I was reading The Biology of Aging. Several times, the author says something to the effect of “experiment beats observation, therefore the gold standard in aging research is to show that adding X accelerates aging and removing X slows it.” For many values of X, experimental manipulation definitely makes organisms live longer/shorter, but it’s not clear that X actually changes significantly during actual aging.
So in this instance, we don’t fully understand how the system works either, but a measurement of X could still tell us whether it’s relevant (based on whether it changes).
Curious about the motivating case for this. I was trying to think of an example where
A. I knew how the system worked.
and
B. I didn’t know the state of the system.
and
C. It wasn’t obvious that I should take a measurement instead of run an experiment.
But I couldn’t think of anything.
I was reading The Biology of Aging. Several times, the author says something to the effect of “experiment beats observation, therefore the gold standard in aging research is to show that adding X accelerates aging and removing X slows it.” For many values of X, experimental manipulation definitely makes organisms live longer/shorter, but it’s not clear that X actually changes significantly during actual aging.
So in this instance, we don’t fully understand how the system works either, but a measurement of X could still tell us whether it’s relevant (based on whether it changes).