Your entire first paragraph is trivially true and doesn’t address the point at all. We’re in complete agreement that evolution can impact lifespans well beyond the reproductive age. I think that’s old enough that it is discussed at one point by Darwin although I don’t have the citation off the top of my head.
. I was specifically pointing out that the thing you were raising as a question is a field that is already well studied.
Ah, I see. now. So your point is simply that we know about this issue and that there’s been a lot of study related to it. I don’t see anywhere that would disagree with that claim. I don’t think I said anywhere in my remark anything indicating that the point about evolution pushing problems past the maximal age was at all obscure or original to me. Simply saying that it is a studied issue isn’t sufficient. You need something of the form “this is studied and has been found to be wrong”. But that’s not the case. And it is precisely not the case because there aren’t even now that many really old people. So the essential problem remains: for all we know there could be diseases that show up after around age 100 or older and we haven’t noticed them yet because the sample sizes are small. Moreover, basic evolutionary theory should give us a high prior for such diseases existing because evolution has no reason not make trade offs that benefit at some point before the approximate maximal age in the wild and would cause problems further down the line.
Your entire first paragraph is trivially true and doesn’t address the point at all. We’re in complete agreement that evolution can impact lifespans well beyond the reproductive age. I think that’s old enough that it is discussed at one point by Darwin although I don’t have the citation off the top of my head.
Ah, I see. now. So your point is simply that we know about this issue and that there’s been a lot of study related to it. I don’t see anywhere that would disagree with that claim. I don’t think I said anywhere in my remark anything indicating that the point about evolution pushing problems past the maximal age was at all obscure or original to me. Simply saying that it is a studied issue isn’t sufficient. You need something of the form “this is studied and has been found to be wrong”. But that’s not the case. And it is precisely not the case because there aren’t even now that many really old people. So the essential problem remains: for all we know there could be diseases that show up after around age 100 or older and we haven’t noticed them yet because the sample sizes are small. Moreover, basic evolutionary theory should give us a high prior for such diseases existing because evolution has no reason not make trade offs that benefit at some point before the approximate maximal age in the wild and would cause problems further down the line.