Move Slowly and Repair Things

The last few years, my eyesight has deteriorated at what feels like breakneck pace. Maybe that’s what drew my eye (see what I did there?) to yesterday’s odd piece in ScienceDaily about Greenland sharks, who can live for around 400 years and whose eyes show surprisingly little retinal deterioration associated with ageing.¹

»Maintenance is intelligence slowed down«

Researchers examined sharks more than a century old and found intact retinal structures and unusually strong expression of genes involved in DNA repair. The findings don’t explain why the sharks live so long, but suggest that part of the answer may be less glamorous than immortality: maintenance.²

That’s a strange way to think about ageing. We tend to imagine it as something that happens simply because time passes. But time does not, by itself, break things. It gives damage more opportunities to occur. Ageing begins when the rate of damage exceeds the capacity for repair.

The Greenland shark appears to have found a different balance. It grows extraordinarily slowly and reaches sexual maturity around 150 years of age. We have built our economies around acceleration, iteration, and replacement. The shark has built a life around persistence.

That’s not to say slow is always better. Sometimes speed is the point. A startup that takes three years to find product-market fit is usually already dead. A hospital can’t afford to spend a year adapting to an epidemic. There are locally optimal rates of change. The interesting question is what determines them.

»Move fast and break things« captured one theory of optimisation: the gains from moving quickly outweigh the costs of what gets broken along the way.³ If iteration is cheap and replacement is easy, speed can be rational. But that’s only one strategy, albeit one that we’ve become so accustomed to that its assumptions can look like laws of nature. Products are designed for replacement. Software is shipped quickly and patched later. Buildings are demolished when adaptation becomes inconvenient. We celebrate the new thing and treat the continued functioning of the old thing as unremarkable.

Perhaps we need to think about systems as having two complementary forms of intelligence: adaptation and maintenance. Adaptation changes the system when its circumstances change. Maintenance keeps it persisting as itself – sometimes through a small correction, occasionally through something as drastic as starting over. The difference between maintenance and replacement isn’t how much changes. It’s whether the same self is still the one doing the surviving.

Maintenance is intelligence slowed down. We usually think of intelligence as fast: quick perception, quick decisions, quick response. Maintenance is the same capacity stretched across a much longer interval – noticing small deviations early enough to correct them before they add up to a crisis. Most of the time that looks unremarkable: small corrections, made quietly enough that nobody notices maintenance was even happening. Every so often, it looks like what some jellyfish do.

The Greenland shark sits at one extreme of maintenance: change almost nothing, repair continuously. At the other extreme is the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, which maintains itself by discarding almost everything. When injured, starved, or threatened, an adult can reverse its development and return to its earlier polyp stage, from which new jellyfish can emerge. The process can be repeated, which is why it is sometimes called the »immortal jellyfish«.⁴

The shark survives by barely changing. The jellyfish survives by changing almost everything. Same instinct, wildly different tactics: keep going by changing what you can, or, when that’s not enough, change everything and keep going anyway.

Perhaps that’s what we miss when we make speed the default measure of progress. We’ve become very good at producing, launching, replacing, and scaling; much less good at asking what’s worth preserving, and when to stop trying to preserve it. The shark has spent 400 years learning the first. The jellyfish has learnt the second: sometimes survival means starting over.

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