Listen live 8 to 10 pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio
First hour: Scientist Josh Mittledorf, author of Cracking the Aging Code (with Dorion Sagan), explains that the human body doesn’t just wear out. It is perfectly capable of repairing and rejuvenating itself and living for hundreds if not thousands of years. In fact, there is no reason it couldn’t get stronger and more youthful and less likely to get sick or die with each passing century. The problem is that it doesn’t want to! On the contrary, it wants to blow itself up in an inside-job-style controlled demolition timed by an internal “master clock.” This sounds bizarre, especially to neo-Darwinian fundamentalists, who believe that “selfish genes” should select for ever-longer-lived individuals. But Josh explains why they are wrong, why the inside job theory of aging fits the emerging paradigm of evolutionary group selection, and what this portends for our ability to slow our own aging processes. Today, each of us can fairly easily impede aging and add about ten healthy years to our individual lifespans through lifestyle choices, diet, and supplements. Tomorrow, it could easily be decades, or even centuries. There is a very real possibility that at least some people alive today could live for millennia. But can the planet handle that? And will the Deep State allow it—or hoard the elixir for itself? (After culling most of the population through biological warfare and vaccinations?)
Note: The Qur’an endorses the strong version of group selection by insisting that all life consists of communities: “There is not a creature that lives on the earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but they form communities like you.” (6:38) As for aging, the Qur’an repeatedly says everything comes into existence and goes back to God at its appointed time or “ajalin musamma,” sometimes translated “allotted span” or “expiration date.” Do humans come with a built-in biological expiration date? (As well as the metaphysical one the Qur’an is presumably talking about?)
Second hour: Today is the 12th anniversary of the Supreme Court Heller Decision affirming that the 2nd Amendment applies to individual firearms ownership. Eric Zuesse attacked it last year, and has updated his argument, in part to answer my objections. Eric joins the show to make his case against Heller and the Anti-Federalists, while philosophy professor Peter Simpson responds with a Pro-Anti-Federalist position (if that isn’t an oxymoron).