= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on A quick calculation on exercise - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (38)
We have to very careful with correlation/causation here. Olympic athletes are a select group of people who won the genetic lottery by certain measures. It might well be that their apparent longevity is a pure selection bias.
On genetic grounds, at least, I might actually expect a bias in the opposite direction. The "genetic lottery" as you put it works on specific traits; there's no general qualityOfPerson attribute (though see below). We might expect a few of those traits (like those relating to cardiovascular resilience, say) to contribute both to athleticism and longevity, but I'd expect some to involve tradeoffs between the two: we could imagine a trait that improved metabolic efficiency at the cost of adding oxidative stress, for example, or one that made muscle cells respond quicker to injury (==faster strength gains) but increased the chance of cancer in those cells.
Mutational load might be an important confounder here, though, as something that I'd expect to affect fitness in a very general sense. And of course I'd expect Olympians to come from higher social classes on average, since those are the families that have the money to support intense early training. The linked paper controlled for "occupational group", but I don't know if that completely captured the latter.
Yes, but the selection works from two directions: to be an Olympic-class athlete you need to a have a major advantage in some particular trait and no noticeable fitness disadvantages. In a random selection from the population there will be somewhat-ill people (e.g. with chronic diseases, say, autoimmune), but these people will be absent from the Olympic athlete sample. That by itself is probably enough to generate a noticeable longevity advantage for the athletes.