katch wreck

here's a new science #rant on #aging :)

as far as biology can tell, aging is best understood, #philosophically at least, as part of a #developmental continuum between #embryogenesis & death, which is pre-programmed somehow. therefore, we cannot in principle place precise "boundaries" or "cutoffs" between development, adulthood, and seniority. In strict #biological terms, they are all part of one continuous #program. a complete explanation of aging therefore requires complete #devbio knowledge

Apr 20, 2024 at 7:07amWeb
Show threadkatch wreckApr 20, 2024
So, if you're on board with what's stated above, then please consider the following: decyphering the (unknown) "aging program", if you will, entails a two-level challenge: one, we must (with some sufficient degree of correctness) infer what the language of this aging program is, in terms of its programmatic structure, and its corresponding evolutionary/biological/biophysical mechanisms. two, we must then again infer what the content of this program is, which is analogous to decrypting a cypher
Show threadkatch wreckApr 20, 2024
i.e., we have a decryption problem wrapped inside of an inverse (system identification) problem: we don't know the language, the rules, or the message. all we have are whatever biological insights we can gain from our rather short-timescale observations using rather perceptually-limited instrumentation and cognitive abilities. as is often the case in biology, as in cosmology, it is the vastness of the unknown that makes any attempt at a complete explanation extremely error-prone. like infinity!
Show threadkatch wreckApr 20, 2024
people often rush into the aging research field eager to decrypt the message of the program, as if the language and logic of the program were already somehow reasonably-well described. that is the pitfall of aging-related research: somehow human tendencies are biased towards REALLY wanting to believe that our perceptions are somehow sufficient to paint a "reasonably complete" picture of how things might work in reality (without any evidence of this). so people want aging to be simple to explain.
Show threadkatch wreckApr 20, 2024
OK, so if decrypting aging is analogous to cracking a cipher, then what good does it do to apply your code-cracking techniques to a language whose grammer is completely alien to anything you've ever seen before? it probably does not do that much good. to me, this analogy more or less explains why aging-related research is moving far slower than some of the hype-driven claims might lead you to believe. fundamentally, developmental biology is so mysterious to us, that we cannot infer its rules.
Show threadkatch wreckApr 20, 2024
in a nutshell: until we understand what aging is really for, we cannot understand how it really works.