Health
Darwin, Lamarck, and McFadden
Here are three ideas of how evolution works, which I’ll refer to as Darwinian, Lamarckian, and super-Lamarckian.
Aug 13, 2025
Column
Josh Mitteldorf
Aging & evolutionary biology
Josh Mitteldorf is best known for promoting the theory that aging is not “wearing out” but rather an evolved program that limits lifespan. The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. He began blogging about aging on this site in 2012. His guidance for a long life is at AgingAdvice.org. His two books on aging are available at Amazon and elsewhere.
Mitteldorf’s PhD is in astrophysics. Since about 2020, he has taken up a new challenge as curator and critic of science on the fringe, writing about promising science that the science establishment has unjustly neglected.
In other areas of life, Mitteldorf’s two daughters were among the first girls to be adopted from China in the 1980s. He has taught a weekly yoga class for fifty years. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. Follow his other writing at mitteldorf.substack.com, and listen to his poetry on YouTube.
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Health
Physical Time and Time as We Experience It
We experience past and future as different. We have a sense of agency about the future, while we regard the past as set in stone.
Aug 13, 2025
Health
What do THEY know that We don’t?
74 years later, what do they know that university scientists don’t know? And what technologies do they have that are not in the public domain?
May 21, 2025
Health
Magnetic Poles are Drifting Rapidly
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.
Apr 9, 2025
Health
Proposal for Enhancing Experimental Anti-aging Treatment with Young Plasma
Large doses of young exosomes, delivered intravenously, have been shown to have extraordinary rejuvenation power in rats.
Feb 1, 2025
Health
Is the "lab leak hypothesis" another cover-up?
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.
Dec 8, 2024
Health
SV40 and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
SV stands for “Simian Virus”, a virus that infects monkeys. Viruses are adept at co-opting our cells’ metabolism, redirecting the native abilities of the cell to ends that benefit only the virus.
Nov 30, 2024
Health
Gary Ruvkun and the Science of Aging
Gary Ruvkun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine today for establishing the importance of RNA as a signal molecule, independent of its role in transcribing nuclear DNA.
Oct 8, 2024
Health
How we know that aging is a biological function, and why it matters
This new video introduces my work in the context of a hundred years of evolutionary theory and the breakthrough rejuvenation science in the present.
Sep 28, 2024
Life
Sex and the Single Paramecium
In Darwinian terms, sex is good for the community, bad for the individual. If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you are thinking that sex is a part of reproduction, and reproduction is the very definition of Darwinian fitness.
Sep 15, 2024
Health
Stochastic methylation clocks?
Methylation clocks have found their way into the community of aging research as a way to test anti-aging interventions without having to wait for mortality statistics.
Aug 14, 2024
Health
Funeral by Funeral
My title is taken from a well-known but less-well-authenticated quote from Max Planck: “Science progresses funeral by funeral.” Planck discovered the quantum principle in 1899, before the the physics world was ready for it.
Aug 7, 2024