Why evolution designed us to die fast, & how we can change that – Jacob Kimmel

Today, have the pleasure of chatting with Jacob Kimmel, who is president and co founder of New Limit, where they epigenetically reprogram cells to their younger states. Jacob, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

All right. First question. What's the first principle's argument for why evolution just like discards us so easily? Look, I know evolution cares about our kids, but if we have longer, healthier lifespans, we can have more kids, right? Or we can care for them longer. We can care for our grandkids. So is there some pleiotropic effect that anti aging medicine would have which actually selects against you staying young for longer? Mhmm.

Yeah. So I think there there are a couple different ways one can tackle this. One is you have to think about what's the selective pressure that would make one live longer Right. And encode for higher health over longer durations. Do you have that selective pressure present? There's another which is are there any anti selective pressures that are actually pushing against that? And there's a third piece of this, which is something like the constraints of your optimizer. If we think about the genome as a set of parameters and the optimizer is natural selection Yeah. Then you've got some constrain

Right. By the way, just on that, often people who are trying to forecast AI will discuss basically how hard did evolution try to optimize for intelligence and what were the, the things which optimizing for intelligence would have prevented evolution for selecting for at the same time, which would make it so that even if intelligence were a relatively easy thing to build within this universe, it would have taken evolution so long to get a human level intelligence. And potentially if it was, if intelligence would be really easy, then it might imply that, you know, we're gonna get a super intelli

Yeah. You gotta contribute resources back to the group. You can't just be a freeloader. Need calories, go out in the jungle, get some Like

if you're just, if you're just hanging out learning stuff for fifty years, you're just gonna die before you get to have kids yourself. So obviously humans have bigger brains than other primates. We also have longer adolescents, help us make use potentially of the extra capacity our brain gives us. But if you made the adolescents too big, then you would just die before you get to have kids. And if that's gonna happen anyways, what's the point of making the brain bigger? AKA, know, maybe maybe intelligence is easier than we think, and there's a bunch of contingent reasons that evolution didn't c

I entirely agree with with that particular thesis. You know, I think in biology in general, when you're trying to engineer a given property, be it being healthier longer, be it making something more intelligent, And this is true even at the micro level of trying to engineer a system to manufacture a protein at high high efficiency. You always have to start by asking yourself, did evolution spend a lot of time optimizing this? If yes, my job is going to be insanely hard. If no, potentially there are some low hanging fruit. And so I think this is a good argument for why potentially intelligence

So in one way, this is actually a very interesting RL problem. Right? It's a long horizon RL problem, twenty year horizon length, and then the there's a scalar value of how many kids you have. I guess that's survive, etcetera. And if you know how hard or I I don't know. But if you've heard from your friends about how hard RL is on these mode