On Longevity, Reality, and Critical Thinking

Every now and then, I receive a random e-mail from a random person along the lines of, "Hi! I found your blog. Can you tell me how I can live forever?"

Generally I just ignore these letters, as, really, I figure either their authors are credulous beyond all get-out or engaging in some sort of bizarre joke. But seeing as I've received a spate of these comments privately recently, I just wanted to state for the record that if you are looking to random bloggers to "tell you the path to living forever", um, well, you might want to work on those critical thinking skills.

Seriously. Critical thinking is utterly invaluable if you actually care about what reality is actually like. And you don't need to be any kind of super-genius to do it successfully, nor do you need to take special classes in it. There's plenty in the way of free resources, such as:

- The Skeptic's Dictionary has a good page consisting of links to Critical Thinking Mini-Lessons.

(Also check out their Too Good To Be True page for a nifty list of examples of opportunistic pseudoscientists and scammers marketing their crap.)

- A classic: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. I learned about this in the very first "Introduction to Engineering" class I took in school, wherein Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark was assigned reading.

- Via Respectful Insolence, a concise summary of how to know you're doing science wrong (emphasis mine):

If you don't make mistakes, you're doing it wrong.
If you don't correct those mistakes, you're doing it really wrong.
If you can't accept that you're mistaken, you're not doing it at all

...and many, many more that you should be able to find pretty easily.

There are also things you can do just in the course of your everyday life to flex your critical thinking abilities and thereby strengthen them. Whenever you encounter a billboard or advert, try considering what is actually being offered versus the emotions being invoked by the ad's imagery, sound effects, etc. Learn to recognize when false causal relationships are being drawn between events and actions, and don't just go along with it when people are doing this. Learn the difference between "rational thinking" and "rationalizing" (e.g., if someone tries to claim that Santa Claus is real, but just doesn't think poor children deserve presents, you've probably got a rationalizer on your hands!).

Heck, if you've got a bit of free time, you can even do "probability experiments" like the ones I did as a kid of about eleven, which entailed flipping coins many, many times and writing down the heads/tails results (this was how I determined that no, I most likely did not have the ability to Use The Force). Sounds silly, but can be very illustrative of (for instance) how having too small a sample set can be misleading, and how more data can reduce the chance of drawing an incorrect conclusion.

Another fun and useful activity is to visit Wikipedia and look up a subject you've seen a lot of people arguing about. Then, in addition to the actual article, read its talk page. Because Wikipedia's stated policy is to present a "neutral point of view", there tends to be a lot of quibbling over how this is to be accomplished, and on what sources are actually acceptable and valid references.

E.g., the talk page for 'Evolution' has a 40-something page archive of discussion and debate between the various parties vying for control of the article's content. Seriously, if you want to see various forms of human reasoning (and rationalizing) in action, these talk pages are a great resource. Moreover, some articles' talk pages nicely illustrate "manufactured controversy" in action, and it is very useful to learn the difference between a real controversy and one that has been "framed" as such by folks with an obvious agenda (case in point: those people who keep saying Obama's birth certificate is a fake).

Anyway, however you do it, the important thing is to get your brain geared up to more accurately assess reality, and the claims people make about it.

See, there are plenty of hucksters out there who would probably be more than willing to sell you their Super-Longevity Bio-Kit or some other quackish nostrum. And despite not being a biologist myself, I think I'm at least informed enough on the subject of biogerontology to be able to tell you that anyone who claims to have the "path to immortality" is either deluded or lying. Hence, taking people who make such claims seriously is likely to be a waste of time for everyone involved, and obviously over time this kind of thing is likely to lead to less actual useful real-world work being done.

I once encountered a person who claimed to know a "real-life immortal", that of course I could learn about only through buying and reading his upcoming book about this person (who had apparently trusted him, the author, with this 'special knowledge'). And I don't believe for a minute that I "missed an opportunity" by dismissing these claims and refusing to let that author hijack the discussion. Now, if that author had acknowledged he'd written a fantasy novel in which he explored the various social and technical implications of extreme longevity through the protagonist, then I might have been interested. But as there was no such acknowledgement, I didn't figure I was losing anything in my reticence to entertain this author's storytelling.

All that said, really it seems preposterous that I should even need to say any of this.

If anyone has Internet access sufficient to permit them to find my blog and e-mail me, they also have access to (in addition to plentiful critical-thinking resources) a tremendous amount of actual scientific writing (and no, I don't mean "press releases", I mean stuff written by biologists and others actually working on interesting scientific/medical quandaries). But the fact that I do get these comments has made me wonder if maybe some people genuinely just don't know this stuff is out there; hence this post.

Many primary sources are locked up in journals you have to pay to read, but if you're really interested you might be able to get access through a local or university library (especially if you're a student). And I've been told by at least one practicing biologist that sometimes if you express interest in a paper, you can get a copy e-mailed to you by its author if you ask politely (note that they do not HAVE to send you a copy, there isn't a law about it, it's just something you can try).

For free (well, free presuming again you have Internet access), you can get a sense of what research is being done by searching the PubMed database for something like "human longevity".

A cursory search for these terms, for instance, reveals (among many others) the following:

- SIRT1 Markedly Extends Replicative Lifespan if NAD(+) Salvage is Enhanced.

- A functional EXO1 promoter variant is associated with prolonged life expectancy in centenarians.

- Increasing longevity through caloric restriction or rapamycin feeding in mammals: common mechanisms for common outcomes?

- Centenarians--a useful model for healthy aging? A 29-year follow-up of hospitalizations among 40,000 Danes born in 1905.

You won't be able to read the full text of very many papers that come up, but you can check out the abstracts in a lot of cases, and even that is going to tell you a heck of a lot more about research reality than asking some random blogger how you can reach the most extreme outcome you can come up with.

(Though of course this only works if you are actually interested in reality, and if you're genuinely serious in asking "how can I live forever?", I have to say I am rather skeptical that this is the case...)

I've written a few pieces that reference some of the Actual Research Being Done(TM), but this has been entirely and (I would think) obviously from the layperson's perspective. I don't have, or pretend at having, any special expert knowledge about longevity...and I sure as heck don't have a pipeline to the Fountain of Youth. Nobody does.

Here in the real world, the best any of us can do if we want longer, healthier lives for our loved ones and ourselves is contribute toward actual real-world things that promote health, life, and solid research. And in order to figure out what projects are valid and worth supporting, or worth proposing and starting ourselves, critical thinking is utterly essential. Learn it, practice it, and use it, and while you probably won't get to enjoy whatever comforts you might have previously been gaining via wishful/magical thinking, you will be better equipped to do things that actually make a positive difference in the real world.

In other words, if you're thinking in terms of "living forever", you're doing it wrong. And if you have any motivation behind this sentiment that actually relates to improving healthcare for people of all ages (including the very elderly), you'd best find a way to ground those motivations in something practical and feasible in the present.

If, however, you're looking for a palliative to your existential angst, sorry, you're going to have to look elsewhere than here.