X-Message-Number: 26193
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:24:03 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: news and comments to Hirsch and Coetzee

Several replies this time, and a bit of news about the next issue of
PERIASTRON:

News first: a number of people have let their subscriptions run out
recently, either by mistake or deliberately. If it's by mistake,
then email me that you want to continue and I will send you the 
latest issue, just out, even before I get a check from you. If 
you've let it lapse deliberately, you have a perfect right to 
do so, but I'd still like to know why. I know that at least one
person let his sub lapse a while ago until he felt he had enough
money to continue it. I don't write it just to please subscribers:
facts can sometimes be very unpleasant. But I'd still like to know
why you decided not to subscribe any more.

Comments:

To Prof Henry Hirsch:
Totally passive storage suffers from a major long term problem, easy
to see if you look at human history. Consider the pyramids: when 
they were cared for by priests, no one looted them and they were
maintained in good condition. By now, thousands of years after
the priests left, even the fact that they were mounds of rock
hasn't preserved them, and looting has taken away most of the
easily findable archaeological objects. You like permafrost: what
if the current climate changes (considering what various say, hmmm)
and the ground warms up. Whether or not that happens, there are
lots of microbes which will happily eat the stored remains, 
chemically protected or not.

Put differently, cryonics is an arrangement between those who want
someday to be suspended and those who are suspended now. It's
the job of those who want to be suspended to care for those who
are suspended, because otherwise they call into strong question
their own fate when they are suspended. And anyone who believes
that at some time in future history we will know how to prevent
or fix EVERYTHING (meaning everything!) that might ever go wrong
with us is dreaming.

And to Basie:

Answering your message is awkward because it doesn't look like
it was seriously thought out at all. First, I pointed out that
you were making an error of the levels on which you were talking:
the evolutionary causes of aging do not affect the details of
why it happens biochemically in our bodies (biochemistry of
course also involves our DNA). If we alter our genes in order
to live longer, that may or may not succeed, regardless of
any evolution which produced our genes as they are.

Second, of course, you seem not to have read anything on 
evolution at all. If someone has genes which make them
1.live longer, and 2. therefore beget more children, then
those genes will spread, not diminish. Even inbreeding is
good or bad depending on just what genes and what they do.
Moreover, the idea doesn't stand up anyway. Why do mice
live lives so much shorter than those of elephants? Because
mice are subject to dangers and stresses that elephants
easily avoid. An interesting fact: some have charted physical
size of animals against their lifespans. The relation isn't
perfect: turtles live much longer than mammals of the same
size. However one group of mammals comes out as living 
longer than most other mammals of the same size: monkeys
and apes generally. Their greater intelligence makes them
able to survive predators that would happily eat other
mammals. Moreover birds live longer on average than 
other animals of the same size. Why? They can fly away from
predators.

To throw a name at you, the biological theorist who 
thought up the theory I summarized in my last message was
GC Williams. Others have extended his ideas to predict
deathrates at various periods in the lifespan of living
things. They can explain, in evolutionary but not biochemical
terms, why the deathrates are high at the start of life too,
not just at the end. We have no genes which tell us to stop
living at any particular time; instead by the dangers and
stresses we face, our probability of survival goes down
with time, and even if that probability STARTS by going
down exponentially, the fact that genes which show themselves
only a high ages will have far less influence on our survival
than those showing up in early life ... so that evolution
works to enhance those early genes, not the late one. Result:
over time the life curve ceases to be exponential and turns
into the sharp downward curve we associate with the idea
of a lifespan (*).

            Best wishes and long long life to all.
               (even if you've decided not to subscribe to PERIASTRON)

                  Thomas Donaldson

(*) Animals or creatures that die off exponentially, the 
result of purely random deaths, have no lifespan at all.

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