This has been a very interesting week. The post on Monday, Studying Skin Atrophy With Age, got me thinking about the very concept of ageing. Over the years humanity has become blighted by diseases that our ancestors never had to deal with. Diseases like dementia were unheard of back when we lived in caves for the simple fact that humans live past 40. We could always be relied on to die of injury and infection long before our bodies failed. When we became technologically evolved and begun living past our natural lifespan, our genetics kind of give up and admitted to not know what they’re supposed to be doing at this age. This is of course the natural result of people only needing to live long enough to reproduce according to evolutions view. Resistance to dementia isn’t a trait that will be passed on if you’re not having children at that age.
On some level, this provides a hard limit on how long a human can live (at the moment). The human mind simply won’t survive until age 200 without beginning to break down. This is the inevitable result of technological evolution overtaking actual evolution. We now live in completely artificial environments. When the only grass and trees that remain in an area are those that we permit (and more than likely were planted) then you can see that most modern day humans in the developed world live a life completely separate to the wild. It is of no surprise then that we live long enough for our organs to fail which could be ironically seen as an “unnatural death” in evolutionary terms.
It is an interesting thought, that medical technology will always run into some biological limit and there may be no way to exceed this except by changing our very biology itself. A concept that’s probably worth some thought, until tomorrow, goodnight.
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