Brian Eno and Richard Dawkins, art in evolution

It seems like September will be a great celebratory month. Not only full of meetings

Coming very soon, a dialog between Brian Eno, one of the directors of the long now foundation and the exquisite musician that gave us records like Before and After Science, or Another Green World, and Richard Dawkins, probably the most important living scientist and philosopher, author of The Selfish Gene and God Delusion.

The meeting will be at the Oxford Playhouse on September 4, and just six days later we will be able to enjoy the new Richard Dawkins opus: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

The diversity of evolutionary thinking continues to grow.

Daniel Dennet in Uruguay!

It will be the best to celebrate the 200 years of Charles Darwin in Punta del Este. Among several scientists, the author of Darwin Dangerous Idea will be arriving to Punta del Este, Uruguay, and giving a lecture in September 4th.

Since I will have the great honour of helping for the event, I will not be posting quite regularly.

Please find more information at http://www.darwin200.edu.uy/schedule.htm

Genes memes and ...a third kind of replicator?

The proposal is from Sue Blackmore, the author of the Meme Machine, and a superb thinker in Universal Darwinism. May we consider technology as memes, or a new and different kind of replicators?
Read yourself

Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?
31 July 2009 by Susan Blackmore
(Published at New Scientist magazine)

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs thrive because of the many failures that don't.

The information that is copied, varied and selected is called the replicator, and the process is well understood when applied to biology. Genes are copied, mutated and selected over and over again. Assemblages of genes are used to build vehicles that carry them around, protect them and propagate them. These vehicles - the lumbering robots, as Richard Dawkins calls them - are animals and plants, the prolific and exquisitely designed products of the first replicator.

About 4 billion years after the appearance of the first replicator, something extraordinary happened. Members of one species of lumbering robot began to imitate one another. Imitation is a kind of copying, and so a new evolutionary process was born. Instead of cellular chemistry copying the order of bases on DNA, a sociable species of bipedal ape began to use its big brain to copy gestures, sounds and other behaviours. This copying might not have been very accurate, but it was enough to start a new evolutionary process. Dawkins called the new replicators "memes". A living creature, once just a vehicle of the first replicator, was now the copying machinery for the next.

The idea of memes as a cultural analogue of genes has been much maligned, and most biologists still reject it. Yet memetics has much to offer in explaining human nature. According to meme theory, humans are radically different from all other species because we alone are meme machines. Human intelligence is not just a bit more or a bit better than other kinds of intelligence, it is something completely different, based on a new evolutionary process and a new kind of information.

The main difference between conventional theories and memetics is this: most biologists assume that culture and language evolved because they helped humans survive and pass on their genes, and that genes retain ultimate control. Memetics challenges that assumption. Although the capacity for imitation must once have been adaptive for the apes who started it, evolution has no foresight and could not have predicted the consequences of letting loose a new evolutionary process. Nor could it have retained control of memes once they began evolving in their own right.

So memes began to proliferate. What began as an adaptation soon became like a parasite - a new evolving entity that changed the apes and their world forever. Once memes were proliferating, individuals benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then passed on any genes that helped them do so. This "memetic drive" forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language, art, music, ritual and religion - the successful designs of human culture.

This process was dangerous. Small brains are much more efficient if you don't have to copy anything, but once memes are around you cannot survive unless you do. So brains had to get bigger, and big brains are costly to produce, dangerous to give birth to and expensive to run.

There is also danger in what is copied. If you start copying anything at all then you might copy dangerous memes, like throwing yourself off a cliff or using up all your resources in pointless rituals. This creates an arms race between two selfish replicators - memes benefiting from brains that copy anything and everything; genes benefiting from brains that are smaller, more efficient and highly selective.

Either of these dangers might have finished our ancestors off, but they pulled through. The result was a compromise, with human brains being just about as big as our bodies could stand, and yet selective enough to avoid copying lethal memes. In the same way that parasites tend to co-evolve with their hosts to become less lethal, so memes co-evolved with us. Languages, religions, skills and fashions that began as parasites turned into symbionts. Not only do we get along with our memes now, we could not live without them.

There was also a cost to the rest of life on Earth. Wherever they went humans took memes with them, spreading agriculture and changing the landscape, obliterating some species, domesticating others and changing whole ecosystems. Then, much more recently, they began to build radically new kinds of technology, and the changes they effected dwarfed anything that had gone before. Was this just more of the same or something new?

In all my previous work in memetics I have used the term "meme" to apply to any information that is copied between people, including stories in books, ideas embodied in new technology, websites and so on. The reason was that there seemed no way of distinguishing between "natural" human memes, such as spoken words, habits, fashions, art and religions, and what we might call "artificial" memes, such as websites and high-tech goods. So on the grounds that a false distinction is worse than none I stuck to the term "meme". Yet an email encrypted in digital code, broken into tiny packets and beamed around the planet does seem qualitatively different from someone shaking hands and saying "Hi". Could there be a fundamental principle lurking here? If we ask what made memes different from genes, would that help us decide what would make a new replicator different from memes?

Putting it that way makes the answer easier to see. Memes are a new kind of information - behaviours rather than DNA - copied by a new kind of machinery - brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages - copying, varying and selection - are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology?

There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains. But are all three critical stages carried out by that machinery?

We're close. We may even be right on the cusp. Think of programs that write original poetry or cobble together new student essays, or programs that store information about your shopping preferences and suggest books or clothes you might like next. They may be limited in scope, dependent on human input and send their output to human brains, but they copy, select and recombine the information they handle.

Machines now copy information to other machines without human intervention
Or think of Google. It copies information, selects what it needs and puts the selections together in new variations - that's all three. The temptation is to think that since we designed search engines and other technologies for our own use they must remain subservient to us. But if a new replicator is involved we must think again. Search results go not only to screens for people to look at, but to other programs, commercial applications and even viruses - that's machines copying information to other machines without the intervention of a human brain. From there, we should expect the system to grow rapidly beyond our control and for our role in it to change. We should also expect design to appear spontaneously, and it does. Much of the content on the web is now designed automatically by machines rather than people.

The temptation is to think that technology we designed must remain subservient to us - but think again
Memes work differently from genes, and digital information works differently from memes, but some general principles apply to them all. The accelerating expansion, the increasing complexity, and the improving interconnectivity of all three are signs that the same fundamental design process is driving them all. Road networks look like vascular systems, and both look like computer networks, because interconnected systems outcompete isolated systems. The internet connects billions of computers in trillions of ways, just as a human brain connects billions of neurons in trillions of ways. Their uncanny resemblance is because they are doing a similar job.

So where do we go from here? We humans were vehicles for the first replicator and copying machinery for the second. What will we be for the third? For now we seem to have handed over most of the storage and copying duties to our new machines, but we still do much of the selection, which is why the web is so full of sex, drugs, food, music and entertainment. But the balance is shifting.

Outnumbered
Last year Google announced that the web had passed the trillion mark, with more than 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. Many countries now have nearly as many computers as people, and if you count phones and other connected gadgets they far outnumber people. Even if we all spent all day reading this stuff it would expand faster than we could keep up.

Billions of years ago, free-living bacteria are thought to have become incorporated into living cells as energy-providing mitochondria. Both sides benefited from the deal. Perhaps the same is happening to us now. The growing web of machines we let loose needs us to run the power stations, build the factories that make the computers, and repair things when they go wrong - and will do for some time yet. In return we get entertainment, tedious tasks done for us, facts at the click of a mouse and as much communication as we can ask for. It's a deal we are not likely to turn down.

Yet this shift to a new replicator may be a dangerous tipping point. Our ancestors could have killed themselves off with their large brains and dangerous memes, but they pulled through. This time the danger is to the whole planet. Gadgets like phones and PCs are already using 15 per cent of household power and rising (New Scientist, 23 May, p 17); the web is using over 5 per cent of the world's entire power and rising. We blame ourselves for climate change and resource depletion, but perhaps we should blame this new evolutionary process that is greedy, selfish and utterly blind to the consequences of its own expansion. We at least have the advantage that we can understand what is happening. That must be the first step towards working out what, if anything, to do about it.

Your ideas: Help find a name for the third replicator

Replicators on other planets?
We are able to ask the question "Are we alone in the universe?" because our ancestors created memes, turning Earth into a "two replicator", or R2, planet, rich in language and culture. We are able to contemplate communicating with other worlds because Earth is fast becoming an R3 planet, rich in digital technology that passes information around at the speed of light, and with the potential to send it out into the galaxy. How many other planets have taken a similar course? And why haven't we heard from them yet?

The standard approach to answering that question focuses on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1961 Frank Drake proposed his famous equation for estimating the number of intelligent civilisations capable of communicating with us in our own galaxy. It includes the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of planets that can sustain life and the fraction that get intelligent life and then technology.

Perhaps intelligence and civilisation are not what we should be concentrating on. My analysis based on Universal Darwinism suggests that instead we should be looking for R3 planets. The number of those in our galaxy will depend on the probability of a planet getting a stable first replicator, then a second, and then a third. Maybe each step is hard, or maybe each is easy but dangerous. This new and simpler equation won't tell us the answers, but by posing new questions it may help us understand why - so far - we have not heard from anyone else out there.

Susan Blackmore is a writer and psychologist based in Devon, UK

Singularity is coming

Machines evolve faster than we -humans- do.

Is that something to worry? Remember Hal, from 2001 space odity

Some scientis think so.

In the photograph, a robot that plugs itself when perceives it has low battery reserves.

The report is from New York Times

July 26, 2009
Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man
By JOHN MARKOFF
A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.

The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?

Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.

The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.

“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

Ken Conley/Willow Garage

Darwin, psychology and the way we spend our money

Is Darwin Running Up Your Credit Cards?
by Laura Rowley
Posted on Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 12:00AM
If you're struggling with overspending and don't know where the money's going, Darwin may provide the answer.
In the new book "Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior," evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues humans are instinctively driven to spend money in an effort to display winning qualities and high status to others. And, not surprisingly, that can result in dysfunctional spending behaviors.
Conspicuous consumption "is not an inevitable outcome of human nature, but it's an understandable way that human nature will try to display itself in a market economy," explains Miller, who teaches at the University of New Mexico. "So instead of trying to attract mates and friends by being the best mammoth hunter, we try to be the best lawyer or the most successful entrepreneur, and display success through the goods and services we buy." Miller's book doesn't examine purchases that are merely useful or pleasurable. I buy a certain kind of Nike running shoe because it minimizes the painful stabbing in my left foot (plantar fasciitis), not because I unconsciously strive to signal my fitness to potential mates (which could complicate my marriage).
The Trouble With Marketing
But Miller suggests a good chunk of spending is prompted by unconscious desires that we have adapted over millennia to signal certain traits to others, such as youth (botox), fertility (Carrie Prejean's pre-pageant breast implants) and status (billionaire Larry Ellison's yacht, which at 138 meters, apparently measures 10 meters longer than Paul Allen's). Other core traits humans attempt to display include openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and extraversion, as well as general intelligence, Miller says. "Spent" looks at the historic shift in business from a production orientation to marketing orientation. Instead of selling something and figuring out how to convince you to buy it, smart companies are figuring out what you actually want from your products and supplying it. While it might result in happier consumers, Miller is not sure it bodes well for our collective soul.
"I think on the one hand marketing is absolutely wonderful. I'm really glad that Starbucks figured out that what you want from a coffee shop is not just decent coffee but comfortable chairs, good lighting, magazines, WiFi and a place to socialize and hang out," he says. "But the more seductive those consumer experiences are, the harder it is to save money and avoid debt and jump off the consumerist treadmill. It's an arms race of sophistication between marketers and consumers."
As marketers become increasingly savvy in associating their physical products with desirable display traits, it's easier to lose oneself in narcissism -- flaunting and chasing an endless option of fitness indicators. Consider the person who buys Glaceau Smart Water at $5.20 a gallon -- or 870 times the price of tap -- hoping to show off status and intelligence (now there's an irony).
"Narcissism is a runaway personality disorder where somebody pours too much effort and energy into trait display, and not enough into following up relationships over the long term that may have been started by the effective trait display," Miller explains. "The narcissist will effectively keep investing all his time and energy and money in display and never reap the emotional rewards of long-term relationships that those displays lead to. Narcissists care a lot about getting deference and respect from strangers. but won't cultivate relationships with the strangers worth getting to know. It's exactly what marketers want them to do because it maximizes consumer spending."
Conversation Tops Consumerism
What's somewhat disturbing (or possibly hilarious) about all the money spent on consumer goods in pursuit of desirable trait-display is that most people simply don't notice. "Social psychologists have found we remember someone's age, sex, race, possibly how physically attractive they were or some impression of social class," says Miller. "But we typically do not remember the pants they wore, the specifics about their watch or the car they were driving. Even if you talk to them over dinner, you'll get mostly a general impression about their personality or level of intelligence."
And after relationships are established, we rightly focus on more important matters like character, action and words. "The fundamentalist consumer delusion that products and brands matter, that they constitute a reasonable set of life aspirations, seems … infantile, inhuman and essentially toxic," Miller writes.
Although evolution may be driving misguided materialistic displays in an attempt to communicate our fitness, Miller argues that it doesn't have to be so.
"The cool thing about signaling is it's very non-materialistic -- it's not about taking in energy and matter to support our health as an organism but about sending symbols and signals back and forth to others," he says. "It's also appreciating the full complexity of human nature and romance and friendship, and saying we're not just after fertility or youth, but we also care about moral virtues like kindness, agreeableness and intelligence and seek that in humans we like to hang out with. Evolutionary biology actually tries to offer a vision of human nature that's more consistent with the way mature adults actually socialize -- which is not caring about physical appearance or wealth."
Bottom line, human beings who are aware of their instinctual drives to impress others will recognize that it pays to shop less and talk more. "We already have the most powerful signaling methods evolved in any species, which is language," says Miller. "The added value you get from consumerism is pretty small. People fall in love mostly through conversation. Given the richness of that signaling, what you happen to wear or the brand you favor might add 10 percent to the information which is already conveyed."
Perhaps that's the secret of the people profiled in the classic book "The Millionaire Next Door." Authors Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that many millionaires are self-made businesspeople who live in the first home they bought, drive used cars and are modest in their material displays.
"Those men and women have figured out that attracting mates and friends happens through conversation anyway," Miller suggests, adding that instead of buying stuff to display their wealth, they can talk about their passion for business. "It provides the same information about success as owning all the trinkets, but it's a lot cheaper."

The evolution of politeness

How politeness evolved

By Alan Boyle

Taking turns isn't just a nice idea. It may be as much a part of the theory of evolution as survival of the fittest - at least that's the conclusion that British researchers reached after running a genetic simulation through thousands of generations of evolutionary change.

Turn-taking behavior seem to come naturally to humans, whether it's standing in line or deciding who's going to do the dishes tonight. But such behavior has been observed in a wide variety of other species as well: Chimps take turns grooming each other, for example, and penguins take turns minding their eggs.

"It is far from obvious how turn-taking evolved without language or insight in animals shaped by natural selection to pursue their individual self-interests," University of Leicester psychologist Andrew Colman said last week in a news release about the research.

Colman and a university colleague of his, Lindsay Browning, looked into the evolution of politeness for a paper published in the September issue of the journal Evolutionary Ecology Research - not by studying actual monkeys, penguins or line-standers, but by setting up a series of genetic simulations where they could dictate the rules of the evolutionary game.

The experiment was as much an exercise in game theory as in evolutionary biology. Colman and Browning programmed a computer to play a variety of games in which the payoff varied depending on whether the simulated players made the same or different choices.

One of the best-known games in this genre is the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which two prisoners receive different penalties depending on whether they defect or stay loyal to each other. Under the most common rules of the game, the most frequent outcome is for the prisoners to rat on each other, even though they would have been better off if they had both stayed loyal.

"The Prisoner's Dilemma, which is being used to study cooperation almost exclusively to date, doesn't ever give any advantage to automata that take turns," Colman told me. "In fact, it's created a blind spot in studying this issue, in our opinion."

He and Browning mixed up the repertoire by using six games, including the Prisoner's Dilemma as well as variations of cooperative games known as the Battle of the Sexes and Stag Hunt. They also built in a little mathematical mutation to duplicate what biologists have found happens in real life. Then they ran the simulation through 2,000 evolutionary generations. Each 2,000-generation simulation was repeated 10 times to check the stability of the results.

Here's how the experiment turned out: Under the right conditions, different players locked themselves into a pattern of mutually beneficial turn-taking that could sustain itself indefinitely.

"They didn't have the benefit of language to plan any strategy such as that," Colman said. "It could be something that just evolves through natural selection, just with hard wiring."

One factor was key, he said: "You've got to have two different types, because they've got to behave in different ways in the same situation in order to initiate this behavior. Without this genetic diversity, the behavior cannot evolve."

Even though game theorists may cast this diversity as a battle of the sexes (for example, she likes opera, he likes boxing), Colman emphasized that the diversity he had in mind was not necessarily a gender split, a la "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus."

"I always tell my students, 'Women are from Earth, men are from Earth ... deal with it,'" he joked.

Rather, the diversity may take the form of different responses to environment changes (for example, becoming more dormant to conserve energy vs. becoming more active to seek out new food sources). Colman said turn-taking appears to be an instance of the "invisible hand" of natural selection at work.

"The assumption in the early days of evolutionary theory was that evolution would tend to make all organisms conform to an optimal form, and this would tend to reduce diversity. ... That turned out to be a primitive idea and not sufficiently subtle," he told me.

The fact that so many species exhibit turn-taking behavior suggests that the genetic code for cooperative behavior goes way back, Colman said. And that's a good thing, whether you're a yeast organism trying to metabolize sugar, an eel hunting for food in a coral reef ... or a filmgoer standing in line to see the latest "Harry Potter" movie.

"Humans obviously engage in turn-taking behavior. Queueing is an elaborate example of it," Colman said. "What this shows is that it's probably deep in our DNA. You don't have to necessarily assume that this is something that developed recently just because we're a civilized species."

Now it's your turn: Does this research shed new light on evolutionary theory? Is it merely a case of scientists stating the obvious? Or do you think "survival of the fittest" really doesn't explain turn-taking and other forms of altruistic behavior? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

2009/07/14/1996118.aspx

Evolution is: live longer

If you want to know how evolved is a country look to the life expectancy. The more the people live, the better that place surely is. But what about expanding our lifetime? Why can not we dream with a future when dying is just an option? Maybe that is extremely long term for you. But since today we are one step closer.
Organ transplant drug extends life of older mice
SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein,
Ap Science Writer – Wed Jul 8, 2:53 pm ET
WASHINGTON – A drug used to prevent the rejection of organ transplants was found to significantly increase the life span of older mice, researchers report. The National Institute on Aging is testing compounds that may extend the life span of mice. The drug rapamycin is the first to work for both male and female mice, according to a study published online in the journal Nature.

The drug couldn't be used for that purpose in people. It suppresses the human immune system to prevent a transplant recipient's body from attacking the donated tissues, raising the odds of disease.

Researchers didn't start the medicine on the mice until they were about 600 days old, the equivalent of about 60 years for people. Despite that delay, the rapamycin seemed to work, said lead author David Harrison of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine.

That surprised and impressed gerontologist George Martin at the University of Washington, who was not part of the study.

Females fed rapamycin lived 14 percent longer than those that didn't take the drug. For males, it was 9 percent longer.

Randy Strong, a study co-author and professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, said it is the equivalent of adding six extra years of life to men and eight years for women.

Rapamycin already extended life for yeast, worms and fruit flies.

"This is most promising," said Nancy Nadon, of the National Institute on Aging and another study co-author. She said the key is to find other compounds that target the same cellular pathway without the harmful side effects of rapamycin.

Earlier studies showed that resveratrol, which is in red wine, extended the life of obese mice. Unlike resveratrol, rapamycin worked on normal size mice of both genders, Harrison said.