A great read, fascinating stuff
The Origin of Death (1970)
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: The Origin of Death (1970)
#12Very fascinating read. Reminds me of a recording of a stream I was listening to recently where the person talks about the idea of death being given in a deal to biological life.
Maybe immortal organisms did exist at one point. Issue is that being immortal prevents you as a specie to adapt to changes. Death of individuals can be simply seen as a competitive advantage within the framework of the theory of evolution.
The linked talk explains that death isn't necessarily related to adaptation. There are many advanced organisms that just keep splitting and don't die, unless eaten or something. Moreover, the part of ourselves that accumulates adaptations (the line of germ cells passed from parents to children) also keeps splitting and doesn't die.
Rather, the point is that at some point the immortal germ line found a weird trick: "let's make in each generation a bunch of cells that will help the germ line reproduce, but that won't themselves reproduce". Like sterile worker bees. And our body, including the brain, is a pile of just such disposable cells.
Re: The Origin of Death (1970)
#13> I used to think that way, too, but I don’t any longer. You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years. That really is immortality. For if that line of life had ever broken, how could we be here? All that time, our germ plasm has been living the life of those singl…
We’re all stardust.
we're all stardust
anything that happened so far has been causal and mandatory
you are forced to read this
Re: The Origin of Death (1970)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe immortal organisms did exist at one point. Issue is that being immortal prevents you as a specie to adapt to changes. Death of individuals can be simply seen as a competitive advantage within the framework of the theory of evolution.
If you follow Richard Dawkin’s reasoning that all organisms are just very effective DNA replication machines, this makes a lot of sense.
On the end a "competitive advantage" is a thing that helps to nicely explain a lot of things like vision, self-consciousness, feelings… Does nothing to the reason why Von Neumann machines appeared on our planet thought.
Re: The Origin of Death (1970)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe immortal organisms did exist at one point. Issue is that being immortal prevents you as a specie to adapt to changes. Death of individuals can be simply seen as a competitive advantage within the framework of the theory of evolution.
The linked talk explains that death isn't necessarily related to adaptation. There are many advanced organisms that just keep splitting and don't die, unless eaten or something. Moreover, the part of ourselves that accumulates adaptations (the line of germ cells passed from parents to children) also keeps splitting and doesn't die. Rather, the point is that at some point the immortal germ line found a weird trick: "l…
That’s right, thinking about your point, with cancer our cells still know how to turn immortal. But what’s the point if it’s at the expense of their carrier. I need to reflect on the implications.
Re: The Origin of Death (1970)
#16Without any direct evidence (although it's an idea I picked up from attending various immunology lectures), it seems like aging/death is at least partially linked to immunity. Our ancient ancestors had to make a tradeoff in order to combat the extremely high mutation rate of their microbes, by increasing their own rate of genomic diversity (through sex, and through adaptive immunity) including in the receptors which…
Hence the importance of feeding your microbes in a predictable manner, with something that is not too easy to digest but calms them down so that they don't overrun the place.
Mucus acts as both a barrier and a food source with an extremely diverse O-linked glycans which decorate its backbone. ~800k permutations of the 5 possible O-linked if you consider a glycan chain of length 5, and 3 possible linkages types. In actually the diversity is likely greater given chain branching patterns, randomized expression of glycosyl hydrolases which generate the mucus, etc..
Re: The Origin of Death (1970)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you follow Richard Dawkin’s reasoning that all organisms are just very effective DNA replication machines, this makes a lot of sense.
On the end a "competitive advantage" is a thing that helps to nicely explain a lot of things like vision, self-consciousness, feelings… Does nothing to the reason why Von Neumann machines appeared on our planet thought.
"The Selfish Gene" attempts to explain this, starting with self-replicating (IIRC) predecessors of amino acids in the primordial soup, which became more and more complex. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't recall details any more.