Josh Mitteldorf

Josh Mitteldorf studies evolutionary theory of aging using computer simulations. The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. It may be that therapies to slow the progress of aging need not repair or regenerate anything, but only need to interfere with an existing program of self-destruction. Mitteldorf has taught a weekly yoga class for thirty years. He is an advocate for vigorous self care, including exercise, meditation and caloric restriction. After earning a PhD in astrophysicist, Mitteldorf moved to evolutionary biology as a primary field in 1996. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, LaSalle and Temple University. He is presently affiliated with MIT as a visiting scholar. In private life, Mitteldorf is an advocate for election integrity as well as public health. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. His two daughters are among the first children adopted from China in the mid-1980s. Much to the surprise of evolutionary biologists, genetic experiments indicate that aging has been selected as an adaptation for its own sake. This poses a conundrum: the impact of aging on individual fitness is wholly negative, so aging must be regarded as a kind of evolutionary altruism. Unlike other forms of evolutionary altruism, aging offers benefits to the community that are weak, and not well focussed on near kin of the altruist. This makes the mechanism challenging to understand and to model. more at http://mathforum.org/~josh

What do THEY know that We don’t?

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In 1951, the act authorizing the CIA was amended with the provision that the CIA and DoD might conduct secret research without revealing their scientific progress to the public or even to Congress. 74 years later, what do they know that university scientists don’t know? And what technologies do they have that are not in the … Read more

Magnetic Poles are Drifting Rapidly

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Magnetic pole drift map

In just the last 20 years, the North Magnetic Pole has moved 400 miles out of Canada and into the Siberian side of the geographic pole. In Derinkuyu, Turkey, there is an entire underground city, half a million square feet of living space extending hundreds of feet down. It was built in a time before … Read more

Is the “lab leak hypothesis” another cover-up?

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Event 201, New York, October 18, 2019

Very early in the pandemic, the infamous “Proximate origins” paper was published in Nature Medicine, using nonsensical reasoning to “prove” that COVID could not have come from a lab. The Big Lie held its ground for over two years, before Jon Stewart sneered at it and Jeffrey Sachs added gravitas to the case against the “Wet Market hypothesis”. Then in December, … Read more

Plato told us that TRUE = BEAUTIFUL

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You are to be forgiven if you don’t see the difference between a “beautiful theory” and an “ugly theory”. Einstein’s General Relativity is a beautiful theory because it can be described simply in words, and those words lead in turn to horrendously intractable mathematics. The words are that the density of energy (including mass, momentum, … Read more

What we might learn from mitochondria

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About a billion years ago, there was a high-powered bacterium — we’ll call her Mitey — who was skilled at redox chemistry. This is the same chemistry that runs batteries, and it’s much more energy intensive than the organic chemistry of life that came before. Mitey was a parasite who used her high-power chemistry to … Read more

Inverting the Hard Problem, part two

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In 1898, William James was engaged by Harvard to lecture on the subject of “human immortality”. He devoted the lecture to the hypothesis that the brain does not create consciousness, but rather that the brain is a connector between consciousness and physical reality. Radio broadcasts were the new technology of that era, and he used the metaphor … Read more

Inverting the Hard Problem, part one

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How does the brain create consciousness? Thirty years ago, David Chalmers called this the Hard Problem, and the name has stuck. In the paradigm of reductionist science, there are only physical matter and physical causes. There is no need for emotions or sensations or intentions — indeed, there is no room for these things, because … Read more

What “Theories of Everything” all miss

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Robust experimental results from more than a century of research in parapsychology are incompatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. This presents the greatest challenge in science today. Viewed in another way, it may be the greatest opportunity we have for addressing long-standing problems and controversies in mainstream science, including The “measurement … Read more