Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

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Hallmarks of Biological Failure/KelleyHarris

From Complex Time

Notes by user Kelley Harris (Univ. Washington) for Hallmarks of Biological Failure

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

Meeting participants have had some productive disagreement about what exactly defines aging. Is it the entirety of the change that occurs between birth and death or perhaps beyond, or just a subset of the changes that occur during one's life? Two main categories of change occur during life: one category is a sequence of programmed developmental milestones including embryogenesis, puberty and menopause. In semelparous species, even death can be viewed as a programmed developmental milestone. Another category of change is deleterious degradation of function, manifesting as cancer, heart disease, weakening of physical strength and life-sustaining activity such as predation, and even increased susceptibility to infectious disease. Some, including Roz, argue that only the second category of change should really be called aging. However, it can be hard to prove that any type of age-related decline is truly random rather than programmed.

In the classical view of aging as the breaking down of the body, participants make use of analogies involving the breakdown of man-made machines, e.g. the failure of a one-horse shay or Henry Ford Model T. However, Barbara's work challenges this view by comparing physiology between species and showing that age-related "degradation" can sometimes be an adaptive response to a stress that can in theory occur at any age. For example, age-related thickening of the heart ventricle is a rampant cause of human death today, but it is physiologically rooted in a type of phenotypic plasticity that can help a young animal adapt to high blood pressure and still live to reproduce.

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials