Contraditions in meaning

Contraditions in meaning

The passage below is from Jellyfish age backwards by Nicklas Brendborg.

Mechanisms of calorie restriction

There’s a lot of research into exactly how calorie restriction works and why it prolongs life. One interesting finding involves the laboratory worm C. elegans. ? It turns out calorie restriction only extends the lifespan of C. elegans

if the worms’ autophagy, cellular garbage collection system, is functioning. ? If scientists block autophagy, calorie restriction no longer helps the worms live longer. ? Another hint pointing in the same direction is that calorie restriction doesn’t provide additional benefits in experimental animals on rapamycin. ? Rapamycin, as you might remember, blocks the growth-promoting mTOR and so activates autophagy.

In this passage it seems to me that between ?&? and ?&? there shows a contradiction.

?&? says that calorie restriction(CR) is beneficial to the lifespan of the worms only when their autophagy is functioning.

But ?&? says calorie restriction doesn’t bring on the benefits of the lifespan of the worms when they are on rapamycin, or rapamycin functions autophagy in the worms.

(I changed ‘activate’ with ‘function’. Am I right?)

Now to me ?&? and ?&? contradicts each other, because the former says that to earn the benefits of CR worms’ autophagy should be working, but the latter says the opposite, that the precondition of earning the benefits of CR is not to activate autophagy.

(Do you agree with my line of thought? But I don’t want that I am right, I just want to know the intention of the author.)

Lastly, ‘Another hint pointing in the same direction’ is somewhat hard to grasp the meaning. It’s literal meaning is not hard but I don’t think I know its contextual meaning. Is that suggest the contradictory idea of the following passage? (Well, I’m in the complete dark. It doesn’t seem hard at first glance but in context it’s really hard to grasp its meaning.)

Thanks in advance.