Ben, There is obvious confusion here. MOST mutations harm, but occasionally one helps. By selecting for a particular difficult-to-achieve thing, like long lifespan, we can discard the harmful mutations while selecting for the helpful ones. However, selecting for something harmful and easy to achieve, like the presence of genes that shorten lifespan, the selection process is SO non-specific that it can't tell us much of anything. There are countless mutations that kill WITHOUT conferring compensatory advantages. I could see stressing the flies in various ways without controlling for lifespan, but controlling for short lifespan in the absence of such stresses would seem to be completely worthless. Of course, once stressed, you would also be seeing genes to combat those (irrelevant) stresses.
In short, I still haven't heard words that suggest that this can go anywhere, though it sure would be wonderful (like you and I might live twice as long) if some workable path could be found. I still suspect that the best path is in analyzing the DNA of long-living people, rather than that of fruit flies. Perhaps there is some way to combine the two approaches? Steve ================ On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 11:34 PM, Steve Richfield < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Ben, >> >> It seems COMPLETELY obvious (to me) that almost any mutation would shorten >> lifespan, so we shouldn't expect to learn much from it. > > > > Why then do the Methuselah flies live 5x as long as normal flies? You're > conjecturing this is unrelated to the dramatically large number of SNPs with > very different frequencies in the two classes of populations??? > > ben > > > > *agi* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
