A 2018 study featured on the cover of Molecular Biology Evolution provides some insight into why humans are able to live as long as we do. Researchers identified a handful of genes that were so strongly conserved millions of years ago, they influence our lifespans even today.
“During evolution, species adapt to their environments by lengthening or shortening their lifespans,” Lead study author Arcadi Navarro, Ph.D., a research professor at Pompeu Fabra University’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology tells Inverse. “In the case of bats, when they became able to fly they could escape predators, so it makes sense for them to invest in longer lifespans and have more offspring. But others are in the opposite position. If they’re susceptible to predation or infection they’ll shorten their lifespan so they can reproduce quicker.”
“The human ancestor’s ecological conditions allowed for evolutionary increase in lifespan,” Navarro says. “We can only speculate why but it can only make sense that we moved into environments, or ecological conditions or groups that cooperated among themselves to escape starvation and predation, allowing us to invest in having longer childhoods.”
If we want to genetically manipulate ourselves to live even longer, our best bet may be to try to mimic nature’s selective process on these genes in the lab — or as this paper puts it create “new candidate interventions that mimic gene evolution associated with natural changes in lifespan.” But it’s a bit of a pipe dream, and nature has outdone us at every turn.
“The ability to manipulate the lifespan of a species in the lab is much smaller than that process that has already happened in nature,” Navarro. “In the laboratory, after decades and decades of research on mammals, we’ve only been able to extend lifespans perhaps ten, twenty percent. It’s absolutely a humbling fact.”
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