From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Oct 12 1999 - 12:37:14 MDT
On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Damien Broderick wrote:
> No.
>
Gee Damien, why don't you cut right to the heart of the matter? :-;
Actually *aging* in terms of its physiological effects does increase
exponentially. Bruce Ames, one of the worlds leading experts in
toxicology is often fond of pointing out that cancer rates increase
with age to the 6th power. However, they may trail off in the
oldest-old (perhaps because they have *really* good DNA repair
systems). That doesn't help much because the incidences of other
pathologies are probably increasing with age^# power as well.
So aging follows Moore's law in some respects. Longevity is
on a relatively linear path (through human history with occasional
dips for things like the plague/influenza epidemics). These
trends are tracked by demographers and there is a hot debate
as to whether or not the mean and maximum lifespans will continue
to increase or whether there will be a "squaring" of the curve
so that every gets to 120 and then rapidly dies off.
All bets are off however because our knowledge of our genetic
program and molecular biology are increasing very rapidly.
I wouldn't put them on exponential curves because they
have a really funny S shape (1980 - little or no human
genetic sequence, 1999 - lots of human genetic sequence,
2003 - all of human genetic sequence).
Robert
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