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.
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.
Hmm. How does one seek an afterlife divorce?
Due to some unfunny cartoons and the violence that followed their dissemination there has been much discussion lately about whether freedom of speech conflicts with one of the world’s most widely held systems of belief. That religion, which holds mankind is most righteous when it submits itself before God, subsuming self ego in service to something far greater, also appears to hold that drawings of God’s prophets should not be made for fear this could lead to idolatry.
Idolatry is defined by dictionary.com as (a) a worship of idols, or (b) blind or excessive devotion to something. The concern appears to be that symbols are powerful. The symbol may be elevated in place of God, and mankind may end up submitting before the symbol, rather then God.
What then to make of people rioting because they are angered their symbol, or their right not to have a symbol made, has been tarnished? Wouldn’t the real way to not be idolatrous be to recognize the message of God’s prophets, but avoid giving any symbol, in this case a cartoon, more meaning than it should have?
There is a very human desire to live in a world where certain things do not exist: child pornography and murder being just two examples. However it strikes me that many of us, and not just those worshipping under any particular belief, hold symbols so sacred that any defamation of them (such as the burning of our flag) is an attack not just on the symbol, but felt personally by us as well. We have so associated ourselves with the symbol that an attack on them is an attack on our person, on our ego.
Symbols are thus used to unite groups to action, to drive them towards a certain fate. Soldiers, and civilians too, have chosen to die to protect a flag, and have been counted heroic for it. Yet symbols are in the end inanimate, and unfeeling. Is it righteous to give them such importance? And in doing so, do we all become idolatrous?
Update: In Yemen, Mohammed al-Asaadi the editor of the now no longer published English language newspaper Yemen Observer, has been thrown in jail for insulting prophet Mohammed. The act that led to the criminal charges? Running an article denouncing the Danish cartoons, accompanied by the cartoons which had an X run through them. He was recently interviewed in jail by Newsweek:
Do you regret now the decision to run the cartoons, however censored, given the climate? There are plenty of religious fanatics in Yemen, even if they’re a minority.
We had a meeting to discuss this before we published them, so it wasn’t an accident. And we felt that these cartoons had already been shown on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya [satellite TV] and millions of Muslims had seen them. And I personally believe these cartoons should be published. If we make it unlawful to look at them, we give them an importance they don’t deserve, as if there’s something holy or special about them. We should be able to discuss them openly, which is what we did.
For more of the interview, click here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11414568/