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Tim Kellogg

do you ever think about how some organisms, like lobsters, don’t age and are effectively immortal, but most do age? like, we evolved to die. it was evolutionarily advantageous to die, otherwise most organisms would be immortal

i guess it’s similar to why short-lived feature branches work well than immortal forks of source code in software.

or why smaller batches work better in stochastic gradient descent

immortality can be stable and robust, but anti-fragility needs those opportunities for pivots provided by short life spans

@kellogh I can't find the link but after they manipulated fruit flies to breed a line of long lived flies, when they went back their regular lab environment the long lived fruit flies had no advantage and the lifespans went back to the usual short lifes.

@mistersql ah! i want to read that one!

@kellogh
Not evolved to die. Rather, just not evolved to stay in working order beyond our evolutionary useful life span. Just like you don't over-design products, making them heavier, larger and more expensive, if there's no overall benefit.

@kellogh
Think of how whales and mice - both mammals - have a similar (low but not zero) rate of cancers in the wild. But the whale has orders of magnitude more cells and an order of magnitude longer life span.

The whale clearly has a much more solid system to prevent cancers. The mouse (and we) probably could have but doesn't, because having it wouldn't pay off in general.

@kellogh lobsters do age and die, i think the average age was like 40-50 years. you might be thinking about the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, which can shrink in on itself and reverse its medusa stage, then begin anew. i find that more poignant

@kellogh I see it as dying wasn't threatening the survival of the specie

@gkrnours right, i think we forget what evolution is optimizing for. individuals don’t matter, it’s all about the collective

@kellogh lobsters probably just have immortal style souls, like elves.

@ReverendMoose they probably speak cool languages too