I caught part of the live feed of the Personalized Life Extension Conference. I can see now I'll have to schedule time tomorrow to watch as much of the rest of it as I can.
Michael R. Rose's talk, as near as I can interpret it from the thin slices of it I got to see between interruptions, points to the fact that human mortality curves show increasing death rates through, say, the age of the early to mid 90's. If you make it to that age, then the mortality rate becomes constant instead of increasing, but you will still die because your generally depleted condition at that age leaves you more vulnerable than younger people. Rose defines this flat mortality curve as "biological immortality" for reasons I didn't catch, and he suggests a strategy to attain the flat part of that curve at a much younger biological age. Instead of having a population's death rate to stop increasing and become constant at age 90 or so, why not have that happen by the age of 60?
Rose then argues that evolutionary pressures on Eurasian populations, including their descendants living in other parts of the planet, apparently selected for genes which confer reproductive advantages in young people who live in agricultural societies, characterized by grain-based diets, manual labor and crowded living conditions. But after your prime reproductive years, say, after age 30 and definitely by age 50, Rose suggests, your health would benefit by moving away from an agricultural diet and lifestyle and more towards a hunter-gatherer or Paleolithic diet and lifestyle. (No wonder at my age I prefer to live in the high desert, I try to avoid crowds and I want to eat more salads, fresh fruit and wild Pacific salmon.)
I didn't understand what this has to do with hitting your constant mortality rate at a younger age, however. I'll have to listen to the entire talk when it comes online and perhaps read some of Rose's papers so that I can figure out his reasoning.
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