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by sammyo 639 days ago
One actual researcher mentioned good habits will get anyone into their 80's but everyone tested over 105 has most of 100 certain genes. Really old age may be genetic.
2 comments

I do aging genetics research and in fact that's the opposite of my impression so far. Not trying to be contrary, I'm sympathetic to that idea, but most of what I've seen suggests idiosyncratic environmental effects become more prominent as you age, even into late age. Those random fatal events, cumulative exposures, random nucleotide flips, and so forth, all add up more with time.

I suspect aside from lifestyle changes and drugs targeting those affected pathways, gene and "epigene" editing is the thing that will result in longer lifespans. But genetic and epigenetic editing targeting random accumulated mutations with age, not necessarily those at birth.

The phenomenon in the linked piece is important because it throws a monkey wrench into a lot of stuff. I'm skeptical of biological measures of aging because of the widespread idea that people can be biologically older or younger than chronological age. I think it's going to take some large population with good, verifiable, maintained records at birth, which will take some time to establish.

Any review papers or pop-sci writeups you like on potential approaches for in vivo epigene editing?
No researcher will actually make this argument though because they'll immediately be called a eugenicist.
Researchers don’t care about that. We’ve already got IVF with preimplantation genetic diagnosis. So far it’s mostly used for eliminating genetic disorders like fragile-X but there’s nothing stopping parents from trying to select for other attributes except having enough money to pay for it and finding the right doctor. Though realistically the most you can really do now is avoid genetic disorders and select the sex of the baby.

That ship has sailed.

Lol, you're telling me. I literally worked with one of the pioneers of human germline gene modification with IVF. Oh, that sweet, sweet DARPA money. I miss that paycheck.

I can assure you he had (and still has) a small contingent of protesters at all of his speaking engagements and a number of conspiracy theorists online who think that he is literally the devil. Only academic types even really know that he exists, so these protests are from the research community. There's even univeristy-published research comparing him, by name, to the Nazis.

/s used to write quality control software for IVF labs.

>Researchers don’t care about that

Haven't been around a lot on planet earth, have you? I can excuse you.

From a quick web search - "nature vs. nurture" seems to be safe for discussion, on traits far more sensitive than "could you live to 85, or to 105?".
Clearly a researcher has made that argument or GP wouldn't be talking about it.
Why?

It's not making an argument, it's describing. And describing is not taking action.

[edit] about describing truth or evidences: we need that. Of course it all depends on how you present the truth, whether you are actually doing pseudoscience or not, whether you are manipulating concepts that are actually scientific or not, and whether you are conflating correlation with causation or not.

Are you familiar with the controversy around a book titled "The Bell Curve"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

The Bell Curve wasn't simply descriptive. It contained "policy implications based on these purported connections [between IQ and race]." It opened by saying that if you want to hire good employees, you should hire by IQ... and then connected IQ to race, implying that racial discrimination is justified. On examination, many of the sources were directly tied to white supremacist organizations.

The Bell Curve is a singularly poor example of a scientific description of the status quo attracting unfair attacks.

No, but there's a title "Lack of peer review" in your link.

This doesn't look like science.

There a lot of pseudoscience around IQ too, probably starting with the very concept of IQ for measuring "intelligence" (for which we would need a strong definition anyway)

There are plenty of very real issues with Murray and The Bell Curve, but to say IQ is pseudoscience is a ridiculous claim.
> to say IQ is pseudoscience is a ridiculous claim

Is this claim really ridiculous? A quick search yields convincing results that hints at scientists questioning the concept:

- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121219133334.h... "Scientists debunk the IQ myth: Notion of measuring one's intelligence quotient by singular, standardized test is highly misleading"

- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund... "IQ tests are 'fundamentally flawed' and using them alone to measure intelligence is a 'fallacy', study finds"

There are many things wrong with how IQ is tested, and even how the whole notion was born.

(note that between my comment and yours, I had edited that sentence a bit, it's not worded as strongly now - this is because I don't doubt much that IQ was scientifically researched, so saying IQ is pseudoscience may indeed a bit far-fetched, but I still think the whole notion is quite broken)

> No, but there's a title "Lack of peer review" in your link.

You are moving the goalposts.

Earlier you said:

> It's not making an argument, it's describing. And describing is not taking action.

The example I provided shows how describing alone is enough to be accused of being an eugenicist. Rightly or wrongly, doesn't matter.

Fine, something not peer reviewed, crippled with fallacies posing as scientific material which describes falsehoods gets heavily criticized. This looks good to me. There are ways to reap storm by describing something false and by not doing one's homework, yes, I'm willing to believe this. Note that I was speaking about describing truth (implicit in the first paragraph, explicit in the second).

I'm not willing to engage further, our last argument two weeks ago [1] didn't end well and history seems to repeat itself. This won't lead to an interesting discussion.

edit: like last time, you could have stated your point instead of asking a loaded question and make me do your homework.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41338751#41356028