Death has been on everyone’s mind at one time or another… It’s unavoidable…
Some are fascinated by death; mainly the possibility of better afterlife. Some, or the great majority of people, are frightened by it. It seems the unknown of after-death is one of the main factors causing many to tremble…
However, it turns out that Craig Venter, the pioneer of the human genome project and the supposed creator of artificial life, turned his attention and efforts toward decoding death… here
It seems obvious Venter believes that death is be caused by genetics; some genetic mutations that could be fixed and we could live forever, otherwise he wouldn’t be digging in the genome looking to fix the death code…
As a Darwinist and atheist, Venter’s beliefs are probably similar to those of Dawkins/Coynes/Grours/Felsentseins crowed, and the like. The standard model is that life created itself spontaneously (spontaneous matter wanted is the theme of my next OP) and then through billions of years of trial and error of random, unguided processes all 10 billion of species on Earth developed…
However, not many people, including Venter, talk about why, after their great success in creating life, natural, random processes developed death…
Does death have an evolutionary advantage over life that involves the possibility of reproduction and the passing on genes??? This idea seems funky to me just like the whole evolutionary nonsense…
The religious have their own way of explaining death…The great majority believe that Adam and Eve’s sin led to death…Whether their sin led to some kind of a genetic change in the genome that causes death, is unclear…
Personally, I don’t believe death is a genetic thing… though I have to admit that one bible passage makes me puzzled:
Gen 3:22
“Then the God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand rand take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever”.
What do you think?
Can death be decoded?
Will Craig Venter, or other scientists, ever be able to find the code of life?
Is death an evolutionary invention? If yes, why?
It’s good to see Joe included in such august company.
No.
Death is a natural consequence of aging. Better to look at aging rather than at death.
Aging seems to be related to memory. If there were a continual renewal of tissue, then that tissue renewal would erase any memory.
At first God let everything live. But then the crap started to pile up and the stench became unbearable.
Joe who???
You don’t believe a word you have just written, do you? 😉
Just exploring What is the purpose of death?
Why not? Especially if you can’t comprehend the purpose of life in the first place…Don’t you?
What a delightfully anthropocentric post!
Roughly half of the history of life has been exclusively single-celled; for those chaps, death is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and avoidable. Although you could argue that unicellular organisms with asymmetric cell division may suffer unavoidable death (e.g. brewer’s yeast, make about ten daughters, and then you’re done).
I don’t know much about it, but depending on your definition of death there’s plenty of plants and fungi that are immortal.
So Neil’s criterion interests me: is there a 1:1 correlation between inevitable death and having a plastic CNS?
I will also note that J-Mac’s motivation for this post has a very simple answer/refutation. He’s thinking about vertebrates, and here you have the situation where, if you are done reproducing, then all that’s left for you to do is hurry up and die so you stop using valuable resources that your descendant’s can put to better use. Seriously, die already! It’s adaptive!
BTW Venter is even more of a kook than Allan Miller.
That explanation won’t really work if it evolves mostly by individual selection, as it’s a good-of-the-species argument. Peter Medawar long ago came up with a much better one, which others worked out much more completely. Namely, that adaptations that increase viability and fertility when you are young, but lose viability when you are old, can often be favored, especially since having your offspring earlier is advantageous. This leads to the evolution of senescence.
There are more theories, too. See this Wikipedia page
Joe Felsenstein,
Good point. I was over-simplifying, going for an old-fashioned group selection theory. Lot’s of interesting stuff out there. Given my background, I find the DNA damage theory fascinating ,but I would hesitate to try to convince J-Mac of its plausibility.
I don’t know about 1:1.
Trees have memory. The wooden structure is a memory of where to find light. And they keep that memory in dead material, so they presumably don’t have the same limitations. But they are not mobile. If they had were mobile and had to carry those wooden trunks around with them, that would be a problem.
DNA_Jock,
It looks like all we need is Robert Byers’ opinion on this to finalize the final act of this comedy club…
I hope he got some free drinks tonight to help him unwind..
Take it away Bob!
Venter was diagnosed with 2 types of cancer within the last few years… Does it make him a kook trying to figure out why natural selection has been proven so impotent, again and again?
J-Mac, if you think that a 70-year-old getting cancer is a demonstration of the impotence of natural selection, then I’m really glad I didn’t try to explain the DNA damage theory of aging to you.
Craig Venter was a kook long before he got cancer: the EST stunt he pulled, the Human Genome fight, the watermarks in the synthetic mycoplasma.
Hey, we could call J-mac’s area ‘the anti-kook corner’! (Really anything he likes would be fine.)
J-Mac,
OK, as one kook to another, an important issue with vertebrates is the separation of germ line and soma. The potentially immortal cell lines of single celled organisms have given way to a setup in which genes in the soma (that’s most of our bodies) forego their immortality for the sake of their gene copies in the germ line. Cancer is, in a sense, the reassertion of the ‘interest’ of immortal cell lines due to mutations, which inevitably accumulate during a long life. Of course it is an enterprise doomed to failure, but they don’t know that.
Given a long enough life, and circumvention of various other ills and accidents, we’d all die of cancer. It’s inevitable, because DNA is a bugger for replicating. The germ-soma contract can only be a temporary suspension.
As to why NS does not favour immortality: imagine a gene that triples lifespan arising in a population capped at some level by a limiting resource, individuals of which are fertile throughout life. The triple-lifespan individual has triple-lifespan offspring, all producing three times as many as the wild type per generation. Naively, you might imagine tripling your lifetime output would be a sure-fire winner in the evolution game. But you’d be wrong. It might be asking a bit much to ask you to think about why, but I’ll just leave that there for now.
[eta: I forgot to mention that some species do not appear to suffer from cancer. It would be interesting to know why, but it does oblige me to row back slightly from my ‘inevitable’ stance.]
What’s cancer? Adaptive evolution? Or another proof of the impotence of natural selection so worshiped by Darwinists?
If I recall correctly, Venter got his first cancer in his fifties and many children get it too, which explains what? God’s will?
I’m just curious: what was synthetic about the so-called “synthetic mycoplasma???
What species? If that is actually true, I’m pretty sure some labs would be working on it to find out why…I emailed my buddy who is into this stuff to find out more…
I was intrigued by the “immortal” jellyfish, as you may remember…
Personally, since life on subatomic level is quantum, or subquantum, the possibilities of immortality and cancer fee life could be hidden there…IMV…
J-Mac,
Elephants. They aren’t cancer free, but they have about a sixth the rate we do, but comparable longevity. There are many different factors though. Things true in one species don’t have to be universal for evolution to be true – after all, you don’t see elephants buzzing round the kitchen on hot days.
J-Mac,
Oh, Gawd.
But they still get it…They also get high rate of arteriosclerosis which proves veganism to be a waste of time….
Just because you are clueless about QM doesn’t make it wrong…
Everything material and immaterial in the universe is quantum…like it or not…
Cancer is free market capitalism at work.
Does this include the Bushman?
Can you give some examples of some immaterial things, and how you interact with them (i.e. know that they are there)?
You don’t really get this whole “cause and effect” thing do you?
Here’s a site you’ll enjoy in that case: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Death evolved so that no one has to listen to J-Mac babble on for eternity.
Evolution doesn’t normally employ foresight, but it made an exception this time out of mercy.
Who says everybody who practices veganism is doing so to live longer anyhow?
Is there ANYTHING AT ALL that J-Mac is not utterly confused about? (I mean, except the fact that if he types stuff on his computer it will appear on this site.)
It’s true that he sometimes makes me look forward to it.
J-Mac,
What do you do for a living? Trust fund is it?
Attacks on J-mac rather than the problem…
What’s new with evolutionary theory when the facts contradict the dogma?
Exactly! I’m on your side. The dogma is dead! Long live er, something.
It’s interesting how asking for your answer is perceived as an attack.
If your reason for choosing a plant based diet is ethical issues about the animals and the effect on the environment then a plant based diet is not a waste of time whatever the health benefits are .
It turns out eating an unhealthy diet ,meat or plant based , is what raises your risk.
It would be a violation of the rules of TSZ to require that authors of OP understand what they’re talking about. Or to have an adequate grasp of basic English grammar. That would be censorship!
As long as his mother doesn’t cut off the internet line to the basement…
That is fine… but I was more concerned with the health effects of plant based diet…
With the fat>(except trans-fats) cholesterol> heart disease fiasco and plant based diet being very difficult to follow, which leads to increased consumption of sugar especially corn syrup, what is left? Ketogenic diet, perhaps… Cancer cells without glucose have a hard time surviving and they can’t use ketones as fuel…
oops…….
Cell Cycle. 2010 Sep 1; 9(17): 3506–3514.
Published online 2010 Sep 1. doi: 10.4161/cc.9.17.12731
PMCID: PMC3047616
PMID: 20818174
Ketones and lactate “fuel” tumor growth and metastasis
Evidence that epithelial cancer cells use oxidative mitochondrial metabolism
Previously, we proposed a new model for understanding the “Warburg effect” in tumor metabolism. In this scheme, cancer-associated fibroblasts undergo aerobic glycolysis and the resulting energy-rich metabolites are then transferred to epithelial cancer cells, where they enter the TCA cycle, resulting in high ATP production via oxidative phosphorylation. We have termed this new paradigm “The Reverse Warburg Effect.” Here, we directly evaluate whether the end-products of aerobic glycolysis (3-hydroxy-butyrate and L-lactate) can stimulate tumor growth and metastasis, using MDA-MB-231 breast cancer xenografts as a model system. More specifically, we show that administration of 3-hydroxy-butyrate (a ketone body) increases tumor growth by ∼2.5-fold, without any measurable increases in tumor vascularization/angiogenesis. Both 3-hydroxy-butyrate and L-lactate functioned as chemo-attractants, stimulating the migration of epithelial cancer cells. Although L-lactate did not increase primary tumor growth, it stimulated the formation of lung metastases by ∼10-fold. Thus, we conclude that ketones and lactate fuel tumor growth and metastasis, providing functional evidence to support the “reverse Warburg effect.” Moreover, we discuss the possibility that it may be unwise to use lactate-containing i.v. solutions (such as lactated Ringer’s or Hartmann’s solution) in cancer patients, given the dramatic metastasis-promoting properties of L-lactate. Also, we provide evidence for the upregulation of oxidative mitochondrial metabolism and the TCA cycle in human breast cancer cells in vivo, via an informatics analysis of the existing raw transcriptional profiles of epithelial breast cancer cells and adjacent stromal cells. Lastly, our findings may explain why diabetic patients have an increased incidence of cancer, due to increased ketone production, and a tendency towards autophagy/mitophagy in their adipose tissue.
No, I don’t think QM wrong, and I am aware, regardless of my tastes in the matter, that fundamental physics is quantum in nature. What I don’t see is any likelihood, beyond the capacity to club them into the same sentence, that you can make a sensible causal link between QM and cancer that adds to understanding.
The answer lies in drinking 3 glasses of water at 11pm.
The answer lies in saying ‘bibble’ before every bowel movement.
The answer lies in QM.
All of those statements are of equal merit in this regard: all empty conjunctions.
I can’t slap my forehead too hard because I spent a bit too long in the sun watching my son play cricket today. But elephant diet as a guide to the merits of veganism in humans? I think “Oh Gawd” may well become my new catchphrase.
Then you would need to follow the guidelines same as carnivores. Since vegans are more extreme in avoiding animal products in any form than non vegan vegetarians, I think the best explanation for a shift to veganism ( most start out as vegetarians ) is the ethical aspect rather than temporarily cheating death by living a few extra years.
Which is no different from carnivores, who are advised to eat more fruits and vegetables.
Processed food with their hidden sugar and salt are a problem for vegans or carnivores alike , problem with processed foods are they are so easy and cheap.
Drugs ,surgery ,and death.
Maybe, but cancer is not the only tool of the grim reaper. Walk thru a nursing home. The body thrives but the mind is gone.
I don’t think vegans eat elephants.
How’d he do?
The elephant, or the cricket player?
Wow!!! I have finally found someone to talk to about one of my favorite 50 subjects. Ketones.
PeterP,
Why do you think diabetics produces ketones in the first place? Diabetes is mainly the bodies inability to deal with high blood sugar levels; often times the body does’t produce enough insulin to deal with high blood sugar. So, why would diabetics produces ketones? For those who are not experts like PeterP, ketones are the products of the body switching into burning fat, rather than glucose, as fuel… to sustain brain functions mostly…
Another interesting thing about “death” is cell death, which is no doubt programmed…
It is different from what this OP is all about, but I thought I would mention it as I was getting emails from my friends telling me I’d omitted this very important feature of “death”…
Look at it kids!: I didn’t steal any of the OPs and neither have I taken over any of the topics… I’m going golfing… You take care of the rest…
ETA: You be good!
Yeah. You
Do elephants get heart disease or not? If yes, why?
OMagain to J-Mac:
My money is on “ward of the state”.