Animal domestication is really wild.
So we first select for neoteny (playfulness, dependency on caregiver, physical features people like) basically prolonging the juvenile state. Then we put them in controlled environments of abundance, were all their needs are met. Which further diminishes need to reach adult state (with traits like aggressiveness to compete for resources). This abundance causes them to mature/breed earlier and reproduce more than in the wild. Basically a population of children that can produce children. Then we want this population of children to live longer.
Recently I had an interesting thought that basically people did almost the same to themselves spontaneously through culture. Which might influence various aspects of human behavior, like social interactions in general, cooperation and means of competition, mate selection. We might have genetic changes that are not maladaptive only in the culture that introduced them. As technology forces culture to evolve it might turn out that huge swaths of human species have their evolutionary fitness suddenly reduced.
Those two are naturally related. If getting pregnant at 10 usually lead to death, then your genes will avoid that if getting pregnant at 10 is common.
However if socially we prevent girls from getting pregnant at 10 then biology can make them go through puberty at 10 without risk, since they will not get pregnant anyway.
Edit: As for the playfulness point, for us humans we punish kids for being playful when they reach 7, so it makes sense that we will evolve to stop playing around at 7 and hence becoming adults already by then. We don't punish pets for being playful though, at least not today.
I'm finding it hard to understand your point or not finding that argument particularly convincing. We can socially change much faster than we can biologically evolve. Meaning, the change in birth age can be heavily influenced by social factors (birth control, resource abundance, requirements for self-sustainment in adulthood) much faster than biology would adapt. We can be extremely socially different than those who lived when it was the norm to be pregnant at 14 while being essentially biologically identical.
Further, we can have multi-modal distributions that undermine the biological assumption. Some groups show much lower birth ages because it's not culturally disadvantageous than other groups. In that context, even if the average age increases, it doesn't mean lower birth age is biologically disadvantageous.
>humans we punish kids for being playful when they reach 7
This needs a citation or at least a definition of what is meant by "playfulness", because I find it hard to believe. I don't know any parents who would want their child to stop playing at 7 years old.
> I don't know any parents who would want their child to stop playing at 7 years old.
Parents don't decide what happens to the kids at school though.
> We can socially change much faster than we can biologically evolve.
If the genes were always there but they died constantly 200 years ago it just meant that we no longer cull those people early, and after a couple of such generations we now have them around. Early puberty is still not common, it just exists, that makes it more likely to be biological than social, if the social changes did it then early puberty would be the norm today rather than a very rare exception.
What's interesting is that rigid culture that forced us to do adult behaviors despite retaining juvenile traits, now when it's getting lifted and replaced with freedom to do whatever you please might leave many individuals maladapted from the evolutionary standpoint to prolonging their genetic line. Which I think is perfectly fine. New generations that are better adapted to the culture of hi-tech freedom will arise from the few that currently accidentally already do the evolutionarily correct thing.
> New generations that are better adapted to the culture of hi-tech freedom will arise from the few that currently accidentally already do the evolutionarily correct thing.
That's one possibility. Another is subcultures which prioritise reproduction over personal freedom will end up demographically dominant in the long-run. Look for example at Kiryas Joel, New York, and similar ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, whose growth shows no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Of course, exponential growth can't last forever, but nobody knows what exactly the limit is and when it will be reached – it might not be reached until they've become a very substantial percentage of the population, maybe even the majority.
My elder female dog loves to play and the way in which she plays has only gotten more nuanced over time. She's even adapted to play with me, play with other dogs, play with smaller dogs, and play with puppies.
The basic semantics of her language of play are all the same: she bows, she'll yawn, she barks and does that side-eye glance. Sometimes she'll dance. If she gets really hyped up she'll get the zoomies.
Dogs, from what I've observed, are incredibly intelligent and social animals as they exist today.
A lot of dog play is rehearsing hunting-related behaviours. For example, playing tug-of-war over a toy is practising playing tug-of-war over the kill, which helps to break it up into manageable portions. I wonder if adult domestic dogs are more prone to play because they have limited opportunities to use these natural instincts for real? Maybe in a pack of wild dogs where they are constantly being used for real, they would be less likely to rehearse them
>Recently I had an interesting thought that basically people did almost the same to themselves spontaneously through culture.
I think this already well known in evolutionary biology circles though not through culture.
I don't recollect but it was most likely Robin Dunbar who said it, people ganging together to kill of the most annoying/bullying/maladjusted members.
It's not really about killing maladapted. In each generation of humans more than 10% of them don't pass their genes to next generation. From the point of view of evolution it is as if they got killed young. Mate selection is way stronger mechanism of evolution then plain survival.
I'm sure I did not misunderstand Robin Dunbar, He actually said homicides were common. If a bunch of people hated someone they ganged up and killed him/her, leading to humans being relatively more neotenistic than other primates.
(I used maladapted in a very loose way: especially being maladapted socially, we are not talking about being maladapted phicially and other ways)
You'll let me know the next time you'll have to require the permission of your dog to pee, or when it can trigger surgery to cut your balls or put you down.
What domesticated animals were bread for "cuteness"? Cats are mice hunters. Most popular dog breeds were selected for killing and dog fight! That "big smile" is not for laughter, but to crush bones!
And many domesticated animals can not even reproduce without human assistance. How they would survive in wild?
Dog fighting is limited, but most dog breeds have been bred primarily for a specific practical purpose.
> Dogs literally evolved a muscle to make them more appealing to (and help them communicate with) humans
Not necessarily exactly cuteness. The other explanation suggested is better communication in general - by exposing the whites of their eyes we can see what they are looking at, which is an important cue for humans (we use it between ourselves too) to indicate the direction of attention.
> Sure. But most of those traits are shallow. Let the breed go stray and many characteristics go away.
A lot of characteristics seem to be bred in and instinctive - breed specific behaviour occurs without training. Strays do not breed pure so of course breed specific characteristics are lost.
> The neoteny—large eyes and heads, for example—is precisely cuteness
To an extent yes. The specific trait mentioned in the comment I was replying to was not neotenous. Not all neotonous traits are physically cute.
> What domesticated animals were bread for "cuteness"?
Fairly recent experiments with domestication of foxes show how it might work.
What you select for is behavior. Mainly you breed individuals that neither attack humans nor run away from them. Any other response than aggression or fear is ok. In few generations it turns out individuals selected this way retain more and more juvenile traits.
I think cats never needed to get domesticated because reacting to humans with neither aggression nor fear is within natural range of perfectly normal behaviors of most individuals of this specific niche feline species that got globalized through its relationship with humans.
How many of you glance at this website and think "fraud engine"? This is a fantastic vehicle to suck money out of people that love their pets, and love animals in general. I know nothing about these people, but my fraud alarms are screaming.
I'd examine this much deeper before engaging. It's far too consumer targeted, far too feel good. I would not be surprised if "becoming a partner" or "community scientist" required fees or more.
This project is a research project out of the University of Washington, led by several of the professors there. I believe the lab is the Healthy Aging and Longevity Institute.
They share a list of academic publications that have resulted from the project, and their Team page lists the full names a sizable large number of people.
Their FAQ indicates that the cost of the DNA Kit and other things are covered by the project funding. [1]
What made you think that it's engaging in fraud? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not involved in the project but just from looking at the site for several minutes, it seems to be a fairly reasonable research project.
Or did you say "fraud" less to mean "these are people who are stealing money and e.g., hoarding it away" and more to mean "these are people engaging in a research project I disapprove of"?
Honestly, it does not appear like a research institute at all. It looks like the styling that the owners of People's Magazine or the National Enquirer would use to market their 'research nonprofit' where the actual research contribution is 3% of their revenues, while supporting fat salaries for an executive staff. It just looks too consumer and not academic, not serious. It is simply too feel good. It has the trappings of respectability, but not really. It's too slick. I also never spent the time to look deeper, the loud consumer targeted presentation drove me away.
Probably because creating a nice-looking website is more likely to drive engagement with today's users than something that looks like it was made by some academic stuck in the 90s.
I think it's reasonable to be turned off by a slick-looking website, but I imagine it's because the intended audience of the website is the general (dog-owning) public, likely for the purposes of soliciting participants.
You could try clicking around and reading a little bit before throwing wildly inaccurate, speculative, and slanderous accusations at an org you know nothing about.
Every single longevity project - human or otherwise - is a scam. Fear of dying is the most fundamental one to existence, and scam artists have been exploiting it for as long as there have been people.
Religion promises an eternal afterlife. Cryogenics promises a future thawing and cure in an enlightend and technically advanced future. Plastic surgery puts a veneer over the signs of the natural aging process. The more recent batch have targeted metabolism, growth inhibition (ie rapamycin), etc.
Very wealthy people that don't want to die or don't want their pets to die will never be in short supply. They will still all die, roughly around the same time they would have otherwise from different causes with different infirmities (search for "sirolimus side effects").
Enjoy and make the most of the years you are given. Happy New Year.
There are many destructive processes happening in the post-reproductive years that we don't have names for yet and unfortunately have been referring to as "aging". But they are disease states as much as any other.
There is literally nothing about this project that will have any dog or human live forever. But it does have the possibility to improve dog and human health in some fundamental ways and increase the number of healthy years that we get before disease takes over. If this is longevity science, then all medicine is longevity science.
bahaha usually when HN people are complaining about a website I think they're being dramatic but the way this was scrolljacked, it's almost like it's designed to frustrate you
I participated in this project with my dog for two years. I stopped as the clunkiness of the web ui and lengthiness and frequency of the surveys. The experience left me dubious as to the project's methodologies.
Personally, I'm optimistic about the capacity of studies and projects like these to extend our knowledge regarding aging. Human trials are fraught with ethical issues, and have very slow feedback loops (acquiring results from a study might take decades, which can be an entire career). Laboratory trials on mice and other small mammals can be more effective, but funding is hard and the results are isolated to a small academic lab. Large-scale supplements for pets can give data in a few years, have lesser (though not negligible) ethical problems, and have built-in funding. The funding process is, of course, a source of conflicts of interest, but it has to be done somehow.
FYI limited to to US only - they refer you to their sister project: https://darwinsark.org/ if you'd still like to contribute in a similar fashion but reside outside of USA.
> other examples of innovations flowing from veterinary medicine to human medicine
“As microbial and genetic discoveries were made, pathogenesis studies were required to integrate the new knowledge into useful clinical advances. Those advances include a creative model of enteric bacterial disease (Moon), demonstration of the transmissibility and pathogenesis of scrapie, a proposal that human kuru was a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (Hadlow), and the isolation of bovine leukemia virus (Miller) and bovine immunosuppressive retroviruses (Van Der Maaten)—5 years before AIDS and HIV appeared. Now modern molecular and genetic sciences and their applications in integrative, whole-animal biology make possible exciting advances for the benefit of both animals and people” [1].
(Counterfactual: “major methodological limitations of the animal research and evidence of widespread publication bias” limit translatability [2].)
I don't know, but if you find your dog is now immortal at the human equivalent of 25 and you're getting old and grey, everything hurts, and the babes don't look at you any more, you're probably going to want something to get done about it, pronto.
Dog cancer is considered pretty similar to human cancer and sometimes treatment trials are done in dogs after they are done in mice and before they are done in humans.
Unlike futurists I have little hope of our medical system producing radical improvements to human lifespan in my lifetime. Even ASI can't cure aging if it is not allowed to do experiments or if powerful lobbies prevent it from accessing medical data or "displacing" human medical staff.
If we want to get breakthroughs in lifespan extension quickly, they will have to come initially from something like this where vested interests are less strong and regulations less stifling. Not that I think this particular effort is going to do it, but something like it is the only way it could happen.
While I think that anti-aging is harder than e.g. a successful and sane brain upload, the very thing you say in your second paragraph is why I think we may get it anyway — my inner cynic says that there are many rich and powerful dictators who will be very happy to volunteer their population as test subjects.
But there's nothing stopping aging related research. Ethics committees allow scientists to conduct experiments as long as those meet proper privacy and safety standards. Nothing is being blocked over concerns about displacing human medical staff so I can't imagine where you're coming up with that type of conspiracy theory.
Even if all rules and regulations were removed there will be no radical improvements to human lifespan in your lifetime. This is fine. You are expendable.
Better thought of as an immune modulator than suppressant. Ultimately it’s a blunt tool when we lack more specific agents. Yes, it will have risks including infection, but the benefits may (or may not) outweigh the risks.
Exploring unknown paths that turn out not to lead anywhere useful is still worthwhile, since we can't possibly know beforehand what unknown information will or won't be useful. We don't even know what research might become useful based on new information from some other field or line of research.
Great, so there’s no way to “fail” and they can keep asking for money indefinitely. See the problem here? You’d stop shoveling money into research that hadn’t yielded any results either, especially if it was $24 million dollars that could have gone to better avenues.
That was stated as the main goal of the project: improve quality of life in dogs and hope the results transfer to humans. It didn’t achieve that goal so far. I really don’t know what you want me to say.
I've seen his story across various sources - has he ever elaborated on specific quantities/ratios? I haven't seen anyone reproduce his regimen for his cats, and I'd love to see some more concrete evidence that the diet is effective (IMHO the extensive development of his home to act as a massive jungle gym feels like the more likely culprit in their longevity).
I'm on exactly the same version, also with ublock as the only extension. Weird. For me the scrolling stops immediately the moment I lift my finger off the screen
That AI dog image on the homepage is dreadful. Look at the inconsistency in the depth of field. And the inconsistency of the depth of the physical field the dog is sitting in, left vs right.
Obviously most people disagree, but I don't think we should search for medical advances that make life significantly longer. We should search for ideas that make the finite life on this planet significantly better. A longer life is dangerous. If people could live 150 or 200 years that will make the problems on this planet much worse since the desire to accumulate wealth over that time would be insane.
Is there much difference between an individual living and accumulating wealth over 200 years vs 3 generations of a family living and accumulating wealth over that time? External factors that change fortunes would mostly still stay the same. Biggest difference I can think of would be less change of an incompetent younger generation throwing the wealth away
Well the "throwing wealth away" is a big difference. And it's not just a matter of wealth. It's what people do with that wealth, such as influence the world negatively. The top 1% of those hell-bent on doing strange things usually don't have children that are similarly obsessed. And finally, it would increase the TOTAL number of people, which would exacerbate the situation because an absolute total number of people means even more exploitation by the rich.
> it would increase the TOTAL number of people, which would exacerbate the situation because an absolute total number of people means even more exploitation by the rich
The hypothesis is exploitation scales with population?
> if you include exploitation of natural resources in the calculation
Well yes, if you change definitions I am a pink elephant.
There is no evidence “exploitation by the rich” of everyone else scales with population. (There is some evidence for the opposite.)
Even if we talk environmentalism, economies of scale mean larger populations tend to be more efficient ceteris paribus. And the whole premise is foundational wrong: longer adult lifespans predict lower childbirth and population declines. Not increases.
> A longer life is dangerous. If people could live 150 or 200 years that will make the problems on this planet much worse since the desire to accumulate wealth over that time would be insane.
I honestly think this meme is way more dangerous and insane than the idea of having a longer and healthier life
I’d argue this is the popular take. With almost any medical research. “Don’t play god” and all that. At least while the benefit is hypothetical.
> If people could live 150 or 200 years that will make the problems on this planet much worse
Climate change would become a peach. We love to talk about thinking of the children, but self interest is more powerful among most. Longer lives mean longer-term thinking.
> no matter how long people live, they cannot imagine many years in the future, even if it's their own future
Care to substantiate that claim? Modern history flies straight in the face of it, from savings to childbirth rates correlating negatively with longevity.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting longer healthspans are a panacea. We are amply capable of screwing it up, e.g. by entrenching powerful people. But dynasties and aristocracies already exist. For every great builder of fortunes there are a hundred squanderers, even in the same lifetime. And despite it all, there is something to be said for age granting wisdom for most all the way up to senility, which an extended healthspan should forestall.
Apparently they'd agree. From their Project Details page:
> At the Dog Aging Project, we’re focused on healthy aging not just lifespan extension. We want to understand the biological and environmental factors that influence aging and intervene to prevent debilitating decline. We imagine a future in which we maximize healthspan—the period of life spent in good health and free from disease—allowing us many more years with high quality of life.
So instead of fixing problems with wealth inequality, just let people die. Should we ban healthcare after 55 so people won’t take up valuable resources staying alive? I personally would prefer existing and experiencing all life has to offer.
Just so we know, at what point should we have stopped searching for medical advances that make life significantly longer? I’m assuming you’re anti-chemotherapy?
Industrial civilization has brought about a massive increase in human population which is destructive. One way or another, life on this planet would be much better for a smaller number of humans.
Just so we know, at what point should we have stopped searching for medical advances that make life significantly longer? I’m assuming you’re anti-chemotherapy? And what specifically should the “smaller number of humans” be?
If I consider the global society I will be living in, I would prefer to see what an extra 30-50 years of high cognitive function for the people most rewarded by our current system produces, rather than trying to define what a good finite life is from some authoritarian.
Tech billionaires are always a weird focus for this kind of sentiment...
Compared to the likes of the Rothschilds (just as a well known example) they are harmless, transparent, and meritocratic.
Worse, that wealth accumulation will also lead to cultural stagnation: just like "science advances one funeral at a time", it's a harsh reality that culture also advances one funeral at a time.
Older generations try to take in new ideas - about homosexuality, racial equality, universal human rights, whatever else you can think of - and raise their children with those ideas in place too. And most often, those children find out later that the older generation didn't really believe in what they were saying, at least not to the extent of being able to overcome their own childhood programming. But because this new generation was raised with these new ideas, they're actually able to internalize them and progress society further.
Having older people with stagnant ideas and larger and larger accumulated wealth and power, would be a disastrous headwind against social progress.
