New Research Page

Over on my personal website (colinfarrelly.com) I have created a new page that contains all my publications on aging and longevity science, along with a few reflections on my interest in the topic.  You can access it here:  https://colinfarrelly.com/research-on-aging-and-geroscience/

A sample:

...Admittedly I am something of an intellectual oddball within my specialized field of political theory as the number of scholars working on these topics approximates the number of toes on a sloth! My interest in these topics is fuelled by my intellectual curiosity to learn about topics that are largely neglected by scholars in the humanities and social sciences.  By studying these issues I have learned about evolutionary biology, demography, the history of public health, and science policy, advocacy and communication... 

I am a political philosopher/theorist with a science-nerd (vs science fiction) orientation to my philosophizing. I also care passionately about the quality of life people experience in late life. My interest in these topics is just a natural extension of the humanistic impulse to want humanity to experience a future with less (not more) disease, frailty and suffering.

Cheers, 

Colin

Psychedelic Medicine

 

Nature news reports on the coming era of psychedelic medicine here. A sample:

This shift towards taking psychedelic therapy seriously is happening outside the United States as well. In February, Australia approved MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, although the drug will remain highly restricted. Doblin and others hope that the changing attitudes will open the door for other therapeutic psychedelics, including ketamine, ayahuasca, LSD (acid), psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and many synthetic chemicals currently in development. One analysis has projected that the psychedelics market could be worth more than US$8 billion by 2028.

Cheers, 

Colin

Dewey Quote

 

Food for thought, to end the workweek!

Cheers, 

Colin

Science and Advocacy

Over the last decade I think the professional risks of advocacy have significantly diminished for many areas of scientific research. I call this the “twitter-effect”! (image source).

On a more serious note, here are a few examples from disparate areas of science... IMHO only 1 of which is based on the "objective judgements" of science, and others are basically advocacy (though there is one other I am not sure it fits neatly into this categorization).

I will leave it to my readers to discern which they think are based in science and which are based in advocacy (hint: ask yourself if the claim is motivated by changing people's current behaviour in some way, that's typically a clue!)

Claim #1. Limiting alcohol intake to less than 2 drinks per week will increase your longevity.

Claim #2. Unless drastic, unprecedented and untested measures are taken, millions of humans (including children and otherwise healthy persons) will (unnecessarily) die in the next few months from a new infectious disease.

Claim #3. The vast majority of humans living today will survive long enough to die from one of the chronic diseases of aging.

Claim #4. Climate change poses an existential risk to humanity.

Claim #5. Artificial intelligence poses an existential risk to humanity.

One further question to consider: How many of the 5 claims above have you encountered in a recent media story over the past 5 years?

Cheers,

Colin

JAMA on All-Cause Mortality in US Children and Adolescents

 

JAMA has this Viewpoint piece on all-cause mortality in US youth under age 20.  

Two important to note from the graph above which jump out to me: 

(1) the devastating steep inclines in the death among young males, and 

(2) the small impact COVID mortality had on the young, a fraction of the rate of deaths caused by poisoning in this age cohort.  

Cheers, 

Colin

Evolution and Psychology

An interesting study on what evolutionary researchers believe about human psychology and behaviour.  The abstract:

We investigated the prevalence of beliefs in several key and contested aspects of human psychology and behavior in a broad sample of evolutionary-informed scholars (N = 581). Nearly all participants believed that developmental environments substantially shape human adult psychology and behavior, that there are differences in human psychology and behavior based on sex differences from sexual selection, and that there are individual differences in human psychology and behavior resulting from different genotypes. About three-quarters of participants believed that there are population differences from dissimilar ancestral ecologies/environments and within-person differences across the menstrual cycle. Three-fifths believed that the human mind consists of domain-specific, context-sensitive modules. About half of participants believed that behavioral and cognitive aspects of human life history vary along a unified fast-slow continuum. Two-fifths of participants believed that group-level selection has substantially contributed to human evolution. Results indicate that there are both shared core beliefs as well as phenomena that are accepted by varying proportions of scholars. Such patterns represent the views of contemporary scholars and the current state of the field. The degree of acceptance for some phenomena may change over time as evolutionary science advances through the accumulation of empirical evidence.

Cheers, 

Colin