THE INSTITUTE
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
Galileo Galilei
The Institute's Approach
The founder founded the Institute in 2014 to explore certain inconsistencies between what “everyone knows” to be true about biological aging, and what the founder had observed in everyday life. Through lifestyle changes, i.e., diet and exercise, a large cohort of older individuals were clearly becoming stronger and healthier. The reason he found that noteworthy was because the lifestyle changes weren’t just slowing the aging process, they were clearly reversing several “infirmities of aging.”
That empirical fact is inconsistent with the universally held preconception that all aspects of biological aging constitute a monolithic, irreversible trait. We know that all older people are destined to get progressively weaker as they age. Perhaps that process can be slowed through lifestyle changes. But if all aspects of the aging process are irreversible, it shouldn’t be possible for an older person to be able to get stronger or improve the performance of her circulatory system or respiratory system. So the founder reached out to a noted aging theorist. The expert didn’t even try to provide an explanation for what the founder had observed. He simply rejected the possibility that any aspect of biological aging could be reversible. When asked why the expert could be so certain, his response was that evolutionary principles mandated an irreversible aging process. That response led the founder to investigate what evolutionary theory has to say about the aging process.
The founder discovered that not only does Darwin’s theory not predict an irreversible aging process, but that Darwin himself recognized that his principles of natural selection were wholly inconsistent with the notion of any type of aging process. Positive traits are inherited by later generations. Negative traits are rejected. The progressive diminution in functionality that characterizes the aging process is negative, so it should have been rejected by natural selection. Darwin proposed two possible rationales that would allow his proposed new theory to co-exist with the aging paradigm. For over a century and a half, proponents of the two rationales have engaged in a sterile academic debate over which rationale was better. After reviewing dozens of articles on the subject, it was apparent to the founder that each camp had conclusively established that the other rationale could not possibly be correct – no rationale could explain how an aging process could possibly be a genetically inherited trait. Logic dictates that if evolutionary theory, which has been proven time after time to be an accurate depiction of reality, says that it is impossible for biological aging to be a genetically inherited trait, then it isn’t. These issues are discussed in the essays entitled “Critique of the Programmed Aging Rationale,” and “Critique of the Non-Programmed Aging Rationale.”
Another surprising discovery was that there is no theory of aging – no generally accepted explanation as to how or why biological aging occurs. Worse, many academicians had all but conceded that there may never be any such theory. The founder’s rudimentary understanding of science was that all scientific phenomena have both a recognizable mechanism and a discernible cause. How could it be possible that the most fundamental of all biological processes has no explanation?
These unanswered questions led the founder to create the Institute. Over the past decade, the Institute has spent thousands of hours reading and analyzing everything that has been written on the subject of aging. The proposed New Paradigm and this website are the culmination of those efforts. We believe that the essays on this website provide an answer to the founder’s questions.
So why this website and not a book or series of scholarly articles? This website challenges an aging paradigm that has dominated the life sciences since the dawn of human civilization. As discussed in the essay entitled “Paradigmatic Norms and Paradigm Paralysis,” challenging any paradigm is almost impossible. As Thomas Kuhn observed, for practitioners in a particular field, the then-current paradigm is reality; for them, challenging the paradigm is questioning reality itself. As Albert Einstein succinctly stated the problem: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” That’s not because scientists over the age of 30 can’t be creative; it’s because by the age of 30, they become so convinced that the paradigm is reality that they are incapable of challenging it.
Who can question reality itself? Nobody. Only a person or group that isn’t wedded to the current paradigm, and thus does not blindly believe that the current paradigm is reality, can question it. But the term “paradigm” doesn’t just refer to the set of preconceptions that is generally understood to represent objective reality. The paradigm also determines what questions can be asked and who may ask those questions. Under the current aging paradigm, only someone who has spent years being indoctrinated to believe that the current paradigm does represent objective reality is permitted to have an opinion on the subject. That paradigmatic norm is controlling not just on the scientists themselves; it also constrains the individuals who are responsible for publishing books or scientific articles. Before even reading a submission, those persons weed out anything written by someone who does not have extensive credentials establishing the author’s membership in the establishment. If the Institute had such credentials, it would have been blinded by the paradigm, and incapable of questioning it. Thus, the Institute has no means of getting a book or a series of articles published. It’s not that anyone has reviewed the concepts set forth in this website and disagreed with them; the reality is that every submission made by the Institute has been rejected without anyone ever having read it.
Aside from being the only practical alternative, the website format offers practical advantages. Even after 10 years of research and analysis, many of the concepts described in this website are still evolving. As the concepts continue to evolve, the content on this website can be modified accordingly. That’s not so easy with a book or article.
Any visitor to this website will need to overcome a related paradigmatic norm. That’s the pervasive belief that only trained scientists can hope to understand science, and thus non-scientists should believe only what they’re told by experts, as opposed to reaching their own conclusions. If this website and the New Paradigm purported to be works of science, then we would agree that the science should be judged by scientists. But there is a huge difference between normal science and what the Institute is doing in proposing the New Paradigm. Normal life scientists are in the business of generating data by conducting laboratory experiments or statistical surveys within the strictures of the existing paradigm. The Institute does not generate data. The work of the Institute is more akin to a work of philosophy – using logical analysis to create a new conceptual framework based on publicly available empirical data. All of the data cited by the Institute has been published in books or scientific journals. Thus all of the normal science contained in our essays has been peer-reviewed.
The New Paradigm consists of a series of relatively simple concepts based upon established empirical data that have been assembled into a new conceptual framework. Our goal in developing this website is to make the concepts accessible to anyone, regardless of whether they have any scientific background. We believe that anyone who approaches our essays with an open mind (not as easy as one might think) will be able to see for herself that the logic holds up.
The Institute's Approach
Among the reasons why the Institute has been able to develop a proposed New Paradigm that is so inconsistent with the current aging paradigm is that the Institute has never sought outside funding. Most researchers are driven by the need to obtain funding. In order to obtain funding, a researcher needs to identify the subject matter of his research, how it ties to existing studies and the anticipated results. Typically a funding request is subject to peer review. The funding application process itself stifles originality. It’s difficult for a researcher to follow an unexpected new trail if the researcher has told its funding source exactly what trail the researcher intends to follow.
Frequently, funding sources have an agenda. The Institute has none. It has no affiliations. It has no biases. The Institute is not selling any products nor soliciting any contributions. The Institute’s sole motivation has always been to follow the path that leads to the truth without regard as to where that path might lead.
In order to amass credentials, publish results and obtain funding, a conventional researcher must become a specialist in a particular area. With thousands of studies being published each year, the only way to come up with a unique study, while still following a predictable pathway, is to examine more and more narrowly specialized questions. Thus, the tendency is bore deeper and deeper into a narrow subject matter. The need to specialize makes it difficult for the researcher to make the broad generalizations or discern a pattern that does not fit within the silo created by that specialization.
The New Paradigm is not a work of science. A normal scientist, being a specialist, has a focus that is a foot wide and a mile deep. The Institute deals in general propositions, so its focus is a mile wide and an inch deep.
“Normal” scientific researchers are driven by the need to publish results of experiments or studies in order to obtain funding. That need has resulted in an enormous publicly available body of experimental observations based upon peer-reviewed studies. Since some other researcher has already published a study that tests just about any imaginable hypothesis, there is no need for the Institute to conduct experiments or studies. For almost every working hypothesis that the Institute advanced in the process of developing the New Paradigm, it was able to find published experimental results that either verified or falsified the predictions arising from the hypothesis.
Thus, unlike scientists in the past (or theoretical physicists who may need to create entirely new technologies to test their hypotheses), the Institute was able to test its working hypotheses by reference to existing published studies. The savings in terms of cost and time were enormous. Further, one could argue that reliance upon experiments conducted by third parties results in more reliable results. Without the framework of the New Paradigm, the person conducting any particular study would be unaware of its implications for the work of the Institute.
The Institute's Philosophy
In developing the New Paradigm, the Institute tried to make as few assumptions as possible. However, it did make one critical assumption. It assumed that the principles of natural selection have been established to be a scientific fact, and that evolution is not crazy or inefficient. Our genetic blueprints were developed over an immense period of time – in excess of a billion years. Unlike a blueprint created by an architect on a clean sheet of paper, our genetic blueprints are the result of evolution picking and choosing among billions of random mutations or add-ons. The final result is far more complex than an architect would develop from scratch. Evolution is a tinkerer that rarely throws out a feature or process that works. That add-on approach frequently makes it difficult for us to understand what is really going on.
Evolution, having had a billion years of trial and error to develop the ultimate genetic blueprint for the human being, is far smarter than we’ll ever be. Natural selection works by selecting traits that enhance the probability of an organism surviving and reproducing. Other researchers see that everyone on the planet suffers from FDS, so they assume that the infirmities of aging, including the age-associated degenerative diseases, are the result of evolutionary spite or neglect. But under the principles of natural selection, FDS cannot be a trait that would have been favored by evolution. For the vast majority of humanity, chronic degenerative disorders are not programmed into the blueprint or the result of a flaw in the blueprint, but rather result from behavior-driven deviations from the genetic blueprint. Humans don’t suffer from FDS because evolution is trying to kill us off or doesn’t care. FDS must be the result of the modern environment somehow being different than the evolutionary environment.