Ageing and Philosophy

"There is nothing like will; everybody can do exactly what they like in this world, provided they really like it." {Lord Beaconsfield, alias Disraeli, in "Endymion"} ... If this is as true as I believe it to be, "the longing after immortality," though not indeed much of an argument in favour of our being immortal at the present moment, is perfectly sound as a reason for concluding that we shall one day develop immortality, if our desire is deep enough and lasting enough."

Samuel Butler (1835-1902). Alps and Sanctuaries p. 23 (1881)

Around 161 BC in the comedy Phormio, by Terance, an old man is asked by his brother what illness afflicts him and replies: "Why do you ask? The illness is old age itself." In 1732 the doctoral thesis of Jacob Hutter was entitled "Senescence itself is an illness" (Senectus ipsa morbus est). The incurable nature of the illness was commented on by Seneca (Senectus enim insanabilis morbus est; see Schäfer 2002 Med. Hist 46, 525-48). Twentieth century optimism led to a marked change in attitude towards the issue of incurability, an optimism that Samuel Butler had, as usual, anticipated.

Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958). Probably in Berlin in the early 1930s. A photograph from the collection of the National Library of Medicine, USA."I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved. What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!"

Richard B. Goldschmidt (1878-1958). In and Out of the Ivory Tower. (1960) University of Washington Press, Seattle, p. 311.

 

"The passage from non-existence to non-existence seems to me a strange and, on the whole, enjoyable experience. ... But I resent the fact that, as seems to be practically certain, I shall be as non-existent after my death as I was before my birth. Nothing can be done about it and I cannot truthfully say that my future extinction causes me much fear or pain, but I should like to record my protest against it and against the universe which enacts it."

Leonard Woolf (1880-1969). Sowing (1960) Hogarth Press, London, pp. 1-2.

 

Stephen Jay Gould"It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light."

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) Bully for Brontosaurus. Reflections on Natural History. (1991) W. W. Norton, New York.

These views of two great twentieth century evolutionists and an outstanding "man of letters" capture a changed attitude towards death. In Richard Goldschmidt (born 1878) and Leonard Woolf (born 1880) we find calm acceptance. In Stephen Jay Gould (born 1941) we find an apparent awareness of the possibility that ageing may be a disease like any other disease. So far, it seems to be a disease with a 100% mortality. But, as Samuel Butler foresaw in 1881, that may not always be so. He had just read Thomas Huxley's treatise on The Crayfish (1879):

"That all living beings sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but it would be difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief that they needs must do so. The analogy of a machine, that sooner or later must be brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its parts, does not hold, inasmuch as the animal mechanism is continually renewed and repaired; and though it is true that individual components of the body are constantly dying, yet their places are taken by vigorous successors. A city remains notwithstanding the constant death-rate of its inhabitants; and … an organism … is only a corporate unity, made up of innumerable partially independent individualities."

    Reflecting this, there are now government Institutes of Ageing with mandates that extend beyond "geriatrics" (how to age with health and grace) to "gerontology" (how to understand and reverse the ageing process so that normal life may be extended).

   A fundamental idea is that in the course of evolution most organisms have died early from environmental insults (e.g. predators) and so there has been no selective pressure for enhancing later life. Organisms are selected to be optimal, in terms of the number and health of their offspring, in their early years. Indeed, genes which operate such as to achieve early optimization may even exert negative effects if operating in the same way later in life (should the organism survive environmental insults, as most humans seem to today). 

    Thus, a high blood pressure may be selectively advantageous in early life, but may predispose the organism to cardiovascular problems in later life. Similarly, genes concerned with somatic DNA repair have been fine-tuned over evolutionary time to work optimally during the early years. Their failure to do this later in life would have no consequences in terms of the number and health of offspring. The essence of this was perceived by Charles Darwin who in his 1837 notebook Abstract of John Macculloch wrote:

Suppose six puppies are born <<& it so chances, that one out of every hundred litters is born with long legs>> & in the Malthusian rush for life, only two of them live to breed, if circumstances determine that, the long legged one shall rather oftener than any other one. survive. in ten thousand years the long legged race will get the upper hand. though continually dragged back to old type by intermarrying with ordinary race. -- <<There is no way of eliminating the evils of old age, after breeding season, or gaining adaptations, but for youth most necessary: the fertility of Man in old age keeps woman alive: for Man and woman are same: fertility of either sex determines life[span]:.>> [The double arrow brackets imply insertion to Darwin's original text presumably by Darwin.]

Likewise, in 1929 the great pioneer of modern biostatistics, Ronald Fisher, wrote:

Ronald Fisher"In man, the death-rate increases and the expectation of life decreases with increasing age. Death might be just as inevitable without this being so. For example, if the expectation of life were 20 years at all ages, we should have a half chance of dying within about 14 years, only one in a thousand would live to be 140, and one in a million to 280. We should all die sooner of later as we do now, only - if fertility continued - even the oldest would have the same expectation of further posterity as the youngest, and would be as much affected by selection, and consequently there would be no tendency for their death-rate to become higher than at early maturity, where in man it is least.

    In fact, the incidence of death or cessation of reproduction (or at least of reproductive usefulness) determines the action of natural selection, which in turn reacts on the death rate. In an oak in the forest, I suppose an old tree has a greater expectation of posterity than a young one, so that it would be a bad bargain for the father oak to benefit his offspring unless he could do so by losing considerably less than the offspring gains.

    The reproductive value at different ages must determine the extent to which parental care pays. If all ages were of equal reproductive value, a species would tend to benefit its offspring up to the point at which the offspring gains double the advantage which the parent loses, but no further. Of course, immature offspring are usually worth much less, and so should be cared for only at a cheaper rate still. But if crocodiles were able to recognize their mature offspring, I suppose they would co-operate with them not only in terms of mutual advantage, but in terms of joint advantage so long as the loss of either did not exceed the half the gain of the other. Hence society starts with the family."

Letter of R. H. Fisher to Charles Darwin's son Major Leonard Darwin. 27th June 1929. Natural Selection, Heredity, and Eugenics. Edited by J. H. Bennett. (1983) Oxford University Press

These ideas were elaborated in Fisher's 1930 book (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Oxford University Press) by Peter Medawar (1952; An Unsolved Problem in Biology, H. K. Lewis, London), and by others (e.g. Charlesworth, B. 2000. Genetics 156, 927-931; Gavrilova, L. A. & Gavrilova, N. S. 2002. The Scientific World Journal. 2, 339-356; Moriera, T. 2019. Studies in History & Philosophy of Biol and Biomed Sci. 77, 101179)

 Much of this had been anticipated by Samuel Butler, beginning in 1878 with his first evolution book - Life and Habit (p. 170).

After any animal has reached the period at which it ordinarily begins to continue its race [today read adolescence], we should expect that it should show little further power of development, or, at any rate, that few great changes of structure or fresh features should appear; for we cannot suppose offspring to remember anything that happens to the parent subsequently to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring within itself [today read subsequent to a parent discharging the gamete that produced that offspring]; from the average age, therefore, of reproduction [termination of reproduction; e.g. parental menopause], offspring should cease to have any further experience on which to fall back [i.e. no knowledge of what a post-menopausal person experiences], and would thus continue to make the best use of what it already knew, till memory failing in one part or another, the organism would begin to decay. To this cause must be referred the phenomena of old age, which interesting subject I am unable to pursue within the limits of this volume.

The idea again explicit in his later Humour of Homer and Other Essays:

If heredity and memory are essentially the same [today read DNA], we should expect no animal would develop new structures of importance after the age at which its species begins ordinarily to continue its race [today read when it stops producing offspring]; for we cannot suppose offspring to remember anything that happens to the parent subsequent to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring within itself [today read the gamete that produced that offspring]. From the average age, therefore, of reproduction [termination of], offspring should cease to have any further steady, continuous memory [today read DNA information] to fall back upon; what memory there is should be full of faults, and as such unreliable.

The issues, of course, extend much beyond the sphere of biology per se. Over millennia our philosophers, struggling for answers to the deep questions of life, have found their hour on the stage all too brief. It is as if they had been appointed to a committee that must report by a given date, - a time-span quite inadequate for the task in hand. Thus, there is a now a "first-things-first" viewpoint. Let us attend to our immediate problems, - world peace, health (including ageing), - then there will be time for attending to the really deep questions. Unfortunately, our approach to immediate problems is often coloured by our attitude towards the really deep questions. So, difficult as it is, the two have to go hand-in-hand.

Donald Forsdyke July 2002 

 


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