Jacob Kimmel

Yeah, so I think there are a couple different ways one can tackle this.

One is you have to think about what's the selective pressure that would make one live longer and encode for higher health over longer durations.

Do you have that selective pressure present?

There's another, which is are there any anti-selective pressures that are actually pushing against that?

And there's a third piece of this, which is something like the constraints of your optimizer.

If we think about the genome as a set of parameters and the optimizer as natural selection, then you've got some constraints on how that actually works.

You can only do so many mutations at a time.

You have to kind of spend your steps that update your genome in certain ways.

So tackling those from a few different directions, like what would the positive possible selection be?

As you highlighted, it might be something like, well, if I'm able to extend the lifespan of an individual, they can have more children, they can care for those children more effectively, that genome should propagate more readily into the population.

And so one of the challenges then, if you're trying to think back in sort of a thought experiment style of evolutionary simulation here, would be what were the conditions under which a person would actually live long enough for that phenotype to be selected for and how often would that occur?

And so this brings us back to some very hypothetical questions, things like what was the baseline hazard rate during the majority of human and private evolution?

The hazard rate is simply, what is the likelihood you're going to die on any given day?

And that integrates everything.

That's like diseases from aging, that's getting eaten by a tiger, that's falling off a cliff, that's like scraping your foot on a rock and getting an infection and dying from that.

And so from the best evidence we have, the baseline hazard rate was very, very high.

And so even absent aging, you're unlikely to actually reach those outer limits of possible health where aging is one of the main limitations.

And so the number of individuals in the population that are gonna make it later in that lifespan, where using some of your evolutionary updates to try and actually push your lifespan upward is relatively limited.

So the amount of gradient signal flowing back to the genome then is not as high as one might intuitively think.

Yeah, you got to contribute resources back to the group.