I think this is a subject that is ripe for appeals to consequence.
People concerned about aging would really, really prefer there was a biological cause for aging. If it's biological, there's a chance there's a trivial fix (gene therapy, supplements, ...) for it, or at least a trivial incremental fix that will get you an extra ten or twenty years while you wait for the next incremental fix to be developed for the next problem down the line.
If the problem is physical, caused by the wear and tear of your metabolism, the problem becomes significantly harder. Not impossible (after all, cell lines can be immortal, trivially, we have an unbroken line of single celled organisms dating back billions of years), but you are potentially looking at rebuilding mammalian life from the ground up before you make even incremental progress. And the only maybe-possible-but-the-animal-models-are-mixed incremental fix we have is to lower your metabolism by living your entire life on a calorie-restricted diet, or maybe by being just a little too cold all the time.
I'm all for still devoting a healthy amount of resources to trying to find easy biological fixes to aging, because I'm old enough now that probably nothing else would happen fast enough to keep me, personally, alive, but if it turns out most of the problems are physical, we shouldn't shy away from acknowledging that just because it makes the work of beating death harder. We aren't trying to beat aging because it seemed like an easy thing to do.
People concerned about aging would really, really prefer there was a biological cause for aging. If it's biological, there's a chance there's a trivial fix (gene therapy, supplements, ...) for it, or at least a trivial incremental fix that will get you an extra ten or twenty years while you wait for the next incremental fix to be developed for the next problem down the line.
If the problem is physical, caused by the wear and tear of your metabolism, the problem becomes significantly harder. Not impossible (after all, cell lines can be immortal, trivially, we have an unbroken line of single celled organisms dating back billions of years), but you are potentially looking at rebuilding mammalian life from the ground up before you make even incremental progress. And the only maybe-possible-but-the-animal-models-are-mixed incremental fix we have is to lower your metabolism by living your entire life on a calorie-restricted diet, or maybe by being just a little too cold all the time.
I'm all for still devoting a healthy amount of resources to trying to find easy biological fixes to aging, because I'm old enough now that probably nothing else would happen fast enough to keep me, personally, alive, but if it turns out most of the problems are physical, we shouldn't shy away from acknowledging that just because it makes the work of beating death harder. We aren't trying to beat aging because it seemed like an easy thing to do.