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Acceleration of progress. Alex contributed to this by limiting the speakers, so everyone is speaking so fast, and we're seeing that acceleration right now. It's a pleasure to be back, I was here as an undergrad at a college down the river. I'm going to talk about why we age, and how to expand your life span by two years. And I am going to be talking about citizen scientists.
I am a founder of Ab Inventio, a company. You can visit our website at abinventio.com. Benjamin Button was born an old man, and got younger every day. The rest of us get older every day. We go from beautiful babies, to decrepid old men. Why? Why does this happen? It happens to us, it happens to every single living thing ever known. The answer to this is commmonly believed to be true: at a certain age there's no selective pressure to stay alive. There might be no positive pressure to stay alive. Scientists at UCSF, at MIT, Harvard, and others at CalTech, have shown there's a specific genetic program that makes us older, that ages us. When you knock a single gene off a c. elegans worm, the worm lives twice as long. Can you imagine in the course of millions of years of evolution, why hasn't this gene been knocked out? These worms have the genes, they have propagated more. How does this make us more fit, or why?
The reason has to do everything with the apple not falling from the tree. Evolution has optimized the genetic distance between generations. If you have two little variation, then evolution cannot go fast enough to adopt to the environment. Too much variation, your children are dead. You don't want to deviate too far from that, unless you want to have a well-functioning human gene. There's an optimal genetic distance between generations, which varies between fitness and environmental change. Some people don't want to change the environment, poor people want to change it as fast as possible. The happier you are in your environment, the less incentive you have to change the environment. The more the environment changes, the more trouble you are having, the more you should be willing to experiment with things.
Gametes, usually the cells that lead to combining to a new line form, and a sperm fertizlizing. The mutations over the lifetime. That's the reason women are not recommended to have children over a particular age, because of mutations after a number of years of life. It doesn't increase with time only. It's not a linear process. I was talking with a friend recently. I was showing him.. there's this face recognition feature where you can see all of the pictures of the same person, and you can see a person age as you look at their pictures. It's a horrible feature. There was this huge stressful period in my life where all of my aging occurred. That seems to be the same case, most of their aging when her son got sick, and so on. This is true in the public life as well. Our presidents had a lot of stress. Clinton for instance. You'll be able to see the before and after of all presidents, and they all age a tremendous amount.
If there is an optimal genetic distance between generations, and the optimal distance decreases with age, then it follows that mating must initially increase and then decrease with age. And then decrease with age. That's exactly what happened. Mating indeed decreases by age. Aging-related inability to mate, aging-related decrease in attractives, aging-related decrease in libido, which hasn't happened to me yet, and aging related to death. The most attentive of you might ask, if the old progeny are less fit, why doesn't natural selection just take care of that?
The reason for this is illustrated in the national geographic cover. All of the kids of this one man. That's exactly where most of evolution happens: living in closely related clans. Everyone is very closely related genetically in clans. The inferior fitness may not manifest itself in early days. Food, parenting, that fits the sibling's chances of survival. That's why you need to stop them, in order to save your fitter kids.
Can we do anything related to expand our enjoyable life span? I've been working on this for the last 3 years. A professor at MIT, Richard Larson, the average American spends 2 years of their life waiting in line. This is not something new. We've been doing this forever. I was standing in a theme park line, and isn't there a better order to serve people in. Queue List. I created a system that lets people use a cell phone enter into a mobile, virtual line, and get a call or text message when there turn arrives. We've already saved more than 10 years through this. QLess. Please check it out.
http://qless.com/
http://waitinginlinesucks.com/
I thank you for being here instead of watching the world cup. I know it's a sacrifice. During the duration of the World Cup, QLess will offer all new customers who mention H+ 2 installations for the price of 1, and will donate 50% of proceeds to somewhere that Alex helps us figure out.
Getting the human body to achieve 100% uptime. QLess, even as a new company has greater than 99.999% uptime. We haven't had millions of years of evolution. We have redundancy. One server goes down, another goes up. I'm proposing we launch an aggressive research program to apply redundancy to human organs. Fail over systems, wireless sensors. Imagine if you had two hearts, and time to fix the first one, when you have a problem.
In order of the theme. I want to talk about Citizen Scientist. For the last 6 years, I have been a citizen scientist, I publish everything I discover, on the wikipedia, for people to read freely. It's really worth it. People have read my postings, tens of thousands of time, as opposed to the nature paper that I published, which was cited only 100 times. Scientific publishing is outdated. The world needs a wikipedia for researching, it shouldn't need to be peer reviewed first. The minimum publishing unit needs to be as small as possible. Ideas need to see the light as soon as they are conceived. I am announcing today, the nascent, site that I am creating for the community, with Wikipedia-like.
http://everybodyscience.org/
It's a wiki, hosted by Wikia. It will be free for everyone. Thank you very much.
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