X-Message-Number: 12816 Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 07:28:52 -0400 From: Rand Simberg <> Subject: Evolution and Long Life At 05:00 AM 11/22/99 -0500, John Clark wrote: > >>Me: > >>He can not find any down side to the mice at all but he speculates >there must > >>be one someplace because otherwise evolution would already have found >this fix; > >Rand Simberg <> in #12806 Wrote: > > >I would conclude from this statement that he doesn't understand evolution. > >From the standpoint of evolution, there is nothing broken to "fix." There > >is no obvious benefit to the mouse genotype from in having the phenotypes > >live longer than they already do, > >That's not what I would conclude. I would conclude that long life for mice >would >be an evolutionary advantage and the advantage is obvious, it just isn't >very big; I guess it's not obvious to me, at least from the standpoint of the gene. Can you enlighten me? >it would not be worth even a small reduction in the fertility rates of young >mice. >At least it wouldn't be worth it from evolution's point of view, the mice >may have >another opinion on the subject. Yes, that was my point. And Jan Coatzee wrote: >There is usually a direct relationship between an animal's development >time from birth to being a mature or adult animal. Yes. >If one extend the >life span of an animal you will automatically increase this >developmental time. This does not follow. You are confusing cause and effect with correlation. >This means in the case of most animals they can not >survive to become adults and hence the extinction of the specie. Only >the human specie can get away with that. Maybe one day humans will live >a 1000 years but they will have to spend 100 years of that as teenagers. There is no reason for this. We spend a certain percentage of our lives as adults because that's all out genes need--not because there's any physical requirement to do so. One could easily have a life space of hundreds, even thousands of years, with the same adolescence time as current humans--there are no physical laws preventing it. >I don't think one can survive that long as a teenager. Neither could the >parents handle a teenager for a hundred years. Thus the present ratio of >teenage years to life span may be the optimum. No, the present ratio is optimum only to the gene--we can fix that. As you point out, the ratio would have to decrease dramatically with artificially longer-lived individuals. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12816