I would not call myself a domain expert, but I do think I have a rough idea about the field.
As far as I understand the mainstream position is roughly: There seem to be evolutionary pressures that result in naked mole-rat longevity and naked mole-rats have made a lot of different adaptations for that reason. We have an understanding of some of those adaptions and there’s a good chance that we don’t yet understand all of them because understanding all of them would mean understanding aging better than we do currently.
If you do study a potential new mechanisms it would make sense to look at how it plays out across species and just just the naked mole-rat.
With johnswentworth’s post about the Core Pathways of Aging, for example you have the thesis that transposons are important for aging. You can find out that naked mole-rat have unusually low transposon activity, which is a point of evidence to validate johnswentworth’s thesis that transposons are important for aging. However, if you would reason from that that naked mole-rat longevity is mainly due to different transposon behavior that would be an overreach because naked mole-rats do plenty of things besides having different transposon behavior.
It would be interesting to have a better transposon theory of aging even if that only covers part of what aging is about. That wouldn’t really be a “theory of naked mole-rat longevity”, so I’m a bit skeptical about anything that would bill itself as a new theory of naked mole-rat longevity because that’s not the chunk in which I would think. I would expect that relevant scientist who care about mechanisms of aging and not about the naked mole-rat as a species would react similarly.
It’s an evolutionary theory, not a mechanistic theory. Tbc not a revolutionary theory broadly, nor a theory that would cash out to longevity treatments if true or anything crazy like that.
I would not call myself a domain expert, but I do think I have a rough idea about the field.
As far as I understand the mainstream position is roughly: There seem to be evolutionary pressures that result in naked mole-rat longevity and naked mole-rats have made a lot of different adaptations for that reason. We have an understanding of some of those adaptions and there’s a good chance that we don’t yet understand all of them because understanding all of them would mean understanding aging better than we do currently.
If you do study a potential new mechanisms it would make sense to look at how it plays out across species and just just the naked mole-rat.
With johnswentworth’s post about the Core Pathways of Aging, for example you have the thesis that transposons are important for aging. You can find out that naked mole-rat have unusually low transposon activity, which is a point of evidence to validate johnswentworth’s thesis that transposons are important for aging. However, if you would reason from that that naked mole-rat longevity is mainly due to different transposon behavior that would be an overreach because naked mole-rats do plenty of things besides having different transposon behavior.
It would be interesting to have a better transposon theory of aging even if that only covers part of what aging is about. That wouldn’t really be a “theory of naked mole-rat longevity”, so I’m a bit skeptical about anything that would bill itself as a new theory of naked mole-rat longevity because that’s not the chunk in which I would think. I would expect that relevant scientist who care about mechanisms of aging and not about the naked mole-rat as a species would react similarly.
It’s an evolutionary theory, not a mechanistic theory. Tbc not a revolutionary theory broadly, nor a theory that would cash out to longevity treatments if true or anything crazy like that.