It’s nice to know that the entropy is good for something:
Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn (£82.5bn) – and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 – scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing.
But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints.
The study, by an international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries and including experts from the University of Oxford, set out to test the “invariant rate of ageing” hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing from adulthood.
“Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages,” said José Manuel Aburto from Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, who analysed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents.
Amelia Hill, “Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study” at The Guardian
For sure. Declines in deaths from traffic accidents — to take one example — will lead to an older average age in a population. Prevent a war and you have more old codgers around decades later. Prevent teen suicides and the same thing happens. But those people aren’t aging more slowly. They’re aging at the same rate because they are alive.
Note: The researchers found it was the same story with primate apes.
That said, there may be a kind of blip in human longevity, not fully understood, between 105 and 110 years of age. But by the time you are there, you have already broken all the rules.