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Cyan comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong
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"I don't want to be immortal by having kids; I want to be immortal by not dying."
- Woody Allen, mutatis mutandis
In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.
It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life - adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.
Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.
Also, check out the "cryonics wives" effect. It looks as though some people are not happy about the resource-investment conflict between ice and offspring.
Prospective sleepers no-doubt have their own values. I am describing one reason why most people don't sign up for cryonics. It's partly because it makes little economic sense.
"In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time."
This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.
"Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life."
Most people don't know about CR and don't know what they want very clearly anyway.
Interestingly though, if the choice is: get shot now or one of your children gets shot now most people would choose the former.
Your example is pathological. "Painless sterilisation" and "being shot in ten years" are uncommon as choices to be made in the ancestral environment. By contrast, most organisms constantly face decisions regarding whether to expend resources on body maintenance programs or courtship, mating and reproduction.
Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction - and not longevity. If you still do not "get" that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.
"Your example is pathological. "Painless sterilisation" and "being shot in ten years" are uncommon in the ancestral environment."
Yes, that's why the two are different- because evolution did a lousy job at making an organism's desires match its own desires.
"Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction - and not longevity. If you still do not "get" that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned."
You do not understand the difference between what evolution wants and what an organism wants. They are not the same thing. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/.
"In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time."
This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.
If vasectomy and tubal ligation performed before having kids had the side effect of physical immortality, would you expect these procedures to be more or less popular than they are currently?
Why couldn't you have kids and restrict calories? And correct me if I'm wrong, but I had thought that there was still very little evidence on caloric restriction actually extending life in humans.
I don't know if calorie restriction is the same thing or how this applies to men, but underweight women will stop menstruating, and presumably can't reproduce.
Hmm. Do you mean if you ignore the evidence about how it does that in lots of other species - and that it produces similar short-term health improvements and metabolic changes in humans and other animals - and instead insist on only counting studies directly involving human longevity as evidence?
Yes. I'm one of those crazy people who wants to see calorie reduction actually extend human lives before I believe that calorie reduction extends human lives.
But I would be interested in seeing evidence that caloric reduction leads to "short-term health improvements" in humans.
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."
For your "why" question, perhaps see: http://cr.timtyler.org/why/
I still don't understand why you can't restrict calories and have kids, especially if you take a short break from calorie reduction to devote more energy to semen production or periods, and then resume the caloric restriction.
Think of how many calories it must take to be a bodybuilder or grow ginormous peacocks.