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Age A Byproduct of Cancer Defense?
A reader writes "The International Herald Tribune has an article which says, in brief: they have discovered that aging in mice seems to be a byproduct of the chemicals that prevent cancer" If true, that's quite a double edged sword - avoid death, to cause it later.
In the environment where we did most of our evolving very few people lived to "old age" before succumbing to a number of other dangers, so something that kept cancer at bay for a while at the price of guaranteeing death after a few decades probably seemed like a good deal. Kind of like the 640k limit. "That ought to be enough for everybody."
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
"Too much p53 and you get this aging effect. Too little and you get cancer. My guess is that evolution has evolved just the right level."
Would somebody explain to me how evolution would play in this finely-tuned scenario? In the U.S. our average lifespan is over 70 years, yet most women pass menopause around age 45. There's a 25 year lifespan discrepancy, in which evolution has no effect, because the population (at least of women) can't reproduce!
Well, in that case, the ??? actually equals "Market to a man's fear of death and desire for immortality". People have been making money off of that for thousands of years.
It hurts when I pee.
Does this mean that since modern day man has increased contact with carcinogens, evolution will now favor those with higher cancer resistance and therefore shorter life-spans?
"when the going get's wierd the wierd turn pro." -hst
You could think of death as the end of cell growth, whereas cancer is cell growth gone out of control.
Silly mortals! I propose that whomever designed us intentionally created these apparent paradoxes to force all doubters to eventually believe.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Do you have any links/info that corroborate your assertion?
A *lot* of people I know would have died much earlier than they did (or they aren't dead yet, me included) due to illnesses they contracted after age 5...
Considering all of the people older than 5 going in hospitals for heart surgery, appendicectomies, assorted cancer removals etc. that go on living for decades afterwards (rather than dying), I find it counter intuitive that a lower infant mortality is the only reason why the average lifespan has increased so much during the past decades.
Note that I don't necessarily think it's wrong, mind you, just very counter intuitive, that's why I'd like to know if you have some sort of proof to back your statement with.
-- the cake is a lie
All joking aside, this shows how flawed the study of human cancer in rodents is. It's true, many rodents are very succeptible to cancer, most of the time from stuff which is not carcinogenic to a person. So, if we relied on rats to tell us about human cancer, we'd probably have to live in bubbles, but we, uh, don't.
"We kill to cure, with cures that kill" - Skinny Puppy
Err, two words: Organized Religion
If someone has been making money for thousands of years, I'd say their claims are pretty well-founded
Well, that's debatable.. I'm not going there, though.. :)
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
The reason being that thermodynamics (or chaos theory, or whatever) says that you're wrong. Any system as complex as a living cell, even something so simple as a yeast cell or E coli can not maintain that level of organisation for long. The cell is very thrifty with its organization, to be sure, but it is not infinitely so. That's why reproduction and evolution are so critical, because no single system can survive by itself for too long, so it must rebuild itself from scratch. Yes, you can put these systems in to hibernation, but that isn't really life functioning in any way shape or form until it's revived.
And of course pre-programmed cell death wasn't present in single cell organisms, it'd be counterproductive for an E coli to simply kill itself. Preprogrammed cell death does not kill the entire organism, and it obviously be detrimental if it did.
And as for sex and evolution evolving together, there are single celled organisms that have sex via plasmids. Granted, it might not be the "one chromosome from each parent" that we are used to in humans, but it is still genetic exchange by conjugation. There is no apoptosis here either.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."