For "lousy" read "excellent".

You seem to be having difficulty with reading what I wrote. I never claimed that "what evolution wants" and "what an organism wants" referred to the same thing in the first place. You appear to be criticising a straw man of your own making.

See here.

Caloric restriction clearly can benefit the average American. The verdict is out on whether this is only because the average American has such an awful diet that decreasing consumption necessarily decreases consumption of an awful diet; however, the additional evidence from other species combines to be pretty compelling in my mind.

I don't partake in chronic caloric restriction, but I fast occasionally, ideally as much as I can while maintaining the amount of muscle that I like to keep, and without dropping my productivity levels. The evidence in favor of the health benefits of intermittent fasting seems slightly better than CR, although I believe it is only beginning to get more attention in research.

E.g.:

"At present, although only limited information is available on the effect of CR on humans, credible data exist that allow us to make some reasonable predictions. For example, a 1994 European clinical study on non-obese, middle-aged subjects under a 10-week, 20% energy reduction (Velthuis-te Wierik et al. 1994), and the 2-year Biosphere experience (Walford et al. 1999, 2002)), produced promising human data on CR’s efficacies (Rae 2004). Further, a recent report (Fontana et al. 2004) shows CR’s beneficial effects, including the suppression of an atherosclerosis and inflammation biomarker in humans, solidifying the possibility of CR’s extension of human longevity. One clear-cut and most immediate sign of CR’s effect in human subjects is body weight reduction, as in the case of rodents. It is important to realize how simple weight reduction (mainly from loss of fat mass, particularly visceral adiposity) could have a strong impact on inflammation, insulin resistance, and diabetes in humans as reported recently (Dandona et al. 2004; Ferroni et al. 2004). If obesity is a state of inflammation and obesity-related insulin resistance is a chronic inflammatory disease, as indicated by biomarkers, then a reduction of adiposity by CR alone could exert a great improvement on human health and functional longevity, which is already widely accepted by many biomedical researchers."

• http://www.springerlink.com/content/y4v8476763644335/fulltext.pdf

Think of how many calories it must take to be a bodybuilder or grow ginormous peacocks.

One of the more obvious and simple approaches would be to calculate the expected delta in gene copies in (say) 2100 - as a result of investing a dollar in cryonics vs investing a dollar in kids. p(cryonics success) is the biggest unknown here.

If we believe the salesman's figures, http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/WillCryonicsWork.html gives 0.15 and 0.0023 as optimistic and pessimistic estimates. I figure kids would win either way under many circumstances.