A few years back, Sylvester Stallone was caught bringing chemical supplements into, if I remember correctly, Australia, that were not legal for him to use there without a prescription. He apologized, but stated his conviction that the supplements were valuable for nearly any older man; they made him feel much younger and able to perform athletically at a much higher standard, and he believed that in a matter of years, they would be available over the counter.
My first thought was that if there were a simple hormonal adaptation which could offer such benefits to human beings without associated risks that outweigh them, we would have evolved it already, so for most people who experienced benefits from the supplements they would probably not be worth the danger.
But some time later, I was revisiting the matter, and it occurred to me that in our evolutionary environment, the expected status of Sylvester Stallone would be “dead.” Individuals in their sixties would already be sufficiently unlikely to be contributing further to the persistence of genes that adaptations favoring their health which did not provide benefits prior to their elder status would likely not have offered enough of an advantage to be selected for.
This probably best fits into the category of “value discordance”; the qualities which evolution selects for may be separate from or narrower than our own values even in domains such as health and physical integrity.
Indeed, AFAIK this is also one of the proposed explanations for why we suffer from age-related decay in the first place: there hasn’t been a strong evolutionary pressure to develop maintenance mechanisms that could keep our body running indefinitely, since it was more effective to just create organisms that would be good at reproducing and surviving while they were young.
A few years back, Sylvester Stallone was caught bringing chemical supplements into, if I remember correctly, Australia, that were not legal for him to use there without a prescription. He apologized, but stated his conviction that the supplements were valuable for nearly any older man; they made him feel much younger and able to perform athletically at a much higher standard, and he believed that in a matter of years, they would be available over the counter.
My first thought was that if there were a simple hormonal adaptation which could offer such benefits to human beings without associated risks that outweigh them, we would have evolved it already, so for most people who experienced benefits from the supplements they would probably not be worth the danger.
But some time later, I was revisiting the matter, and it occurred to me that in our evolutionary environment, the expected status of Sylvester Stallone would be “dead.” Individuals in their sixties would already be sufficiently unlikely to be contributing further to the persistence of genes that adaptations favoring their health which did not provide benefits prior to their elder status would likely not have offered enough of an advantage to be selected for.
This probably best fits into the category of “value discordance”; the qualities which evolution selects for may be separate from or narrower than our own values even in domains such as health and physical integrity.
Indeed, AFAIK this is also one of the proposed explanations for why we suffer from age-related decay in the first place: there hasn’t been a strong evolutionary pressure to develop maintenance mechanisms that could keep our body running indefinitely, since it was more effective to just create organisms that would be good at reproducing and surviving while they were young.