Resetting the Clock of Life | Hacker News Reader

Resetting the Clock of Life

alliance.nautil.us

81 pointsdnetesn18 comments

A great example of the way in which researchers leap to try to alter downstream consequences of aging. This impulse is why 99% of all efforts to treat aging as a medical condition are doomed to failure.

The research community has an institutional problem in that all the short-term incentives have them studying the biochemistry of the system in a broken (aged) state, and then working backwards towards causes. Each link in the chain takes years of work. The first place they stop is thus a long way removed from any root cause, but then the incentives work to say "prove your work is valuable" and someone tries to commercialize it.

All medicine for age-related disease (so far) is marginal precisely because it attempts to compensate for or tries to improve downstream consequences that are a long way removed from fundamental damage that causes aging.

You can change the oil as much as you like in a car that is failing for mechanical reasons, but the degree to which you gain benefit from that action is much what you'd expect. You can press the accelerator to try to drive a faltering engine faster. Same story. You fix problems by fixing the root causes, not by ignoring those root causes in favor of things that happen to be what is right in front of you.

How many people periodically restart their computer just because they think it might run better afterwards? Maybe it was easier for natural selection to periodically restart the clock than to debug all the molecular pathways so that they remain stable over an organism's lifetime.

> debug all the molecular pathways so that they remain stable over an organism's lifetime.

It did just that. Hence the lifetime being what it is...

You now want to debug the molecular pathways to remain stable longer than the present lifetime, which will merely move that point a bit into the future, and will then be the new lifetime.

Except the cells used for procreation are also part of the cell line, and do require "debugged molecular pathways" (nature doesn't debug, nature makes things recover from errors, though not always in ways you'd like)

This reason for death does not really make sense. Only the connections between cells get reset. The cell line has to continue, with the potentially problematic molecular pathways (look at all the mitochondrial DNA syndromes).

In fact, if you think about it, there is a continuous cell line between that skinflake you just shed and the very first time DNA started replicating on this planet.

I wonder what occasional socially accepted sleep deprivation (staying out late, working long hours, making love all night ^^ ) does to a body. The day after does typically feel like part of you died, and that dead part has to go to work anyway.

I used to make the effort to go to work after a long night out. Now I just call in sick and sleep. Work will be there the next day.

> Work will be there the next day.

Not if you regularly call in sick to sleep off long nights out.

Well if he has a lot of nights out, neither will his liver, but developer employers, like our livers, are fairly tolerant.

Life has no clocks. It, as a set of processes, has phases, which happen follow the phases of the environment and use these phases to maintenance and repair.

There is no such thing as time, so Nature and evolution does not have any clock or counters. Life does not work the way we conditioned to think as observers. It cannot use abstract mental concerts which does not exist at molecular or cellular level. Cells do message passing and explicit pattern matching. No clocks or counters.

This reminds me of a passage from "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. It's the difference between mechanical time & body time. You can read it here: http://members.iif.hu/visontay/ponticulus/britannicus/einste... (the 24 April 1905 entry).

> Life has no clocks

Oh yes it has! it's arrow is called entropy and it ticks at the speed of atom decay.

From the life's point of view, so to speak, atoms are immutable. The actual process of decay are below the level of abstraction. Life "knows nothing" about it by definition.

For something that has no clocks, it sure has a lot of gears like atp synthase https://youtu.be/b_cp8MsnZFA While I appreciate your comment in being fairly correct, I still think there is a lot of value in trying to understand the human body as a molecular machine that runs on top of reality and generates sub environments that have "clocks" to synchronise processes. After all a clock signal doesn't measure the day, it measures discrete intervals.

Care to offer references for your claims that differ completely from, e.g., the article, which is based on decades of research and established science by experts on the matter?

There is nothing much to explain. The principles I am describing here are of classic Eastern philosophy applied to the Evolution process.

The notions of numbers, counting in general and the related concert of time required an observer to be established and formulated. These notions cannot emerge by accident in a purely mechanical perturbations the way life originated. There were no observer, leave alone designer.

This means that life could only use "concrete" phisical structures against which it does exact pattern matching, which is how DNA or RNA translation and protein sintesis works.

Message passing between the cells and triggering of gates and pumps are done by exact pattern matching for the very same reasons - there is no other way in principle. That is why there is no counters or clocks in the nature except human made ones.

Cells have an entire range of clocks for tons of purposes. Including a number of "death clocks" tracking a number of things, from passage of time since last cell division (including the famous telomeres), to amount of energy passing through the cell and a lot of more specialized clocks as well. (death clock meaning the cell will self-terminate if the clock runs down)

Just listen to your heartbeat and think again whether your cells don't track the passage of time.

And which exactly protein acts as a counter? What unit it uses? What is representation of the current value if the counter? How it deals with overflows?

Again. There is no counting inside a cell in principle. Only pattern matching of phisical molecular structures and "mechanical" triggers. No counters, no clocks, no notion of a number.

Do not confuse oscillations or rotation with time. Processes do exist. Time does not.

> And which exactly protein acts as a counter?

DNA

> What unit it uses?

That's defined, if rather complex. Essentially it's a basepair sequence.

> What is representation of the current value if the counter?

It's unary.

> How it deals with overflows?

It doesn't.

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