Do we not understand enough about the human body? I have heard that we don’t fully understand the mechanism behind aging and this got me wondering. I mean our body seems to be like one of the first things we’d investigate, and yet we seem to know less than I had originally thought.
In: 70
Questions about “cause” are often hard, because they can mean any one of several things. To elaborate consider:
* **What is aging?** Does any form of disability that accumulates over time count? Presumably not, since no-one considers traumatic amputation to be aging. What about the avoidable effects of too much sun exposure, or heavy drinking? Some people argue that aging is not actually a thing at all, but the accumulation of various unrelated types of damage to the organism.
* **How does aging take place?** This is probably along the lines of what you were thinking, but still not a particularly well formed question. For instance, suppose we find that “aging” is controlled by DNA damage, in the sense that if we increase or decrease DNA damage that increases or decreases the amount of aging. OK, that would be an answer. But what controls that? Maybe, for example, DNA damage is directly predicted by reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the cytoplasm. OK, so that’s another answer. But ROS production in itself is regulated. What controls that? And so on.
* **Why do things not not age?** Evolution has solved the problem of building trillion cell organisms from a single set of genetic (and epigenetic) material. Why doesn’t it keep that organism alive once it’s made? To me this is a rather vexing question, and I haven’t seen any well supported answers. Explaining the near ubiquity of aging, IMO, is about as hard, and probably related to, the problem of explaining the near ubiquity of sexual reproduction (among animals and animal like protists, in both cases).
Latest Answers