I have a new theory of naked mole-rat longevity, that’s most likely false. I (and LLMs) couldn’t find enough data to either back or disprove it. Nor could we find anybody who’s proposed this theory before.
Any advice for how I can find the relevant experts to talk to about it and see if they’ve already investigated this direction?
A few years ago I’d just email the relevant scientists directly but these days I’ve worried about the rise of LLM crank-science so I feel like my bar for how much I believe or could justify a theory before cold-emailing scientists ought to go up.
I am curious: What is the theory? I’d be surprised if your theory works, applies to naked mole rats, but not to ants and other eusocial animals. I always thought naked mole rats live long because they are eusocial, so you having a theory specifically for naked mole rats sounds ominous.
I always thought naked mole rats live long because they are eusocial
Well subterranean mole-rats in general (describing the shape, nothing else is in the same genus as NMRs) also live longer than mice and rats. I do think the eusociality plays a role too!
Another unique-ish thing about naked mole-rats, in addition to their high average lifespan, is that they don’t age (or don’t age much) in the demographic sense (ie their annual probability of dying is close to flat). I don’t think worker ants or bees work the same way though the data on this is scarce.
I am curious: What is the theory?
In addition to eusociality and the subterranean environment (=lower predators from a non-adaptive evolutionary perspective, = lower oxidation from a mechanistic/biological perspective), naked molerats’ rather unique form of queen selection may mean that living longer confers reproductive advantage, similar to lobsters.
So there’s an evolutionary incentive to live longer/having later-in-life deleterious mutations are costlier.
Since the NMR extrinsic mortality rate is low, the reproductive advantage conveyed from being slightly older doesn’t have to be as high as for other animals, in the standard nonadaptive framework.
Yeah, the low extrinsic mortality is definitely something NMR have going for them that ant workers don’t (queens do since they don’t leave the nest usually). Indian jumping ants also compete for being queen like NMRs, but they forage and leave the nest. There are definitely academics that think in detail what differences in extrinsic mortality risk predict for life-span. When I just asked Claude on that it apparently is actually more complicated than lower extrinsic mortality=slower rate of senescence? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similarly, I am not sure if the low oxygen environment is actually that great for NMR longevity. As ChristianKi mentions your theory is going to be more interesting if you can look across species what it would predict or what your evolutionary theory predicts regarding mechanistic/biochemistry and genetic stuff in NMRs. As ChristianKi, I would not call myself an expert, but I might be somewhere on the Pareto frontier of having looked into aging, eusocial animals and naked mole rats. Not sure about relevant experts. Maybe check the people who wrote the textbook on naked mole rats? You would need some generalist that would know enough about these senescence models and about particular biology of naked mole rats and this expert might just not exist in 1 person.
One thing that’d trivially disprove my theory is if younger female naked mole-rats are more likely to win dominance contests after the original queen dies, whereas my theoy predicts older naked mole rates are more likely to win (though possibly not by a lot). So in some sense it’s not too hard in-principle to figure out that I’m wrong (and why I originally said I thought my theory’s ” most likely false”) Unfortunately I couldn’t find any data on this.
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 have a new theory of naked mole-rat longevity, that’s most likely false. I (and LLMs) couldn’t find enough data to either back or disprove it. Nor could we find anybody who’s proposed this theory before.
Any advice for how I can find the relevant experts to talk to about it and see if they’ve already investigated this direction?
A few years ago I’d just email the relevant scientists directly but these days I’ve worried about the rise of LLM crank-science so I feel like my bar for how much I believe or could justify a theory before cold-emailing scientists ought to go up.
I am curious: What is the theory? I’d be surprised if your theory works, applies to naked mole rats, but not to ants and other eusocial animals. I always thought naked mole rats live long because they are eusocial, so you having a theory specifically for naked mole rats sounds ominous.
Well subterranean mole-rats in general (describing the shape, nothing else is in the same genus as NMRs) also live longer than mice and rats. I do think the eusociality plays a role too!
Another unique-ish thing about naked mole-rats, in addition to their high average lifespan, is that they don’t age (or don’t age much) in the demographic sense (ie their annual probability of dying is close to flat). I don’t think worker ants or bees work the same way though the data on this is scarce.
In addition to eusociality and the subterranean environment (=lower predators from a non-adaptive evolutionary perspective, = lower oxidation from a mechanistic/biological perspective), naked molerats’ rather unique form of queen selection may mean that living longer confers reproductive advantage, similar to lobsters.
So there’s an evolutionary incentive to live longer/having later-in-life deleterious mutations are costlier.
Since the NMR extrinsic mortality rate is low, the reproductive advantage conveyed from being slightly older doesn’t have to be as high as for other animals, in the standard nonadaptive framework.
Can elaborate more if needed.
Yeah, the low extrinsic mortality is definitely something NMR have going for them that ant workers don’t (queens do since they don’t leave the nest usually). Indian jumping ants also compete for being queen like NMRs, but they forage and leave the nest. There are definitely academics that think in detail what differences in extrinsic mortality risk predict for life-span. When I just asked Claude on that it apparently is actually more complicated than lower extrinsic mortality=slower rate of senescence? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Similarly, I am not sure if the low oxygen environment is actually that great for NMR longevity. As ChristianKi mentions your theory is going to be more interesting if you can look across species what it would predict or what your evolutionary theory predicts regarding mechanistic/biochemistry and genetic stuff in NMRs. As ChristianKi, I would not call myself an expert, but I might be somewhere on the Pareto frontier of having looked into aging, eusocial animals and naked mole rats. Not sure about relevant experts. Maybe check the people who wrote the textbook on naked mole rats? You would need some generalist that would know enough about these senescence models and about particular biology of naked mole rats and this expert might just not exist in 1 person.
One thing that’d trivially disprove my theory is if younger female naked mole-rats are more likely to win dominance contests after the original queen dies, whereas my theoy predicts older naked mole rates are more likely to win (though possibly not by a lot). So in some sense it’s not too hard in-principle to figure out that I’m wrong (and why I originally said I thought my theory’s ” most likely false”) Unfortunately I couldn’t find any data on this.
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.