Jacob Kimmel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Interesting. So that's one out of three components of the evolutionary story. The next piece of the evolutionary story is, “Is there anything selecting against longevity?” Let's just pretend everything I said was wrong. Can I still make an argument that maybe evolution hasn't maximally optimized for our longevity? One argument that comes up, and I'll caveat and say I don't know how strong some of the mathematical models that people put together here are. You can find people using the same idea to argue for and against. But there's this notion of what's called kin selection. If you take a selfish gene view of the world—that really this is the genome optimizing for the genome's propagation, it's not trying to optimize for any one individual—then actually optimizing for longevity is a pretty tricky problem because you have this nasty regularization term. If you're able to make a member of the population live longer, but you don't also counteract the decrease in their fitness over time—meaning you maybe extend maximum lifespan but you haven't totally eliminated aging—then the number of net calories contributed to the genome as a function of that person's marginal year and their own calorie consumption is less than if you were to allow that individual to die and actually have two 20 year olds, for instance, that follow behind them. So there is a notion by which a population being laden demographically with many aged individuals, even if they did have fecundity persisting out some period later in life, is actually net negative for the genome's proliferation and that really a genome should optimize for turnover and population size at max fitness. I love this idea of aging as a length regularizer. People might be familiar with the idea that when companies are training models, they'll have a regularizer for, “You can do chain of thought, but don't make the chain of thought too long.” You're saying how many calories you consume over the course of your life, is one such regularizer? That's interesting. The third point was...…

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