Low hanging fruit

[karff]

A low hanging fruit.

Why do we die? Or, why do most organisms die?
There is lots of evidence that aging and death are pre-programmed genetically. Therefore, there must be some evolutionary advantage to it.
We can do a “what does it prevent?” thought experiment to get an idea of what advantage death might have to gene survival.

We assume a population of immortal organisms, or those that only die from non-aging related natural causes. Accidents, predation, disease, etc. But not aging.
If an organism continued to live and reproduce, they would be continually putting their same genes into their local genetic population. They would eventually have no others to breed with but closely related descendants.

So, at first glance, death seems to be a stop against inbreeding.
But let’s look closer. The individuals living the longest would be those most well adapted, the fittest, for their environment. They would be the ones who would be the best at finding food, evading predation, avoiding accidents, resisting disease, and successfully mating. If their descendants had negative recessive traits displayed (the problem with inbreeding), they would not last long. Eventually those negative traits, recessive or not, would be purged from the gene pool, and a very narrow pool of the most fit genes would prevail.

With non-aging organisms, a local environment would eventually be occupied by a population of nearly genetically identical individuals, extremely well adapted to their environment. What is that? It’s the same genetic profile as an asexual population.

So, what is the disadvantage of asexual reproduction? After all, it results in a population of organisms supremely well adapted to their particular environment. Environmental change is the problem. When the environment shifts - a new predator, a new food source, a new pathogen, a changing climate, -the population crashes, maybe even being completely wiped out. It’s a good short term strategy for genes, but a very poor long term strategy.

So, our non-aging organisms, by not dying, are mitigating the advantage of sexual reproduction. Sex and death are a system. One part does not work without the other (there must be a joke in there somewhere).

Now, there is an idea that death is a way for the older generation to stop competing for the resources of the younger generation. But, would that yield longer-term genetic fitness? It’s competition that drives selection for fitness. If a very fit individual were to compete for resources with their offspring, the resulting pool of offspring would be more fit, not less. Those offspring, while perhaps fewer in number, would be fitter, and be able to compete more successfully with more distant populations. This would drive a selection for non-aging.

This starts to raise an interesting idea. There is a sweet spot for fitness. In the short-term, being as fit as possible is successful, as in our non-aging highly competitive population. Those genes eventually completely take over a population. Success, until an environmental change. And the whole population is wiped out, and none of the genes survive.

So, you want to be successful, but not too successful. Imagine you are the fittest organism in a population. Breeding with anybody else lowers your offspring’s fitness, as your genes are mixed with slightly less fit genes. If you continue to survive and reproduce, though, your genes will eventually take over the local population, until an environmental change completely eliminates your genes from existence. So, your “goal” should be to mitigate that success by breeding with less fit individuals, then getting out of the gene pool before you get too successful.

Death is nature’s answer to accomplishing this sweet spot of being the right amount of successful, especially if you are very fit and reproductively successful. (Aging) death is specifically the mechanism by which the most successful organisms are removed from the breeding population before they can ruin their own success. As for evidence, there has long been observed a negative correlation between fecundity and lifespan. The length of the lifespan likely being the sweet spot for a given level of fecundity.

I post this, not because the information is all that useful, but to demonstrate that there is still low hanging fruit to be had just by thinking.

And to raise some questions.
Why did no one figure this out earlier? It could have probably been realized over a century ago.
What other low hanging fruits are out there?
What kind of thinking should we engage in to discover them?

[jacob]

One explanation was given in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene which covers a lot of these concerns/ideas. In particular, as far as I understand, the reason why lethal versions (alleles) exist of a particular gene remain in the gene pool goes way back to Mendel(?): Lethal alleles must logically provide a large competitive advantage for the organism in terms of how it is able to spread more version of it despite being ultimately self-destructive. (Basically proof by contradiction. If they didn't provide an advantage they would soon disappear. But there are here, therefore ...)

In short, Dawkins explains a lot through the idea that the genes themselves really don't care what happens to the organism they construct. In that sense, genes (the information content) are effectively immortal. Organisms like bacteria, plants, humans,... are just vehicles to propagate all that DNA. The genes themselves don't care if the vehicle dies young as long as they live as a perfect copy in another body. As a human you'll find half your genes to be identical to your mother and half to your father. The particular mix is what makes you uniquely you, but the genes are the same (except for a few mutations).

Also note that some bacteria are technically immortal sans getting killed in the environment.

IIRC, also in the Selfish Gene book, Dawkins discussed how humans could technically increase the lifespan of the average human to 80 to 100 to 120 over a few centuries by increasingly delaying when everybody has children. E.g. keep pushing the age of the first child birth up to 30, 32, .... 40, 50,... etc. This would increasingly deselect the more lethal alleles as parents would not be able to propagate unless the person remained fertile after age X. Of course that would require quite the sacrifice from wannabe parents who didn't have the right genes to make the age limit.

[Jean]

To make it short, we die to make space for the following generation. And this is an advantage because the world change or might change.
Also, Dawkins reasoning, while technically right is equivalent to say that we could increase literracy by killing illiterates adult.

[jacob]

In terms of low hanging fruit in general, it's not uncommon for ideas to be discovered and published only to be ignored for years or decades or be ignored outside their country/language of origin. The world wasn't ready for the idea at the time. Often it is that case that the idea wasn't formulated in the conventional way and thus people didn't make the extra effort required to understand it. Later it gets rediscovered by someone else when the world IS ready [to understand] or it gets dug out of the archives by some notable or popular person and it gets associated with that person instead. In a variant of this, the popularization can get overly simplistic with most people not realizing that there's much more to the [original] idea than is popularly acknowledged.

It may also be that the something has not been discovered but the world is ready and just waiting. In that case we typically say that the ideas are hiding in the zeitgeist. Here multiple people might discover the idea within a short time and proceed to compete and argue over exactly who gets credit.

Ideas may also be discovered, recognized, then largely forgotten again, and rediscovered again later.

If you work in a different field, where you lack a formal background, you will often "discover" things that are novel to you but which turns out to be well-known ideas from the birth of the field or from 10-20-30-... years ago. This also is pretty common in fields where not everything gets published, such as finance. If you keep researching and your "already-discovered"-timeline is converging on the present, it's a sign that you're getting close to the frontier. It is also common in fields where a lot of amateurs try to make a point. For example, amateur climate science denialists often rediscover objections on their own without realizing that they were already refuted in published literature many decades ago. Also see: https://xkcd.com/675/

It may also be that ideas that were once novel but not widely published nevertheless had a big impact on how people thought about the field. This makes it easier to "rediscover" the original idea but harder to know that the new discovery wasn't all that original.

To answer some questions: There's isn't much low hanging fruit that is truly original. Most ideas are known somewhere at some point or by someone. Having an original idea that nobody else can claim is very rare indeed! However, if you are somewhat creative in the patent-office definition(*) of the word, it is not unusual to come up with ideas that are new to you even if they are not new to others. You could say that just like your explanation above for why organisms die, ideas die too for pretty much the same reason: to make room for discovery. And much like how the new organisms are made up of the same genes, the new ideas that are discovered are also for the most part made up of the same idea-genes that are continuously carried in the culture (where they're called memes, in the original sense, not the stupid internet perversion of the word) but also originate in the material construct of the universe (only some idea-gene combinations are actually "useful" in the real world).

(*) According to the US patent office (which derive from researchers in creativity), a creative idea must be novel, non-obvious, and useful.

[karff]

You could say that just like your explanation above for why organisms die, ideas die too for pretty much the same reason: to make room for discovery.

It’s not at all about making room. It’s about not swamping the gene pool with genes that are beneficial for only one environment.

This is the novel part: The fittest and most reproductively successful individuals of a species need to be killed off for sexual reproduction to work. Absolutely need to be.

That’s it. I’m pretty sure that’s novel.

It is not that specific genes that are detrimental hang around because they confer an advantage. That’s not the idea at all.

It’s that all the genes that cause pre-programmed death are there specifically to cause death. They are there specifically to kill off the fittest and most reproductively successful individuals.

I’ve never heard anything like that. I’m pretty sure it’s novel.

For a transdisciplinary perspective, it’s portfolio rebalancing on a species wide level. A non-aging population would be like a portfolio manager investing all the returns in the best performing asset class. When the environment changes, the portfolio tanks, and the species population crashes. Rebalancing by investing returns in underperforming asset classes is like killing off the best performing individuals for that environment to preserve genetic diversity for the next change in environment.

If anyone can show me where that specific hypothesis has been already developed, I’ll admit to non-novelty.

[karff]

Now, there is an idea that death is a way for the older generation to stop competing for the resources of the younger generation. But, would that yield longer-term genetic fitness? It’s competition that drives selection for fitness. If a very fit individual were to compete for resources with their offspring, the resulting pool of offspring would be more fit, not less. Those offspring, while perhaps fewer in number, would be fitter, and be able to compete more successfully with more distant populations. This would drive a selection for non-aging.

Maybe my writing is unclear, but I wrote this paragraph specifically to refute the idea that organisms die to make way for the next generation.

[Jean]

We had a discussion about it where i quickly came came to the same conclusion one or two years ago. It sounds pretty obvious to me and I think anyone who asks himself this question would come to the same conclusion.
I think what made us think about it was this rich dude who invest all his ressources into getting rid of death since his dad died.
It was on a french speaking telegram group.
If you wan't to claim paternity on this idea, all you have to do is to turn this 2 sentences idea into a succesfull 200pages essay.
There are thousands of "novel" idea to be had.
There hard part is not coming up with them, it's turning them into something that people derive enjoyment from.
Having idea is like ejaculating. It's just a very enjoyable part of the process of making functionning adults.
For it to amount to a result, it is preferable to do it into a woman, and most woman would accept that only if they can count on you for raising the child together.

Edit:
They die to make space for the next, making space for tge next is important to rediversify the population somehow, in case the futur is different from the past.
This is also why so many individuals are useless. They are just a bet on an hypothetical futur that isn't happening.

[mountainFrugal]

If anyone is interested in contributing to the entire developed field of population biology/ecological genetics here is a good primer of the major theoretical and empirical ideas over the last 50+ years: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ecological-genetics/

Add: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/population-genetics/
Add 2: https://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/pd ... 0186-5.pdf