From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Nov 29 2002 - 15:42:48 MST
On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Having long-lived parents and grandparents likely provides an advantage
> to humans (there are theories about human longevity actually having been
> selected for by the grandparent effect), so it seems that this selection
> effect would promote the syndrome if it really had a reliable
> life-extending effect.
Only if you get to be a parent or grand-parent! If there is an
anti-desirable mate bias you don't get to play the game. At least
not with the frequency that a "normal" person does.
> And I think our Gilbertian friends can attest
> that it is not a huge problem for mate selection.
I'd like to hear from them personally. Think of the mate selection
problems that very short (dwarf) or very tall (giant) people have.
If you can't find someone of your "kind" you are somewhat handicapped
in the real world.
> but if there were any strong effect (say five years more than normal)
> it would likely have been noticed when people checked the mortality side.
I don't believe these studies would have been done. Even if 7% of the
population has the trait you are going to need a lot of people to get
statistical significance. That sounds like an expensive study to me.
There are something like 5000+ diseases in OMIM -- what fraction of
those do you think longevity studies have been done on? I've never
run across even a single example. Most of the time people are looking
at how much a disease shortens lifespan.
Robert
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