evolution and death (1 Viewer)

[abdooooo!!!]

ok this programmed death theory has puzzled me for a long time... but me thinks i finally came up with a simple explaination with the application of evolution.

old cells are programmed to die to be replace by new cells for growth and change of an organism ie its growing up. this change can either be good in an environment or bad. natural selection is there to select the changes that are most suited to an environment. but natural selection only works up to the point of reproduction... ie the success of a species is determined only by their chances to reproduce. and not by how long the organism will eventually live. so the bad genes which causes deases after reproduction which lead to aging and the eventual death is passed on in a population and we will DIE!!!

any thoughts?

 

[~TeLEpAtHeTiC~]

several thoughts..

from what i gather essentially your saying old cells die to make way to new ones in the process of growth, repair and reproduction [i agree] and in a way changes the organism [i disagree]
this process of grr doesn't change the organism unless of course affected by a mutagen throughout the organisms lifespan, due to this, these processes do not cause change, other than that which was programmed from birth according to the programmed death theory, if this is what u wer intending to say then i agree

this change you speak of you say can be good or bad, natural selection is there to choose the changes that are best suited to the environment [i disagree]
natural selection is there to 'choose' the ORGANISM best suited for the environment according to its characteristics and atributations and wether or not they are compatible as oppsed to others in the same species. competition for food water shelter etc are ways fr natural seelction to weed out the duds so to speak and keep those best siuted to live on and reproduce their genes, it desn't choose changes best suited to its surroundings rather its surroundings choose the 'changes' or characteristics best suited

natural selection only works up to the piont of reproduction [i disagree]
natural selection is present as a process throughout the organisms/individuals entire lifespan, in doing so its able to distingiush those best capable of surviving a further generation and reproducing, this process occurs throughut the whole lifespan becuase if it wer determined at birth then other inadequecies that might hav ben encountered later in life are bypassed

bad genes that cause diseases etc are passed on throughout the generations [ i agree]
essentially all ur saying here is the hereditary nature of diseases which is general knowledge?..isnt it...if that is what ur saying..correect me if i am wrong

the programmed deaththeor all in all i find very itneresting, i mean the fact that we are all programmed to die at a certain rate and that it is all predetermined in our dna is rather crazy dont u think?


telepathetic

 

[abdooooo!!!]

cool i got a response from someone who is interested in biology

Originally posted by ~TeLEpAtHeTiC~
from what i gather essentially your saying old cells die to make way to new ones in the process of growth, repair and reproduction [i agree] and in a way changes the organism [i disagree]
this process of grr doesn't change the organism unless of course affected by a mutagen throughout the organisms lifespan, due to this, these processes do not cause change, other than that which was programmed from birth according to the programmed death theory, if this is what u wer intending to say then i agree

ok here is what i mean. growth and development of an organism = change for that invidual organism. and not change for a specie as a whole... if you know what i mean.

Originally posted by ~TeLEpAtHeTiC~
this change you speak of you say can be good or bad, natural selection is there to choose the changes that are best suited to the environment [i disagree]
natural selection is there to 'choose' the ORGANISM best suited for the environment according to its characteristics and atributations and wether or not they are compatible as oppsed to others in the same species. competition for food water shelter etc are ways fr natural seelction to weed out the duds so to speak and keep those best siuted to live on and reproduce their genes, it desn't choose changes best suited to its surroundings rather its surroundings choose the 'changes' or characteristics best suited

lol, are you trying to correct my english?

Originally posted by ~TeLEpAtHeTiC~
natural selection only works up to the piont of reproduction [i disagree]
natural selection is present as a process throughout the organisms/individuals entire lifespan, in doing so its able to distingiush those best capable of surviving a further generation and reproducing, this process occurs throughut the whole lifespan becuase if it wer determined at birth then other inadequecies that might hav ben encountered later in life are bypassed

umm... well i don't want to go to mathematical in biology forum but here is what i mean in terms of simple logic:

any good feature cannot be good for every purpose, it must have side effects which is a disavantage in and for a different purpose or environment.

a feature that is adopted before reproduction and is an advantage at this stage is selected by natural selection. but naturally this feature will always carry a disavantage later in life as a trade off for the initial advantage, which means further reproduction is not possible and soon death occurs at a particular stage during the cellular change.

by this one could conclude that there are trade offs to be made between advantages and disavantages at a particular time in life, since organisms all grow. but mathematically by the law of probability this early advantage is favoured since an early disavantage would end a species before reproduction occurs. this therefore sets a flexible date for death of a particular species due to the amount and seriousness of the disavantages inherited... which must occur later in life after reproduction has occured or else...

Originally posted by ~TeLEpAtHeTiC~
bad genes that cause diseases etc are passed on throughout the generations [ i agree]
essentially all ur saying here is the hereditary nature of diseases which is general knowledge?..isnt it...if that is what ur saying..correect me if i am wrong

yes. but why do everyone inherit diseases which causes the inevitable old age death after reproduction? simply this is explained by evolution/natural selection, and the essential growth of an organism... ie stages of life, the path of cellular change taken.

Originally posted by ~TeLEpAtHeTiC~
the programmed deaththeor all in all i find very itneresting, i mean the fact that we are all programmed to die at a certain rate and that it is all predetermined in our dna is rather crazy dont u think?

hopefully you can find my explaination logical... or can you find any other flaws with the assumption that i made... please point it out.

 

[mei_ling03]

geez guys you make everything sound so complicated. stop scaring all the new bio students!

 

[t-i-m-m-y]

lol@ the thread

whats going on?

 

[abdooooo!!!]

LOL. the governing dynamics of evolution.

an equilibrium of death and new life must and is established as scarcity exists.

umm... i think im gonna get my PhD on that... ahahaha.

 

[mei_ling03]

"an equilibrium of death and new life must and is established as scarcity exists" - wtf?

too much philosophy on such a simple matter

"yes. but why do everyone inherit diseases which causes the inevitable old age death after reproduction? simply this is explained by evolution/natural selection, and the essential growth of an organism... ie stages of life, the path of cellular change taken."

what are you trying to say? old age isn't a disease and disease doesn't cause old age (well, except for one that is).

"any good feature cannot be good for every purpose, it must have side effects which is a disavantage in and for a different purpose or environment."

can you justify that? e.g. humans are stereoscopic vision for coordination etc. that's our adaptive advantage. so when does it ever become a disadvantage? - only ever when it is defective.

just a question, did/do you study bio?

 

[abdooooo!!!]

Originally posted by mei_ling03
"an equilibrium of death and new life must and is established as scarcity exists" - wtf?

too much philosophy on such a simple matter

its nothing to do with philosophy... its mathematics... the law of the universe.

but if you equate math as philosophy then yea... LOL.

if you're not killed by old age... you will be killed by other means or new-borns will be restricted to re-establish the equilibrium.

Originally posted by mei_ling03
what are you trying to say? old age isn't a disease and disease doesn't cause old age (well, except for one that is).

what? genetic disease is classified as a genetic defect which impairs or interferes with the normal functioning of the body.

so if you follow that definition then old age is not a disease since everyone has it. im not here to argue the terminologies of biology, but simply point out that this programmed death is caused by trade offs made between advantages in early part of cellular change in an organisms life and the disadvantages later in life. this must be balanced to favour the advantages early in life to reach reproduction because or else the species would be ended ie extinct.

Originally posted by mei_ling03
can you justify that? e.g. humans are stereoscopic vision for coordination etc. that's our adaptive advantage. so when does it ever become a disadvantage? - only ever when it is defective.

think of it this way... there are opportunities cost in developing a certain feature, say humans developed the so called "stereoscopic vision for coordination" in the past million years, but they must have gave up the path to develop something else... ie echolocation to see in the dark. if humans had no technologies like other animals and we were put on a planet which had no visible light... would that be an disadvantage? cordination is useless if we can't see right?

and disadvantage is a relative thing... you must compare it to other features that you don't have to see if its actually an advantage or not. this comparison is only dependent on the environment and purpose.

all im saying is there is a path of cellular change during an organisms life, this path will have advantages and disadvantages at certain points of its life... if the disadvantages gets too serious at a certain point we will be more likely to die by accident, predation, spantonous failure of certain organs.

so this disadvantages must be all overcrowding at the age of 60+, under the condition we currently live under with medicine and stuff. therefore most people die at that age... as programmed into us by our genetics.

like i said before if we get this disavantages early in life before reproduction we wouldn't be here since natural selection take us out.

Originally posted by mei_ling03
just a question, did/do you study bio?

no i study math and economics... LOL. yea im doing hsc biology this year.

 

[~TeLEpAtHeTiC~]

ok an obervation on ur arguement here abdooo..u've changed it from
the programmed death theory to the equilibrium between life and death
andas far as i understand both these phenomenons they arnt entirely related
care to explain which one u are actaully talking about?

 

[abdooooo!!!]

programmed death... i did not change my argument.

that was suppose to be humorous statement in relation to the topic.

all im trying to say is there are "changes" in an organism throughout its life. the path of this change is decided mainly by genetics. this genetics is randomly introduced and is selected by natural selection. this selection will favour the genetics which has its advantages early in life to maximise its success to pass on these genes. since the generation of this genetics is random there must be a point down the path which has many disadvantages to an environment or self-destructive, but this disadvantages cannot be filtered out by natural selection since the organism already passed on its gene. therefore this is what i reason as programmed death by genetics.

can't anyone understand what i am going on about? whether this is right or not you can't argue that this is not logical.

 

[t-i-m-m-y]

i guess this is a HSC help forum after all abdoo, not a place to discuss our phd thesises

*runs away; me gonna steal the thesis for an idea now lol

 

[~TeLEpAtHeTiC~]

Originally posted by abdooooo!!!

all im trying to say is there are "changes" in an organism throughout its life. the path of this change is decided mainly by genetics. this genetics is randomly introduced and is selected by natural selection. this selection will favour the genetics which has its advantages early in life to maximise its success to pass on these genes. since the generation of this genetics is random there must be a point down the path which has many disadvantages to an environment or self-destructive, but this disadvantages cannot be filtered out by natural selection since the organism already passed on its gene. therefore this is what i reason as programmed death by genetics.
can't anyone understand what i am going on about? whether this is right or not you can't argue that this is not logical.

i always understood what u wer tryin to say
although u hav several road blocks that u'd hav to overcome if this was ur thesis...
but then again a thesis can be a thesis wether wrong or right.so u'll still get ur PhD if ur arguement is sustained and the 'evidence' is there..
out of curiosity hav u done any research on this?
one thing i do find a little farfetched is that we must ride on the hunch that we are born with the genetic predisposition of genetic disadvantages later in life, yet during infancy and beyond the genes only allow for advantageuos characteristics and 'changes' to take place
the problem is, genes are not this organised and can be sporatic at times, as well as this other consituents must be taken into account of the individual or organism, in this case most likely their physical, emotional, mental environments can play a hampering role during their earlier stages which in effect nulls out any chance of these genetic advantages at infancy allowing the organism to progress to reproduction
if it so happens that no adverse affects prohibit any such interference then in this case,merely what u are saying here is that, the genes in our body are programemd to work hardest during infancy, adolensence early adulthood and beyond up to 60+ish when u say programemd death kicks in
the fact that the advantageous genes work hard to maintain life throughout the orgnisms life to ensure reproduction and then all of a sudden being muted by the disadvantageous genes later in life and having them take over is a very big presumption
now i hav a different view of the programmed death theory and this is the one in mainstream biology currently and accepted experimentally, not to say however it cant be proven wrong and a better thoery come along
if need be and if someone wants me to explain this theory i'll go into it..but i've written too much already sorry all the 04'ers...
all in all abdooo i agree it is a logical senario however there are to many elements that come into effect for something like this to occur if it ocurs at all.. not a bad idea for a thesis though

edit: forgot to add another thing, if natural selection was at the process that allowed for the 'programmed death theory' u are proposing then wouldnt it rather be the opposite, with those that are less predisposed to dying early due to genetic disadvantages later in life living on further to pass their genes on or in other words, the ones living longer are the ones passing their genes on and those with this programmed death kicking in would die sooner and not hav a chance to pass on the gene
this being the case how is it possible that an organism infact all organisms hav this programmed death, when in reality we can see its mechanics do not exist, ppl get over diseases, ppl live longer, essentially as i see it, natural selection is playing a leser and lesser role in human evolution with technology taking over at an exponention rate

 

[xiao1985]

lolz, cbb to read all the long ish posts...

wut r u guys talkin abt??? lunch??? when's lunch??

 

[abdooooo!!!]

wow cool... so you understood what i was saying tele... so i wasn't just talking crap lol. i like lunch.

hey who said that i was gonna get a PhD on it... lol... it was suppose to be a joke.

anyways i remember a couple of years ago reading that a nobel prize was awarded in medicine for the idenfication of the gene in the DNA that causes programmed death of cells. so if anyone was to figure out and back up the claims of this theory on programmed death of a multicellular organism... many nobel prizes will be assured and soon humans will live alot longer than now.

just on what you are saying, its not suddenly they just die or stop reproducing... well my understanding is that an average female human can reproduce biologically (not socially) at the age of 12 and she can continue reproducing every 9 month until about 45 years old. but everytime this process gets harder. i'll try to explain this by what i think must be true.

ok here is my mini thesis... my observations for multicellular organisms:

1. organisms change throughout its life

2. this change cannot repeat itself ie the cellular conditions that you are in at 9 years old, would not be repeated any other time throughout your life, so its not looped.

3. ability to reproduce is the measure of an species success by natural selection.

i can argue that there must be an "optimum position" to the environment that is somewhere located in the path of these cellular changes for a particular organism. but this organism must continue to change by my first observation, so therefore this condition must deteriorate from the optimum (since nothing is better than optimum so anychange will be for the worse). and by my second observation the path cannot come back to the optimum and must not cross with any other cellular conditioning that is already passed. finally by the law of probability/natural selection, the optimum condition must be chosen at the time of reproduction ie fertility. and death must be chosen after reproduction as a trade off for not repeating the position of the path of growth.

this seems hard to prove LOL.

edit: and with the people thingy... we can in the future manipulate our environment or genes so that it'll always be optimum conditioning or at least better than death type conditioning.

so in the end death is inevitable no matter what. but "programmed death" is a time set by evolution on different species due to its common path of growth.

 

[abdooooo!!!]

Originally posted by abdooooo!!!

ok here is my mini thesis... my observations for multicellular organisms:

1. organisms change throughout its life

2. this change cannot repeat itself ie the cellular conditions that you are in at 9 years old, would not be repeated any other time throughout your life, so its not looped.

3. ability to reproduce is the measure of an species success by natural selection.

i can argue that there must be an "optimum position" to the environment that is somewhere located in the path of these cellular changes for a particular organism. but this organism must continue to change by my first observation, so therefore this condition must deteriorate from the optimum (since nothing is better than optimum so anychange will be for the worse). and by my second observation the path cannot come back to the optimum and must not cross with any other cellular conditioning that is already passed. finally by the law of probability/natural selection, the optimum condition must be chosen at the time of reproduction ie fertility. and death must be chosen after reproduction as a trade off for not repeating the position of the path of growth.

this seems hard to prove LOL.

so in the end death is inevitable no matter what. but "programmed death" is a time set by evolution on different species due to its common path of growth.

i forgot to add another thing.

let me describe this with something that is simple.

the successfulness of a species is determined by:

1. number of offsprings produced (rate)
2. quality of the offsprings (how mature it is before birth)

obviously faster you reproduce, the offsprings being born are at a crappier quality... like them animals who have 100 offsprings in one go 99 of them die like finding nemo lol.

but animals like lions have most of their offspring surviving... but they only have one of two offsprings to start with.

this clearly demonstrate that you can't say just build a super species which reproduces at unbelievable rate and quality so it'll be the fittest... because we are ultimately limited chemically by what we can do in this universe. so a balance between quality and rate must be reached to maximise the chances of a particular species for a particular environment.

this reason applies equally to what i described in the above post.

i believe that to reproduce and live longer... the species must slow down its rate of change.

but by doing this they are making the journey to reach fertility alot longer... thus increasing their chance of dying before they even pass on a single gene.

this general assumption is made by my observations that the species which reach fertility the fastest live the shortest. this means the rate must be proportional on both side of the optimum of cellular conditioning.

so we can clearly see that natural selection does "not have to favour" the one who reproduce the longest or live the longest. because it must take into account the time it gets to fertility. this is in addition to what i said about the advantages must be selected early, since reaching fertility faster is an advantage early. but this would be a disadvantage later as you would die sooner due to the faster rate of deterioration due to change away from the optimum (explained in my above post). there are other situation where i think this logic applies equally... but i won't go on to them now.

this should clarify my logics... but for this to be true many assumptions i made have to shown experimentally, and lots of data must be collected and compared.

 

[xiao1985]

uhm, perhaps there should be an "appreciation of aestheticality of biology" in biology section, lyk math ext 2....

so that newbs won't get scared away...

no offense intended tho, i would try to read and understand it, tho i prolly wont udnerstand half of it... =p blehz

 

[abdooooo!!!]

there is no newbs here... lol... everyone who posted here has done their hsc. newbs don't even know what evolution is yet... so they won't even click on this thread.

maybe its because i didn't express it properly... ahhh who cares... at least i rationalised something for myself... evolution is just a combination of chemistry and economics... biochemistry explains what has happened chemically and the math/logics of econometric model explain why has this happened in logical terms.

 

[xiao1985]

coolz... sigh, eva noticed bio can be economics as well... sorta unbelievable, two unrelated subjects...

 

[Zarathustra]

abdooooo!!! -wow- great theory - putting economics together with biology is great - my two most disparate subjects.
Didn't Richard Dawkins argue that since genes are essentially immortal and organisms are mortal that we are the means by which genes are reproduced - instead of vice versa "The Selfish Gene." That all altruistic behaviour could be explained since it would be contributing to the furtherance of the species more than the genus, family etc. We obviously feel more sympathy for our direct relations than strangers, and more for strangers than for other species etc. Morality is a way for the gene to triumph - even if it means death for the individual - ie fighting to the death to protect your family.
This would mean that the more generations in x period of time the better - the shorter the life span of the individual the better for the group - as this would make it easier for the organism to quickly adapt to its environment - case in point, bacteria are quickly becoming resistant to antibiotics because of their incredibly short lifespans. Programmed death then would be advantageous to the species as a whole and as the individual is insignificant - apart from their carrying of genes - it would be the most logical outcome.
A possible exception would be grandmothers living longer (to look after their grandchildren) and thus increasing the chance of the grandchildren's survival in turn leading to the propagation of the genes leading to long life in women - women live longer than men because old men are useless - old women are still contributing.

 

[abdooooo!!!]

hey Zarathustra, sorry for taking so long to reply to your email... i was pretty busy doing something then.

umm you understood everything i said... great. ya go economics... im not really interested in the hsc type economics... i like the math of it to explain and rationalise this world we live where physical math cannot acheive.

there are few more points i like to discuss... but im eating now so... wait.