then effects the rate of aging. While caloric restriction has worked in even lower order mammals, large scale human studies have yet to be completed. Even if caloric restriction was shown to work in people it requires significant discipline while impacting lifestyle significantly.

These reasons provide potential means for exploring the processes of aging. A great deal of fruitful research has been done on aging in yeast cells. It is the current scientific understanding that inside a yeast cell a reduction in caloric intake causes a reduction in three enzymes (TOR, Sch9, and PKA) that are part of the metabolism process. Reductions in TOR in particular decreases the rate by which a cell creates new proteins and slows aging.

Now, in the April 18, 2008 issue of the journal Cell (see link), a team of researchers led by Brian Kennedy and Matt Kaeberlein have published research linking ribosomes, the protein-making factories in living cells, and Gcn4, a specialized protein that aids in the expression of genetic information, to the pathways related to dietary response and aging.

By studying different strains of yeast cells they found that mutations in the large subunit of ribosomes sometimes led to increased lifespan. They also tested diazaborine, a drug which interferes with the large subunit of ribosomes, and found that treated cells lived 50 percent longer than untreated cells. They also found that longer lived yeast strains with mutations in the large subunit of the ribosome produce an extraordinary amount of Gcn4, a specialized protein which helps transfer genetic information during cell growth. They then tried preventing the increase of Gcn4 to see if it would effect life span, and it did in fact lead to shorter life spans. The researchers have thus found three different ways to effect aging in yeast cells. (This is not the only research approach being followed; see my prior post)

The path from such research in yeast cells to a treatment for human beings will likely be a very long one. While it is possible that a means to short circuit the aging process without significant side effects may be discovered (as was discovered for creating a twin of a sheep; see my prior post), it is far more likely to take decades, or a century.

Yet there could come a time when denying someone anti aging treatments is considered cruel and unusual. Perhaps some people born today will live to see that time. If so, they may be the only people living to have once thought of aging as natural and inevitable. They may have great difficulty in convincing anyone that aging was anything other than a disease, waiting for a cure.

Think of religious ideas as mental frameworks that live in the mind. Like natural organisms, a particular religion can demonstrate more fitness for spreading from mind to mind in a particular social environment then another.

Over many generations, certain religions dominate and others recede. Some will mix into their framework new ideas, mutating like natural organisms into a form the orthodox detest but new societies find more palatable, and others will remain unchanged. Partly the fitness of a religion in any social environment is its fitness to spread to nonbelievers, partly the fitness of a religion is its ability to hold onto existing believers, and partly the fitness of a religion is the power and ability the believers have to really influence the nonbelievers.

Living in a society that protects (even if it sometimes discourages) the freedom to believe what you will, it is common to think of the decisions people make about what religious beliefs to hold as personal choices made based on the intrinsic characteristics of a religion. Yet if you think about it, for much of the time religions have spread across human minds, one religion has tended to dominate in a geographical area, and since people often didn’t move far from where they were born, their social environment was much more harsh or unforgiving to making a decision about following a non dominant religion.

Here’s an interesting display, over time, of the spread of the world’s dominant religions.

http://mapsofwar.com/images/Religion.swf

It unfortunately doesn’t show the non dominant religions and it doesn’t show smaller religions that dominated much smaller regions. It also makes you wonder what religions existed hundreds of thousands of years ago, while our species existed, but before they had started to write their beliefs down.

Nonetheless, watching the history of the spread of dominant religions is interesting. It makes you realize how much a person’s current religious beliefs are shaped by ancient conquests and the accident of the geographical location of their ancestors.

Agrarian societies often have a practice of arranged marriages, probably because of cultural values that get established based upon economic forces, namely, the distribution of risk that happens when farming families are bonded together. Arranged marriage was practiced in America as well, when America had a more agrarian society.

As people have moved away from the risky business of farming, have grown more economically independent of the family unit at younger and younger ages, been offered financial products that hedge their most calamitous risks, and have embraced being catered to on an individual basis, such cultural habits have diminished.

Yet in China, where arranged marriage is still practiced with gusto, there is what I understand to be a unique form of arranged marriage: after death arranged marriages. As the NY Times reports,

“… in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants” or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.”

Curious what people believe, and curiouser still, how they will act in pursuing those beliefs.

Still, it’s somewhat sad that having such beliefs people seem to have such strong concerns for the experience their sons will have in the afterlife, and not so much for their daughters.

And how does one seek an afterlife divorce?

Under the laws promulgated by the Catholic church, excommunication for abortion, violence against the pope and consecrating a bishop without authorization is automatic without an action or proclamation by a church official, because it is deemed so serious that no verdict or judgment is required. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the head of a group that proposes family-related policy for the Catholic church, said in an interview with the Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana that stem cell researchers who destroy an embryo should be automatically excommunicated (see NY Times article).

Excommunication is a bar from participating in the church’s communal life, including loss of access to the liturgy, religious ceremonies such as receiving the Eucharist or other sacraments (see wikipedia article). Since the Eucharist is the means by which Catholics unite with god and with each other, excommunication seems to be not just a barrier on uniting with other Catholics, but also with uniting with god.

Belief in god and belief that god has particular attributes is a powerful, fascinating idea that creates significant meaning for many people.

Yet believing in excommunication is different then believing in god. A belief in excommunication is a belief that others have the power to say whether you have the right to unite with the god you believe in. For the threat of excommunication to hold any power other than damage to reputation, the believer must believe in not just god, but in the power of others to stand between the believer and god.

(Shunning a person, requiring that all people of a faith avoid all contact with them, is a threat of a slightly different nature than excommunication. Many faiths have made use of shunning. See this wikipedia article)