Growing & Staying Young

[Keith E. Sullivan]

GROWING YOUNG

Some years ago, a retrospective showing of Pablo Picasso's works was
held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Nearly a thousand of
Picasso's works were displayed in chronological order, beginning when he
was a very young boy. The early works were traditional landscapes and
still-lifes. Then, as the artist advanced in age, brilliant colours
began to emerge, and the still-lifes were no longer very still.
Finally, of course, the works turned into the kind of bold, zesty
abstractions for which Picasso is best known. One art critic who saw
the show recalled that once, when Picasso was eighty-five, he was asked
the reason why his earlier works were so solemn and his later works so
ecstatic and exciting. "How do you explain it?" asked the interviewer.
"Easily," Picasso responded. "It takes a long time to become young!"

Maurizio Mariotti <mari...@IAFRICA.COM>
UGA Humor List <hu...@uga.cc.uga.edu>
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THERE ARE WAYS TO BREED LONGER THAN BUGS
by Bill Hall, Lewiston, Idaho Tribune, March 25, 1998

A spoil-sport scientist has made the intriguing observation that the
only way possible to make any significant change in our human life span
is to adjust human reproduction to where we wait to have sex and
children until much later in life.

The rule of Nature is, the later you breed, the longer you live. The
younger your species reproduces, the earlier the natural time of death.

Insects, for instance. Laurent Keller, an ecology professor at
Switzerland's University of Lausanne, says our life span is determined
by a wider variety of factors than the ones you would expect. There's
more to this than the deterioration of the body's ability to repair and
restore itself. Life span is also affected by breeding, by sex. So go
ahead and have fun, you rascals, but don't come crying to me when you
kill yourselves doing it.

Insects are even more eager for sex than our kind. They are so
vulnerable to predators and other misfortunes that they manage to
perpetuate their genes only by getting busy very early in their lives --
kind of like hillbillies.

The longer a bug is crawling around out there the more likely it is to
be eaten or stomped. Consequently, most insects live no more than a few
months. So if they are going to maintain the presence of their kind of
bug in the world, they can't procrastinate when it comes to dating and
getting married. They can't be dawdling through elementary school and
high school and bug college before buckling down to the business of
having kids. For them, there's no time for school because there's no
tomorrow.

So a bug pretty much bounces out of the egg and starts making eyes at
somebody before his feelers have even dried. He starts dating and
mating and then, after a few thousand kids, dies from the wear and tear
of reproducing -- if a predator doesn't get him first.

Once you no longer possess the means to reproduce, you become useless in
Nature's eyes. Our bodies aren't meant to last much beyond our
kid-rearing years. There is a natural limit on how long we can go past
reproduction. And while more people live past 100 now and more of them
live that long while mentally and physically able, there is still no
improvement in the 120 years or so to which the most long-lived of our
kind can go. You see average life expectancy creeping up over the
years, but not the maximum number of years possible. That's it, even
with all the tinkering and patching and rejuvenating. More of us can
make it to that maximum but nobody goes beyond.

Ross Crozier of La Trobe University in Australia says that to overcome
the natural limit, you must find almost impossible ways to defeat the
natural barriers, especially including the breeding-oriented life span
that evolution has given us. In short, you would have to find a way to
delay reproduction in humankind to delay death in humankind. You must
delay sexual capacity until years later than now. Then Nature will help
us push the limits out more than far enough to protect and nurture the
children we produce in those later years.

In other words, if sex becomes as minor a matter to people for their
first 70 years as it is now for the first seven, then there is the
possibility that Nature will find ways to keep our bodies cranking for
much longer periods of time.

But even if Nature would do her part, are we willing to do ours? Would
we be willing to give up sex for the first 70 years, doing nothing but
watching Saturday cartoons and coloring in coloring books until the
opposite sex finally strikes our fancy and we have something more
fascinating to do with these bodies?

Would you rather live much longer but without sex for decades? Or would
you rather be what we are now -- more like the bugs and inclined to get
quickly in gear before we get squashed?

Of course, there are other tradeoffs. If we are to push longevity
upwards toward something like 150, we would have to be driving kids to
Little League games in our 80s.

Worse, at 90, we would be standing at the door at midnight demanding of
a 68-year-old son, "Where have you been, old man?"

And frankly, some parents would know the heartache of a daughter turning
up pregnant when she is only 72. She would be expecting a baby three
years before she could get married without parental consent.

The bugs have it better than that.
--
Keith's Mostly Clean Humor & Weird (McHaw) List

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