Futurehead.com

Why do we suffer poor health, disease, and limited healthspan? A wide variety of mechanisms are at play, but interpretation of genetic data from fruit flies bred for longevity suggests the major culprit may not be accumulated damage, or any particular mechanism, but rather the intersection of biological complexity with evolutionary adaptation.

Long-lived flies demonstrate a huge breadth and depth of genetic differences from ordinary flies, rather than a few key alterations. Adaptations specialized for different stages of life interfere with each other antagonistically, causing many of the phenomena we perceive as aging, and leaving us in late life with a high but constant death rate. The networks underlying longevity are the networks underlying the overall operation of the organism.

Today’s “narrow AI” tools, applied to the data from long-lived flies and other experimentally evolved organisms, will likely allow us to discover powerful new drugs for combating disease and increasing healthspan. But to thoroughly solve the “limited healthspan” problem will probably require generally intelligent Artificial Biologists, capable of deeply comprehending the structure and dynamics of biological networks in a way the human mind cannot.

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