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Michael Shermer column criticized

I seriously doubt that Michael Shermer is a skeptic. It just seems too easy, too suspicious.
 
The ImmInst Association: "The mission of ImmInst is to conquer the blight of involuntary death." That is, to live forever, or at least for a very long time. To me, they don't sound TOO woo-woo, but borderline...

The original article is from CSICOP, here.
 
Dorian Gray said:
I seriously doubt that Michael Shermer is a skeptic. It just seems too easy, too suspicious.
Click to expand...

You're joking, right?

Look, all of the medical work in existance has lowered the base rate of death, but hasn't changed the fact that if you'e a man, ever 7 years you are twice as likely to die, per year (over the teen years), and if you're a woman, every 8 years.

So what's the problem? Nobody's done anything to the basic problem, only lowered the constant that multiplies the function of the same shape.
 
Immortality Institute? Oh brother! Who's profiting from that one?

I think Shermer is dead on in his assessment and categorizations. And, by the way, the single biggest "cause" of increased lifespan is a decrease in infant mortality rate. It is a statistical abberation - when more people survive infancy, the average lifespan is pushed up.

"...people in the low- and middle-income economies have made a greater gain in life expectancy over the last 15 years than have those people in the high-income economies. Partly this is due to a decrease in the infant mortality rate, allowing more infants to survive to adulthood.
Click to expand...

http://research.biology.arizona.edu/mosquito/willott/323/project/population/ContrastEcon.html

Contrary to popular belief, we haven't yet made any huge breakthroughs in substantially increasing longevity. And, it's likely that, even if we do, no one will ever be able to make it much past 140 years... unless we figure out efficient, practical, safe, and effective ways in the future to utilize the methodologies that Mr. Shermer has already adeptly categorized.

-TT
 
My understanding of the matter is derived from the evolutionary theory of aging, i.e. an organism will evolve to live onl so long that it is still promoting the spread of it's genes.

If an animal lives, on average, only twenty years due to predation and accidents, then the organism is better off to try and reproduce as much as possible early on, screw the later years. Genes get better spread that way.

With that sort of optimization in place, organisms which rarely reproduce in their latter years will be subject to all sorts of nasty stuff. Since they aren't reproducing, what's to select against a gene that causes arthritis, alzheimer's, kness detatching and attacking it's eyes, communism, etc? Nothing really, the negaitve mutations can never get weeded out since the organism doesn't spread it's genes at that age.

Of course, that's not to say it necessarily has to be reproducing. A grandfather who helps his grandchildren is still spreading his genes by increasing the likelyhood of his progeny's survival into sexual maturity. this could explain why some organisms live a little while beyond fertility.
 
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