New study shows that medicine - not evolution - holds the key to lifestyle expansion

A new study has demonstrated that evolution alone cannot overcome the biological constraints of aging. The research was published in June 2021 in Nature Communications. Scientists aimed to investigate the ‘invariant rate of aging’ hypothesis, which suggests that the rate of aging is fixed within a species. The team studied a collection of 39 human and nonhuman primate datasets across seven genera (species groups). Human life expectancy has increased drastically since the mid-1800s. People in many different parts of the world lived to only about the age of 40 by the 1850s. In stark contrast, the United Nations estimated an average global life expectancy of 72.6 years in 2019. While these gains have been impressive, they have resulted from changing the environment to reduce mortality at younger ages. There’s no evidence that evolution itself has helped slow down the rate of aging. The authors of the study implied that within a given species, biological factors are the ultimate determinants of longevity. This effectively means there are intrinsic constraints on how much we can slow the human rate of aging. While these findings are truly eye-opening, they elicited debate in the industry and a barrage of misrepresentation by numerous media outlets. Much of the confusion seems to come from the ‘fixed’ aspect. However, by stating that there are biological constraints that determine the rate of human aging, this is not to say that aging is inevitable, fixed, and unchangeable. In the context of the paper, ‘invariant rate’ is not set in stone. The researchers intended to say there is ‘quite limited’ variation in the rate of aging because biological factors have a stronger effect than environmental factors. A study of human lifespan over the last 150 years demonstrated that improving environmental factors affects demographics, increases life expectancy, and lifespan equality. However, this research asserted that humans will need to tackle the evolved biological constraints on lifespan to accomplish much more. This is precisely the challenge that longevity research aims to overcome. Ultimately, the research showed that humans will eventually run out of environmental improvements and turn to biological interventions to stop or reverse aging. But experts are optimistic that ongoing efforts in anti-aging research will succeed in outmaneuvering the constraints identified in the study. Anti-aging pills, epigenetic engineering solutions that revert the age of cells, and mechanisms that literary turn back the hand of time may be just around the corner.