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Ageing and Philosophy
" There
is nothing like will; everybody can do exactly what they like in this
world, provided they really like it." {Lord Beaconsfield,
alias Disraeli, in "Endymion"}
...
If this is as true as I believe it to be, "the longing after
immortality," though not indeed much of an argument in favour of
our being immortal at the present moment, is perfectly sound as a reason
for concluding that we shall one day develop immortality, if our desire
is deep enough and lasting enough."
Samuel Butler (1835-1902). Alps and
Sanctuaries p. 23 (1881) |
Around 161 BC in the comedy Phormio,
by Terance, an old man is asked by his brother what illness afflicts him and
replies: "Why do you ask? The illness is old age itself." In 1732 the
doctoral thesis of Jacob Hutter was entitled "Senescence itself is an
illness" (Senectus ipsa morbus est). The incurable
nature of the illness was commented on by Seneca (Senectus enim
insanabilis morbus est; see
Schäfer 2002 Med. Hist 46,
525-48). Twentieth century optimism led to a
marked change in attitude towards the issue of incurability, an optimism that
Samuel Butler had, as usual, anticipated.
 "I
have accumulated a
wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always
ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and
further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved.
What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!"
Richard B. Goldschmidt (1878-1958). In
and Out of the Ivory Tower. (1960) University of
Washington Press, Seattle, p. 311. |
| "The
passage from non-existence to non-existence seems to me a strange and,
on the whole, enjoyable experience. ... But I resent the fact that, as
seems to be practically certain, I shall be as non-existent after my
death as I was before my birth. Nothing can be done about it and I
cannot truthfully say that my future extinction causes me much fear or
pain, but I should like to record my protest against it and against the
universe which enacts it."
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969). Sowing
(1960) Hogarth Press, London, pp. 1-2. |
 "It
has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of
death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree
with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a
time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly
and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more
martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing
reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the
light."
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) Bully for
Brontosaurus. Reflections on Natural History. (1991) W.
W. Norton, New York. |
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These views of two great twentieth century evolutionists
and an outstanding "man of letters" capture a changed attitude towards death. In Richard Goldschmidt (born 1878)
and Leonard Woolf (born 1880) we find
calm acceptance. In Stephen Jay Gould (born 1941) we find an apparent awareness
of the possibility that ageing may be a disease like any other disease. So far,
it seems to be a disease with a 100% mortality. But, as Samuel Butler foresaw in
1881, that may not always be so. He had just read Thomas Huxley's treatise on The
Crayfish (1879):
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"That
all living beings sooner or later perish needs no demonstration, but it
would be difficult to find satisfactory grounds for the belief that they
needs must do so. The analogy of a machine, that sooner or later must be
brought to a standstill by the wear and tear of its parts, does not hold,
inasmuch as the animal mechanism is continually renewed and repaired;
and though it is true that individual components of the body are
constantly dying, yet their places are taken by vigorous successors. A
city remains notwithstanding the constant death-rate of its inhabitants;
and … an organism … is only a corporate unity, made up of
innumerable partially independent individualities."
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Reflecting this, there are now government Institutes of Ageing with mandates
that extend beyond "geriatrics" (how to age with
health and grace) to
"gerontology" (how to understand and reverse the ageing process
so that normal life may be extended).
A fundamental idea
is that in the course of
evolution most organisms have died early from environmental insults (e.g.
predators) and so there has been no selective pressure for enhancing later life.
Organisms are selected to be optimal, in terms of the number and health of their
offspring, in their early years. Indeed, genes which operate such as to achieve
early optimization may even exert negative effects if operating in the same way
later in life (should the organism survive environmental insults, as most
humans seem to today).
Thus, a high blood pressure may be selectively advantageous in
early life, but may predispose the organism to cardiovascular problems in later
life. Similarly, genes concerned with somatic DNA repair have been fine-tuned
over evolutionary time to work optimally during the early years. Their failure
to do this later in life would have no consequences in terms of the number and
health of offspring. The essence of this was perceived by Charles Darwin who in
his 1837 notebook Abstract of John
Macculloch wrote:
Suppose six puppies are born <<& it so
chances, that one out of every hundred litters is born with long
legs>> & in the Malthusian rush for life, only two of them live to
breed, if circumstances determine that, the long legged one shall
rather oftener than any other one. survive. in ten thousand years
the long legged race will get the upper hand. though continually
dragged back to old type by intermarrying with ordinary race. --
<<There is no way of eliminating the evils of old age, after
breeding season, or gaining adaptations, but for youth most
necessary: the fertility of Man in old age keeps woman alive: for
Man and woman are same: fertility of either sex determines
life[span]:.>>
[The double arrow brackets imply insertion to
Darwin's original text presumably by Darwin.] |
Likewise, in 1929 the
great pioneer of modern biostatistics, Ronald Fisher, wrote:
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 "In
man, the death-rate increases and the expectation of life decreases with
increasing age. Death might be just as inevitable without this being so.
For example, if the expectation of life were 20 years at all ages, we
should have a half chance of dying within about 14 years, only one in a
thousand would live to be 140, and one in a million to 280. We should
all die sooner of later as we do now, only - if fertility continued -
even the oldest would have the same expectation of further posterity as
the youngest,
and
would be as much affected by selection,
and consequently there would be no tendency for their death-rate to
become higher than at early maturity, where in man it is least.
In
fact, the incidence of death or cessation of reproduction (or at least
of reproductive usefulness) determines the action of natural selection,
which in turn reacts on the death rate. In an oak in the forest, I
suppose an old tree has a greater expectation of posterity than a young
one, so that it would be a bad bargain for the father oak to benefit his
offspring unless he could do so by losing considerably less than the
offspring gains.
The
reproductive value at different ages must determine the extent to which
parental care pays. If all ages were of equal reproductive value, a
species would tend to benefit its offspring up to the point at which the
offspring gains double the advantage which the parent loses, but no
further. Of course, immature offspring are usually worth much less, and
so should be cared for only at a cheaper rate still. But if crocodiles
were able to recognize their mature offspring, I suppose they would
co-operate with them not only in terms of mutual advantage, but in terms
of joint advantage so long as the loss of either did not exceed the half
the gain of the other. Hence society starts with the family."
Letter of R. H. Fisher to Charles Darwin's son Major Leonard Darwin. 27th June
1929. Natural Selection, Heredity, and
Eugenics. Edited by J. H. Bennett. (1983) Oxford
University Press |
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These ideas were elaborated in Fisher's 1930 book
(The
Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Oxford University Press)
by Peter Medawar (1952; An
Unsolved Problem in Biology, H. K. Lewis, London),
and by others (e.g. Charlesworth, B. 2000. Genetics
156, 927-931; Gavrilova, L. A. & Gavrilova, N. S. 2002. The
Scientific World Journal. 2, 339-356; Moriera, T. 2019.
Studies in History & Philosophy of Biol and Biomed Sci.
77, 101179).
Much of this had
been anticipated by Samuel Butler, beginning in 1878 with his first
evolution book - Life and Habit
(p. 170).
After any animal has
reached the period at which it ordinarily begins to continue its
race [today read adolescence], we should expect that it should
show little further power of development, or, at any rate, that
few great changes of structure or fresh features should appear; for we cannot suppose
offspring to remember anything that happens to the parent
subsequently to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring within
itself [today read subsequent to a parent discharging the gamete that produced that offspring];
from
the average age, therefore, of reproduction [termination of
reproduction; e.g. parental menopause],
offspring should cease to have any further experience on which to
fall back [i.e. no knowledge of what a post-menopausal person
experiences], and would thus continue to make the best use of what
it already knew, till memory failing in one part or another, the
organism would begin to decay. To this cause must be referred the
phenomena of old age, which interesting subject I am unable to
pursue within the limits of this volume. |
The idea again explicit in his later
Humour of Homer and Other Essays:
If heredity and memory
are essentially the same [today read DNA], we should expect no
animal would develop new structures of importance after the age at
which its species begins ordinarily to continue its race [today
read when it stops producing offspring]; for we cannot suppose
offspring to remember anything that happens to the parent
subsequent to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring within
itself [today read the gamete that produced that offspring]. From
the average age, therefore, of reproduction [termination of],
offspring should cease to have any further steady, continuous
memory [today read DNA information] to fall back upon; what memory
there is should be full of faults, and as such unreliable. |
The issues,
of course, extend much beyond the sphere of biology per se. Over millennia our
philosophers, struggling for answers to the deep questions of life, have found
their hour on the stage all too brief. It is as if they had been appointed to a
committee that must report by a given date, - a time-span quite inadequate for
the task in hand. Thus, there is a now a
"first-things-first" viewpoint. Let us attend to our immediate
problems, - world peace, health (including ageing), - then there will be time for
attending to the really deep questions. Unfortunately, our approach to immediate
problems is often coloured by our attitude towards the really deep questions.
So, difficult as it is, the two have to go hand-in-hand.
Donald Forsdyke July 2002
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