Earthly Immortality Fantasists Are Poor Scholars of the Human Body's Gigantic Fine-tuned Organization and Complexity

The Reuters news agency is 173 years old, and Reuters is about as reliable a mainstream news source as you can find. A recent news article published by Reuters is entitled "Hot Mic Picks Up Putin and Xi Discussing Organ Transplants and Immortality." It seems that when Vladimir Putin (the leader of Russia) recently met with Xi (the leader of China), a microphone picked up a conversation between them discussing the prospects of 150-year lifespans and earthly immortality. 

The article states this:

"As Putin and Xi walked toward the Tiananmen rostrum where they viewed the parade with Kim, Putin's translator could be heard saying in Chinese: 'Biotechnology is continuously developing.'

The translator added, after an inaudible passage: 'Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality.' 

In response, Xi, who was off camera, can be heard responding in Chinese: 'Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.' "

Later in the article we read this:

"Putin confirmed later that he and Xi had discussed the subject on Wednesday.

'I think when we went to the parade, the chairman talked about it,' Putin told reporters in Beijing when asked about the leaked conversation.

'Modern means of health improvement, medical means, even surgical ones related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue differently than it does today,' he said."

The statement of Xi is not objectionable. It is true that "some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old. " The statement from Putin's translator is a nutty-sounding one. It obviously is untrue that "the longer you live, the younger you become." That's the opposite of the truth, which is that the longer you live, the older you become. 

The article makes Putin sounds like an earthly immortality fantasist. The earthly immortality fantasist is one who thinks that breakthroughs in medical science will discover some way for a human to keep living on Earth indefinitely, with a lifespan of greater than 1000 years. 

The people who have such fantasies tend to be materialists, and they also tend to be very poor scholars of the human body and its enormous heights of physical organization and component interdependence and fine-tuned functional complexity. The more you study such topics, the less likely you will be to believe in the possibility of humans ever achieving physical immortality on this planet. The better you understand how there had to occur a thousand miracles of hard-to-achieve fine-tuning and accidentally unachievable component interdependence for there to exist a normal human lifespan, the less likely you will be to believe that human medicine will be able to reverse the endless types of biological deterioration that occurs as people age. Similarly, someone who does not understand the complexity of a jet aircraft might think that a few modifications might allow a jet aircraft to keep flying forever. 

Human bodies have enormously high levels of organization. A human body is built from organ systems and a skeletal system; organ systems are built from organs and other extremely complex components; organs are built from tissues; tissues are built from cells; cells are enormously complex units built from organelles; organelles are built from proteins and protein complexes;  protein complexes (often so complex they are called molecular machines) are built from various types of protein molecules; protein molecules are very special arrangements of hundreds or thousands of amino acids; and amino acids are built from about twenty atoms.   The human body has a more impressive degree of organization and complexity than any machines humans have ever manufactured. 

A long-standing characteristic of materialism and Darwinism is a failure to adequately describe the enormous organization and fine-tuned functional complexity of living organisms, and the huge interdependence of their parts. There is a reason why materialists and Darwinists have habitually tended to avoid describing the human body in a way that adequately depicts the enormous levels of organization in the human body.  The reason is that the better job you do at describing such organization, the less plausible materialism and Darwinism appear to be.  

The Darwinist materialist wants you to believe that human bodies arose because of blind accidental processes.  Most of us can intuitively realize a principle that I have called the first rule of accidental construction. In a previous post I defined that rule as follows:

The first rule of accidental construction: the credibility of any claim that an impressively organized final result was accidentally achieved is inversely proportional to the number of parts that had to be well-arranged to achieve such a result, and the amount of organization needed to achieve such a result.

I can illustrate the principle with a simple example. A person throwing some cards into the air might accidentally achieve a "house of cards" consisting of one card diagonally resting against another. But the larger the number of well-arranged cards, the smaller the chance that the result could be the work of chance. You might believe someone if he said he threw some cards into the air and produced a result like this by mere chance:

But you would be a fool if you believed someone who told you that he threw a deck of cards into the air, and it produced the result shown below (which would never be produced by chance even if 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times a deck of cards was thrown into the air). 

The more well-arranged parts something requires, and the greater the variety of the part types, and the greater the complexity and interdependence of the parts, and the higher the number of systems the thing requires, the less likely that thing could be the result of unguided processes. So because materialists want us to believe that human bodies arose from unguided processes, they tend to poorly describe the organization and functional complexity of human bodies. A materialist may say "you're just some meat" or "you're just some flesh" rather than correctly describing your body as a fine-tuned whole that is a set of enormously complex systems that are themselves built of enormously complex systems that are themselves built of enormously complex systems.

In the world of materialism you are constantly inhibited and steered away from engaging in proper scholarship of biological organization and biological complexity and the interdependence of enormously well-arranged biological components. This results in what we might call biocomplexity ignoramuses. And such biocomplexity ignoramuses may believe in the possibility of earthly immortality, which they may think is "not too much of a stretch." 

The idea of earthly immortality is utterly unbelievable. Human bodies look just like unfathomably complex systems that were deliberately designed to wear out and fail after about 70 or 80 years (with a slim possibility of a few decades more of earthly life). There are countless factors that limit the human lifespan. There are no little tweaks that will transform such bodies into systems that can live on Earth for centuries. 

A fundamental fact of biology limiting human lifespans is something called the Hayflick limit. The wikipedia.org article on the topic explains the concept well. A Nobel Prize winning scientist (Alexis Carrel) had maintained that human cells can reproduce pretty much endlessly. The scientist Leonard Hayflick did research refuting the idea. Hayflick showed that human cells can only reproduce about 50 or 60 times. The limit is called the Hayflick limit. 

There are about 200 types of cells in the human body. Many types of cells in the human body have limited lifespans. For example:

• Intestinal cells have a lifetime of only four days. 
• Skin cells only last days to weeks. 
• Fat cells only last about 8 years. 
• Liver cells only last about 10 to 16 months. 
• Pancreas cells only last about a year. 
• Red blood cells only last about 120 days. 
• White blood cells only last between hours and years. 

The Hayflick limit is one of many reasons why there is a built-in limit to the human lifespan. The main reason is that the human body is such a miracle of superbly arranged organization, intricate fine-tuning and just right biochemistry, dynamism and component interdependence  that there are endless opportunities for things to go wrong, and endless possibilities for gradual deterioration.  The longer a person lives, the smaller the chance of escaping the endless ways that superbly intricate and enormously fine-tuned systems in the human body can break down. Similarly, if a man plays Russian Roulette every year, firing a gun with 1 chance in 6 of killing him, then with each passing decade his chance of surviving will diminish.

The software industry has a great expression: "It's not a bug, it's a feature." We can say that about the limited human lifespan. But that limit should be no cause of concern for the person who has adequately studied the evidence for paranormal phenomena and life after death, the extremely many reasons for disbelieving that the human mind and human memory can be explained by the brain, and the very many reasons for thinking that we live in a purposeful universe in which  human beings are no accident of nature, but instead creatures who are here on purpose as part of some grand plan.  

The world's religions have very many diverse forms, and only some of them involve a belief in a deity. It was pointed out by anthropologist Clifford Geertz that you can have a religion without any belief in a deity. The communism of the Soviet Union in the 20th century was a kind of stealth religion, and its features met Geertz's anthropological definition of religion.  He defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." In its transhumanist form today's Darwinist materialism seems to be clearly a religion, as I point out in my post " Transhumanism Puts the Finishing Touches on the Materialist Religion," which you can read here.  Below are features of the transhumanist form of Darwinist materialism, which are also hallmarks of organized religions (read the post for how all of these boxes are checked in the case of the transhumanist form of Darwinist materialism):

When self-described scientific thinkers start teaching an eternal life eschatology based on technological fantasies requiring poor scholarship about human bodies and human minds, it becomes all the more clear that we are dealing with a religion. That has funding consequences.  We are told that the US constitution prohibits any funding in support of a religion, but what about when the religion is a religion-in-all-but-name, a kind of stealth religion? Why should billions of federal dollars be going to support such a stealth religion, with no similar funding for religions that call themselves religions? As for the idea of a very old man being kept alive by receiving an  organ taken from a younger man, it is in general morally abhorrent, particularly whenever the donor did not die a natural death or whenever there are younger people waiting for transplants of the same organ. Medicine should be focused on allowing people to live full and happy lives to about the age of 70 or 80, rather than being focused on getting very old people to live to be older and older and older. 

Cellular Reprogramming: Fountain of Youth or Snake Oil Scam?

It was a bad day recently for a Harvard genetics professor. The Daily Mail ran a story with the headline "Top Harvard professor Dr David Sinclair accused of 'selling snake oil' after pushing 'unscientific' pill said to reverse aging in dogs - and resigns from prestigious academy over backlash."  We read this:

"Dr David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, has been hit with allegations of pushing bogus antiaging drugs over the last decade - including one he was paid $720 million to develop by pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline. The 54 year-old renowned scientist has made previous claims that he 'reversed' his own age by a decade using unconventional lifestyle 'hacks,' and most recently promoted an 'unscientific' supplement developed by his company that claimed to reverse aging in dogs. But the pill is said to 'not be supported by data,' according to University of Washington aging professor Matt Kaeberlein."

We read this about a study involving dogs:

"The dogs were tracked for six months, with 51 completing the study. Animals in the full-dose group showed slight improvements in cognition as reported by their owners after three months, but the effect was not maintained through six months. However, there was no difference between groups in changes in activity level, gait speed or cognitive tests performed by the researchers.

Dr Sinclair revealed the results on X alongside a promotional image for Leap Year, claiming: 'First-of-its-kind supplement clinically proven to slow effects of aging in dogs. Available at LeapYears.com.'

He shared a hyperlink that took his 441,000 followers to a landing page where they could buy the supplement for $70 to $130 for a one-month supply."

Scientists objected, saying that there was no evidence that the supplement reversed aging. Dr. Matt Kaeberlein was quoted as saying this:

"Dr Kaeberlein, a longevity biologist, wrote on X: 'I find it deeply distressing that we've gotten to a point where dishonesty in science is normalized to an extent that nobody is shocked when a tenured Harvard professor falsely proclaims in a press release that a product he is selling to pet owners has 'reversed aging in dogs.' To me, this is the textbook definition of a snake oil salesman."

Dan Eton, a data scientist at Mass General says, "David Sinclair consistently exaggerates the claims of research that he has a financial stake in. It makes me sick to my stomach."

The study is here. The study group sizes were not 51, but only about 16 per study group. We should not take very seriously any reported evidence of modest cognitive benefits, given the difficulty of measuring cognition in dogs, and the failure of this study to provide convincing experimental tests of dog cognition. 

Schematic depiction of next year's anti-aging supplement

The Harvard scientist criticized above (David Sinclair) is co-author (with Yang and others) of a 2023 paper "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging."  The paper makes the very dubious claim that "loss of epigenetic information accelerates the hallmarks of aging," that "these changes are reversible by epigenetic reprogramming," and that "by manipulating the epigenome, aging can be driven forward and backward."  These claims are sharply criticized by a critique of the paper, a paper entitled "Matters Arising: the information theory of aging has not been tested."  The authors are James A. Timmons and Charles Brenner. 

Referring to Yang and Sinclair's paper, Timmons and Brenner say "Extraordinary claims in the paper are unsupported by evidence," and that "no significant conclusion of Yang was demonstrated."  They say, "Despite statements in the summary, highlights and discussion and depiction in the graphical abstract, there was also no reversal of aging in the article and indeed, the corresponding author retracted such claims after publication (Supplementary Material 2)."  Referring to the journal Cell that the paper of Yang and Sinclair was published in, and recommending that the paper be retracted, Timmons and Brenner say this: 

"Cell publishes papers that provide 'significant conceptual advances'  on 'an interesting and important biological question.'  The journal is not supposed to publish misleading papers that fail to disclose citations and related manuscripts, obfuscate mechanisms, provide poorly controlled experiments, and grandiosely overstate results."

But the truth is that when publishing experimental neuroscience results, the journal Cell very often publishes poorly designed research following Questionable Research Practices, and such papers very frequently "grandiosely overstate results." The "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging" paper is one with ridiculously small study group sizes such as 2 mice, 3 mice and 4 mice.  

I previously mocked the way-too-small study group sizes typically used in neuroscience cognitive research, noting that typically the total number of mice used is only about as big as the number of paper authors, saying that it was if these people were following  the ridiculous rule of only using one mouse per scientist. We have that type of situation in this "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging" paper, which has 58 authors, but sounds like it used a total number of mice much fewer than that. The paper has no mention of a detailed blinding protocol, mentioning blinding only in passing when referring to two tiny fractions of the total work going on.  Why do big rich biotech companies work on papers with such ridiculously small numbers of mice and without decent blinding protocols? It sure isn't because they can't afford to test with 100 times more mice. The answer is probably: because it's so vastly easier to get false alarms when you use tiny study group sizes and don't use a decent blinding protocol. And the right type of false alarm can do wonders for the stock price of a biotech company. 

Sinclair has got very rich partially by writing a book entitled "Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To," a book selling millions of copies. A critical review of the book by a scientist (Charles Brenner) states this: 

"According to the book, Sinclair discovered genes called sirtuins that extend lifespan in organisms from yeasts to humans and he found sirtuin activators in red wine and elsewhere. Why do we age? Sinclair’s theory is poor information transmission that can be fixed by greater sirtuin function. Why we don’t have to age? He says that we can take sirtuin activators every morning and soon, we’ll take chemicals that will safely reprogram our genes to restore youthful vigor.....Do sirtuins extend lifespan in yeast, invertebrates and vertebrates? Has Sinclair discovered sirtuin activators? Based on 25 years of work by academic and industrial investigators, the clear answer to both questions is no (Brenner, 2022b).....In the accompanying Lifespan podcast, Sinclair makes innumerable non-evidence based statements about benefits of time-restricted eating, statements about age-reversal as evidenced only by changing biomarkers (Fahy et al., 2019), and even potential immortality by repeatable drug treatments. The latter statements were particularly shocking because one of the drugs used to lower biomarkers of aging was growth hormone, which is clearly defined by genetics as a pro-aging molecule (Bartke, 2021).....Sinclair’s attempts to commercialize scientific discoveries have an abysmal track record—these include the multibillion dollar investment of GSK in his sirtuin story (Schmidt, 2010) and Ovascience, whose work in female fertility could not be replicated (Powell, 2006; Weintraub, 2016). For scientific discoveries to be developed they need to be real but for books to sell, the stories just have to be good. The reach of Lifespan is a problem for the world precisely because a Harvard scientist is telling fictitious stories about aging that go nowhere other than continuing hype as legendary as anything in Herodotus."

Who's right and who's wrong here? I'll let the reader judge that. I do know from a long and very careful study of DNA that the idea that DNA or its genes are a "program" for either making or maintaining cells is a great big lie. DNA and its genes contain only low-level chemical information. DNA and its genes have no information on human anatomy, and do not even specify how to make or maintain any cell or any of the organelles that are the building components of a cell. So the idea that cells can be rejuvenated by medicine-induced "cellular reprogramming" seems pretty fishy. Scientists cannot even currently explain how a cell is able to reproduce. How there occurs the reproduction of something as enormously complex and organized as a human cell is a mystery very far over the heads of scientists. So what confidence can we have in scientists talking about "cellular reprogramming"? 

Biologists frequently underestimate the vast hierarchical complexity of human bodies, and very frequently speak as if they were trying to prevent the public from learning about such exquisite complexity, possibly because they may realize that the credibility of their claims of accidental biological origins is inversely proportional to the amount of fine-tuned organization and functional complexity of large organisms such as humans.  The more we properly understand the stratospheric levels of fine-tuned organization and hard-to-achieve complexity of human bodies, the less confidence we will have that scientists are anywhere near to being able to roll back aging by fiddling with so-called "cellular reprogramming."

An MIT Technology Review article in 2022 says this about claims that the lifespan of some mice have been extended by cellular reprogramming:

"So far, many of these individual rejuvenation claims for live mice haven’t been widely replicated by other labs, and some people are skeptical they ever will be. Measuring the relative health of animals or their tissues isn’t necessarily a precise science. And in unblinded studies (where the researchers know which animals were treated), wishful thinking can play a role, perhaps especially if billions in venture capital dollars ride on the result. 'Frankly, I doubt the reproducibility of these papers,” says Hiro Nakauchi, a professor of genetics at Stanford University. Nakauchi says he also created mice with Yamanaka factors, but he never saw any sign they got younger. He suspects that some of the most dramatic claims are 'timely and catchy' but that the science that went into them is 'not very accurate.'  "

From my careful study over many years of flaws in rodent studies wrongly claiming evidence of neural memory storage, I know some of the pathways of errors that can occur here:

(1) Scientists with very large funding are free to do innumerable studies, and may file away all negative results, not even submitting them for publication. Research practices for rodent studies tend to be  poor, with a very common occurrence of Questionable Research Practices. 

(2) The number of mice used in such studies is typically very small, creating a significant chance (maybe 1 in 20) of "statistically significant" results in any one study, even if no real effect is involved. 

(3) With so many studies being done, it's easy to get something like a study showing some mice with higher lifespan. You can just get chance results, file away in your file cabinet the unsuccessful results, and submit for publication the luckiest results.  

Consequently, it means very little that some 3 billion dollar biotech company has a few studies showing a few mice lived longer than average when given some treatment. How many negative studies does it have filed away in its file cabinets, using the same methods?

There is still the possibility that there might be treatments that partially reverse aging. Part of aging is relatively uncomplicated stuff like the plaque that builds up in your arteries, like the gunk that slowly builds up in your kitchen drainpipe.  Reversing that may be  relatively simple. But something like that is totally different (and vastly simpler) than "cellular reprogramming."

Someone as old as me is old enough to remember that for 50 years scientists have been making claims that reversing or stopping aging was "right around the corner."  It seemed that for twenty years we were told that the key to stopping aging was just to shorten something called telomeres that are found on the ends of chromosomes. For decades we were told that there would soon be some medicine that would shorten telomeres to halt or stop aging. 

You don't hear too much about telomeres these days. 

Nowadays scientific papers have a very inadequate listing of the vested interests of the authors. After the end of the main text of the 2023 paper "Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging" in fine print we have a "Declaration of Interests" statement that refers to the massive vested interests of David A. Sinclair, noting "D.A.S. is a consultant, inventor, board member, and in some cases an investor in Life Biosciences (developing reprogramming medicines), InsideTracker, Zymo, EdenRoc Sciences/Cantata/Dovetail/Metrobiotech, Caudalie, Galilei, Immetas, Animal Biosciences, Tally Health, and more."  What is with the initials, which makes it hard for people to realize the conflict of interest involved? What should occur is that at the very beginning of a paper written by an author with vested interests, we should have a large-type  boldface plain English statement such as this:

"NOTE: One of the chief authors of this paper (John F. Schmitzenholzer)  has major stock investments in a company (XYZ Products, Inc.) that will financially benefit very much from the claims made in this paper, and that person receives large sums of money from that company. The same thing is true for most of the authors of this paper."

I can describe one big piece of statistical funny business that commonly occurs in scientific papers on so-called cellular reprogramming. It is what you can call the "remaining lifespan" trick. It works like this: you try some treatment on a small group of some very old mice, and even if the treatment has no benefit, there will be about 1 chance in 10  that you will be able to report that the treated mice had a significantly larger "remaining lifespan" than the untreated mice.  In captivity mice can have lifespans range from 6 to 18 months, or in some cases as long as 3 years. So if you start testing with very old mice, you can easily get variations in "remaining lifespan" of up to 200%, merely by chance. 

Consequently, we should not be impressed at all by the results in the paper here, which claims that some treatment on mice "extends the median remaining lifespan by 109% over wild-type controls."  The study started out with a treatment group of about 19 very old mice that were 124 weeks old, and a control group of about the same size and age (Figure 1C).  The mice lived on for between 3 weeks and 40 weeks, with the average remaining lifetime being about 15 weeks.  About 13 out of 19 of the treated mice had a remaining lifespan  greater than the average.  By using a binomial probability calculator such as the one at Stat Trek, you can see that this is a result that you might expect by chance (using a completely ineffective treatment) in about 8% of experiments like this:

 We should regard the reported result as being unimpressive when we consider that scientists are free to try experiments such as this mouse study many times, placing in their file drawers unsuccessful results, and submitting for publication results that reach about this level of success.  So given many biotech companies funding experiments of this type, we would expect to have multiple published results about as impressive as this one, even if the treatments have no effectiveness. 

We can get the real story here by considering not the tending-to-fool-you statistic of "increase in remaining lifespan" but the statistic of total lifespan.  The treated mice had a total lifespan of about 144 weeks, and the untreated mice had a total lifespan of about 136 weeks. The treated group of mice therefore had a total lifespan that was only about 6% greater than the untreated mice. But rather than reporting this statistic (which gives us the real story on how slight are the results), the paper has used the "remaining lifespan" trick to tell us the technically correct but very "give you the wrong idea" statistic that the "remaining lifespan" was 109% greater in the treated mice.  

But perhaps I am being too pessimistic about such cellular reprogramming.  I cannot claim to be a careful scholar of anti-aging research. I have spent many years very carefully studying the evidence that the human mind is not the product of the human brain, and evidence for psychical phenomena and paranormal phenomena that suggest humans are souls that will survive death (as you can see in my 198 posts here). Such evidence leaves me thinking that aging and death are nothing to fear. 

Postscript: See my earlier post "The Lesson of the Telomere Myth" for more about how scientists specializing in anti-aging methods misled us for a long time about telomeres. Two of them predicted in 2011 that aging would be cured by about that year.  The Wall Street Journal has a post about Sinclair's claims here, one entitled "Star Scientist’s Claim of ‘Reverse Aging’ Draws Hail of Criticism." 

Aging Reversed, but There's a Catch

If you are as much of an ancient relic as I am, you probably as a general rule don't get too excited about news reports of experimental progress in reversing aging in lab animals. The reason is that these type of stories have been coming out for many years. I've been reading for a good 40 years that scientists have been making interesting progress in learning about aging. The stories often tend to make it sound as if an anti-aging pill may be just around the corner. But after 40 years of such stories, there's still no anti-aging treatment for humans.

But I must admit my eyebrow raised when I read this week's story about a new experimental treatment in mice. In the study (done at Harvard University and the University of NSW) some two-year-old mice were given a compound which caused them in several ways to appear or act as young as six-month-old mice. The mice were injected a compound called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide or NAD. The drug works on the mitochondria, which is called the “powerhouse” of a cell.

The most amazing thing about the treatment is how fast it worked. The mice started looking and acting younger after only one week.

Upon reading these facts, my hopes were raised. This is just what I was hoping for to revitalize my tired old wrinkled body – a simple injection. No need for some lengthy treatment involving long hours of sitting on a hospital bed; just a nice simple injection as easy as a vaccination.

When the news article suggested that human trials might start as early as next year, my hopes were further raised. But then I came to one little detail in the story that made the whole thing burst like a child's balloon.

Near the end of the story it mentioned that the cost of the treatment would be 50,000 dollars a day.

So apparently what we have is an “age reversal for billionaires” kind of treatment. Nice if you're Bill Gates, but not terribly relevant if you are an average guy like me.

I hope very much that no taxpayer dollars are used to fund research on any treatment with a cost of 50,000 dollars a day. If billionaires want to fund research for insanely expensive age-reversal drugs, for their own benefit, they should be allowed to do so. But the average man should not be funding research for drugs that only the super-rich will be able to afford.

Rejuvenated 95-year-old, but wait until he gets the bill!