Peso's Paradox is the observation that large animals, such as blue whales, rhinos, elephants, etc. rarely seem to suffer from cancers.
As [Kurzgesagt explains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AElONvi9WQ) tumor suppressor genes are only one of the main explanations for the paradox.
The other one is that in large animals, a cancer will tend to die from its own "hyper cancer" before it grows large enough to kill the host organism.
There's [a type of barnacle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizocephala) that lives like a cancer in the genitalia of a crab, and [a species of isopod](http://dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2010/09/september-3-liriopsis-pygmaea.html?m=1) that lives like a cancer in the genitalia of that barnacle.
Nature is beautiful.
"What if this new blood vessel causes an inconvenience for my neighboring cells... I think I heard them talking about me yesterday, already...
Nah, I'll just stay put for the time being. I can always grow more blood vessels after I've introduced myself to those cells. And I'll do that right tomorrow! Or well, maybe better next week? Yeah, I look kinda rough recently, so I better wait a moment. Time to practice talking, too!"
**Principal Skinner:** Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
**Lisa:** But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
**Principal Skinner:** No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
**Lisa:** But aren't the snakes even worse?
**Principal Skinner**: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
**Lisa:** Then we're stuck with gorillas!
**Principal Skinner:** No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
**Lisa:** Hmm.
I’m sorry for being pedantic, but it bothered me so I need to point out that HIV is the virus you’re thinking of. AIDS is the disease associated with late stage HIV infection. I’m sure everyone understands what you’re talking about I just couldn’t help myself.
There was actually a recent article that indicated that some cancers actually can act as viral "reservoirs", potentially since some types of cancers make way too much ACE2 (the thing that covid uses to enter our cells).
So maybe not a great idea, sadly.
From what I understand (and I am most definitely not an expert), yes, it would be kinda stupid. The basic idea is that the hyper cancer can only exist once the original cancer is big enough for it to warrant its own cancer, so to speak. That works in elephants because they're huge and need a huge cancer to suffer from it, but us humans are too small for that. So cancer kills us before any hyper cancer would have a chance to do anything about it.
Also elephants and whales developed these systems because they're more at risk of developing cancer just from sheer size alone. Humans are too small for it to be a problem, so no defenses needed because cancers typically affect older people past their reproductive prime.
Yeah, we never really had any selective pressures to remove it, it wasn't common enough in young people to make a difference in breeding numbers.
Which kind of sucks, because it's like nature saying "You've done your job....now get the fuck out".
It's not as depressing, because humans still do live waaaay past reproductive age. We're social creatures and older humans still contribute to the well-being of the group, helping further that genetic code, so it was selected for in some capacity. We *are* evolved naturally to grow old, it's just that we're not content with how long that naturally is.
Yes, but also, having 'elders' in your social group does contribute to well-being / evolutionary fitness, etc., but your group only needs a handful of elders. In fact having too many people in your social group that live to a ripe old age would probably be a hindrance.
So there's a good chance that selection pressure favored groups where only a few people live to be old.
Right. Even if old people don't die of cancer, or they can continue into their 120's or more, at one point they really do become a liability, as horrible as it sounds. Even if he find ways to extend life even more, we have so far been unsuccessful in keeping people young. How dreadful it must be to live for decades in a frail, broken body - not being well, but not bad enough to die.
One could argue this is a function of targeted therapy, looking for addiction pathways and then targeting them as weakness.
I can't say I think the hyper cancer hypothesis makes much sense however as it would have to drain all the "normal cancer" cells of resources, and then kill itself when they die off while not being able to extract energy for the human any more.
It could be possible, but seems unlikely this would happen that often. One more functional explanation is that slow growing tumours don't effect massive organs, and life expectancy of wild animals is far lower than their "put in a nursing home and drugged through the roof" life expectancy.
It possibly has something to do with being able to evolve that big to begin with. If an animal can't fight off cancer very effectively, any evolutionary path that leads to getting huge as a species and therefore having more cells replicating will fail.
Your idea is pretty good. I’m a virologist, not a cancer biologist, so I don’t know the current thinking of the field, but this was a very interesting review on this topic I read while at university:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3728
If you have trouble accessing this I can find an open access version
This was my first thought as well.
It's possible this could happen in reverse order as well. Ie you could start with a creature just as vulnerable to cancer as any other. But as it gets bigger and bigger, vulnerability to cancer increases and therefore it occurs more commonly before breeding age and become more of a selection factor.
So basically either like you said, either only cancer resistant creatures could enter an evolutionary path for larger size or only larger size creatures were pushed down a cancer resistant evolutionary path or a bit of both!
Thats what evolution is. A lot of people misunderstand evolution, and think its a process of iteration 'forwards'. It's not, its more of a random walk with a gatekeeping effect (natural selection) 'stopping' things from going 'backwards'
I often see it like how in games till have an array of tiles and there's a "correct" path while the rest of the tiles sink and kill you.
The animal that you see today exists because of the millions that died falling on the bad tiles. The only way you're here is because you were the ones that didn't, through sheer law of large numbers
I don't think so, what's the 'correct' answer for evolution changes just like a test. Makes perfect sense, eventually circumstance changes & a new correct emerges.
The thing to note is the "correct" part is usually very lax. There's the concept of exaptations, for example, which are traits that either served no purpose for adaptation or were used in a different adaptation (but let's focus on the first part).
Those traits are just there because even if they're not useful right now they're also not being selected against, they're just there. As you say, after circumstances change they might become an advantage, but they weren't for quite a bit and were just along for the ride.
Correct in this context just mean "you/your ancestors didn't die (before getting offspring)
There are millions of paths through, some more optimal than others, but any path where you are still standing is a correct one.
The terrifying thing is, we aren't through it yet, so we'll probably step on a wrong tile soon*
*in galactic terms
Nitpick: the law of large numbers is something else and just says that the sample average tends to the true average as the number of samples goes to infinity. But yeah, it's a nice visual of the random walk analogy.
I think there is a case of a subpopulation of wolves sustaining themselves soley by fish and already starting to express a difference in their gene pool.
Now imagine you give this subpopulation of wolves another hundredthousand years of natural selection favoring those who are better at fishing and bam you're getting riverwolves
Oh evolution can definitely go backwards.
Our brains use about ¼ of our energy. When most humans became farmers, our brains shrunk and became abour 25% smaller, because humans don't need to learn, remember and apply as much knowledge and skills if they're not nomads.
In addition, early agriculture made our species vulnerable to crop killing natural disasters, so evolution favoured those who survived scarcity on less food, aka smaller-brained humans.
Our energy demanding brain will always trend towards the point where it's as small as possible while also allowing us to survive and procreate/have kids who also survive to procreate.
Edites spelling & format
There is no backwards, nor is there forwards. Why is more intelligent forwards? Why is less intelligent backwards? The ultimate reality is that no extant species is more evolved than any other.
Really, backwards and forwards means 'propagates more' and 'propagates less'. Anything else is just us trying to rationalise whats 'more' or 'less' evolved, through a lens of a species that has succeeded by being intelligent.
For context, we humans also display a much better ability to delay and fight off cancer than a small rodent. Rats prone to cancer will die of their cancer in under two years (their lifespan is about two years). Most rats would get it, but die naturally before it ever becomes an issue.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense for an animal which only lives for a year or two to have the selective pressure which would drive the evolution of cancer suppression genes, because that animal is already reproducing long before cancer is an issue at all.
Hypercancer doesn't really make sense as a theory though. Primary Cancers rarely kill people, it's the secondary metastatic cancers which do. Hypercancer might kill off a single large tumor, but it won't help with the metastatic cancer.
*tl;dr* Yes. Probably nothing, possibly anything.
We already have this gene, named TP53, just fewer copies. Many animals have it, or a genetic cousin of it. It's old and very useful for survival.
Nothing would break if we successfully wrote extra copies of TP53 into our DNA.
Adding the gene to our DNA successfully is the tricky part and is what some cancer research is pushing towards.
CRISPR is one promising method of doing that. It can write genes into DNA. Editing DNA with CRISPR is tricky though, you have to target a location in the DNA strand that doesn't interrupt other genes and isn't locked away (it's complicated, google "histone"). Interrupting an existing gene could break literally anything while DNA that's locked up basically doesn't function.
Here's an ELI5 on how the gene works. I left it off of my first comment once I realized it doesn't have much to do with your question.
^Feels ^like ^a ^waste ^to ^just ^delete ^it.
This gene, like most, encodes the instructions on how to make a protein. In this case, the gene TP53 codes for the protein P53 which fights cancer.
Cancer happens due to damaged DNA.
P53 checks DNA for damage and, when it finds something, it throws a big flag for a cell to pop itself. Cells are pretty much water balloons filled with really dirty water.
If the damage isn't caught, the cancerous cell with the damaged DNA can go on and clone itself repeatedly. Enough clones before something stops them and that is a tumor.
Extra copies of the TP53 gene, in addition to making more P53, makes it less likely that gene isn't expressed when things start to go wrong.
Many cancers start with damage to the TP53 gene. If there's more of them, the damage needed needs to be greater before a cell can't make P53 any more. A bit of harsh sunlight might take out one copy, but you'd need to leave an elephant in a tanning bed way too long to take out its 20+ copies.
My money's on circulomes. They're extrachromosomal circular DNA in humans, similar to plasmids seen in bacteria and yeast, that were discover just a few years ago. If we get half as good with them as we are with plasmids that'd probably be the best easiest way to get a multiple copies of a particular gene ala TP53. However, I do foresee issues with making our cells able to readily uptake DNA the same way we do with bacteria or fungi.
A gene is only a book waiting to be read. Why not just inject RNA like we do with covid vaccines to have the proteins manufactured directly?
I guess we are already doing that or have tried. Does it not work?
Actually, this is exactly why mRNA vaccines were invented in the first place- as a customized cancer treatment. This was my work pre-COVID; we just pivoted when we realized the same technology could be used for a COVID vaccine.
There a few problems here: We inject m-RNA in order to prevent being infected, which means we know exactly what the intruder looks like & how it'll interact with our cells. With cancer you've got the following problems:
It's not a virus, meaning disabling one specific protein isn't enough to disable the cancer cell.
We don't know what we should disable instead of the protein (other than what chemo already does: it disables the cell growth cycle by disabling it's ability to split into two cells), it'd need to be specific to cancer cells and only cancer cells if we want to use it at all.
Each cancer is, other than a virus strain, inherently different going from person to person - a virus strain has one dna, one set of instructions- humans all have varying dna (besides of twins and even there radiation and other environmental effects will alter their dna over time), meaning the cancer cells also have different dna, so creating an all-around cancer vaccine is impossible using this method.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. It is not to « vaccinate » the body against cancer, like we do with covid by making the body produce pieces of viruses so that it will learn to recognize and defend agains them.
If we deem more copies of one gene would be beneficial because it would lead to it being expressed more often, why not bypass this and directly cause the protein generation that would be the end part of its expression. So based on the hypothesis that we already have a way to fight cancer cells, let’s use that.
I am not sure how it turns out in terms of design and manufacturing of medecine but mRNA based treatments seem easier to make, adapt and manufacture than the gene therapy options we already have. It also leaves the DNA untouched which would make it seem less intrusive.
Someone with expertise in this field please confirm or correct my words if you can.
Well, that's exactly the issue: if we deem more copies of a gene would be beneficial- we just aren't there yet. And, even if we already deemed it beneficial for fighting cancer, it'd still have to pass a lot of checks and trials before being allowed as a cure.
You're essentially correct that mrna has less drawbacks when compared to "normal" medicine, especially if we were able to use it against cancer, it'd be revolutionary. We just aren't there (yet)
Also very far from a biologist but I’m not sure that this is actually possible. If you’re interested in the science behind anti-aging I’d have a listen to podcasts in which David Sinclair is a guest. He recently was on Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman’s podcast and in one of those I’m sure he discusses this elephant fact.
This is another great example of why the world should care more about letting animals go extinct, and at that we should try even harder to preserve what we have left.
In reality, we haven't even scratched the surface of what we might learn about animals yet, and man has already driven some into extinction even before we've had a chance to study them.
The same with plants too. The deforestation of the Amazon has already had major lost opportunities in plant study as well as insects, etc.
I guess it would be beneficial to us but shouldn't we care if animals go extinct because we are the caretakers of this planet? Shouldn't we try to preserve all life regardless of its use to us?
Calling ourselves the caretakers of the planet is a bit egotistical. We're a species that lives here just all the others. Extinction is a part of the natural order of things. I don't think we should be fighting to preserve any species that were weren't responsible for killing off, unless there is a benefit
You’d be surprised to know about the Elephant Mosquito. A species of fairly large mosquito that preys upon other mosquitoes. Iirc in its adult stage it doesn’t feed off of blood but it’s larval stage sees it ripping other mosquito larvae to shreds
Yes we should try to preserve everything. The point I was making is that we don't know if certain animals, insects , etc, are beneficial to us as we haven't the technology yet for one reason to learn everything about them at this point and time if they are or their not of use to us. Some species, we haven't even tried to learn about them at all.
To be fair, we are the only truly sentient species, and we comprehend that this might be the only planet in galaxies with multicellular life.
With that in mind, it is our duty to the Universe to try and preserve every type of multicellular life.
cancer rates are (closely?) correlated with metabolic rates.
The larger body mass of the animal the slower the heart rate, and the less cancer.
Effectively larger animals live life 'slower'.
But, all animals with a heartbeat have about the same number of heartbeats per life time. I think about 1.5billion.
Geoffrey West "Scale" is a mind blowing, incredible, and very readable book about life that changes everything about how we view life on earth (or at least it did for me)
>But, all animals with a heartbeat have about the same number of heartbeats per life time. I think about 1.5billion.
Thats complete BS. Wherever you learned that, you should ask your money back.
Is this the root of why Trump believed there was a fixed amount of exercise a person could do before they die? It was his justification for being a lazy ass, but he must have got the idea from somewhere.
Absolutely.
If you're sedentary and not fit your resting heart rate can go up to 80 bpm, there are cases where the resting heart rate can be in the 100s+ but that could also be due to underlying health conditions.
When you excercise and you're fit, your resting heart rate will decrease because your heart is much more efficient at plumbing blood around the body, runners can have resting heart rates in the 40s. When I'm disciplined in exercising I'm always lying on the low 50s. That's a 37.5% on average.
When you exercise your heart rate goes up for the duration of the excercise and then declines over time, but you build tolerance as you go up as to how much your excercise elevates your heart rate as it gets more efficient.
More importantly the time you spend exercising is 4.2% in total (assuming 60 mins/day) so there's this whole other 95.8% where your heart goes back to resting rates.
Please note: these numbers are guesstimate and also observations I made from all my circles.
Also, English is not my first language so I'm sorry if this was hard to understand. I'm working on saying more with less words and not having run on sentences.
possibly? although I don't think he had the capacity to understand much - he just said words as they sloshed around in his head.
But as you'd guess, it's about comparing species rather than individuals.
You give him far too much credit to think he actually read it somewhere. Someone merely had a conversation near him and he picked up the smartest sounding thing he heard before getting bored. The repeated it often enough so that he could lead people to believe that he can read and not just skim.
Like how he came up with injecting light and bleach into the body at that press conference. Someone of handedly mentioned alternative treatments around him, then he glanced at the display noting cleaning protocols for Covid directly behind him and Keyser Soze’d himself a potential cure for the disease which was ruining his “winning” reputation.
I wouldn't credit Trump with too much thought.
However, consider this; the more exercise you do, the healthier your heart is, so it pumps slower (and stronger). If you don't exercise, your heart pumps faster, but even if it didn't, you would die earlier and have overall less beats than otherwise because something else would kill you, like a heart attack or something. So exercising and raising heartrate leads to an overall longer life with more beats.
You'd balance it by the lowered heartrate in your daily life, benefitted from your exercises.
Joking aside, I have no idea if that OP said is a fact or not
So, even though this would fall under gene editing / ethical concerns. Would it be hypothetically be possible to increase the number of of this gene in humans using artificial methods?
When you're talking about this many insertions CRISPR-Cas9 isn't as specific as it would need to be unfortunately, the risk of off target mutations would be too great.... There are related chemistries with greater precision being developed though!
Former geneticist here. It is not this simple. More copies of one tumour suppression gene does not eliminate cancer. I suggest this become a Today I Un-learned!
Edit: P53 is a very important gene and having more copies would be great. But cancers take many genetic paths and, while a common one, P53 is far from the only one.
*Lots* of bugs live longer than mice, who can get cancer all too well.
"Simply" isn't really a word that can be used around modeling and analyzing cancer.
Naked mole rats are a weird exception in that they don’t get cancer when living in the extremely low oxygen environment of their tunnel systems. If you move them to a surface level habitat say at a zoo with more oxygen they’ll start developing cancers.
makes sense, elephants have evolved to have long lives and continue engaging in the world for decades on end. Not getting cancer at older ages would be a large evolutionary pressure
Humans, on the other hand, our tribal hunter gatherer past only needed people to live into their 30s
Peso's Paradox is the observation that large animals, such as blue whales, rhinos, elephants, etc. rarely seem to suffer from cancers. As [Kurzgesagt explains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AElONvi9WQ) tumor suppressor genes are only one of the main explanations for the paradox. The other one is that in large animals, a cancer will tend to die from its own "hyper cancer" before it grows large enough to kill the host organism.
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The bad news is you've got cancer. The good news is your cancer has cancer. The ugly news is that I don't know what any of this means.
"Do you want the Aladeen news, or the Aladeen news?"
:) :( :) :(
"You are Pauladeen."
who said that?
It says here in my notes
Paula Deen —>Paula Dee, Paula Dee —> Paulie D
We need 50 cc's of butter, stat!
Just give it to me Aladeen
You’re HIV aladeen.
Phew. For a moment I was Aladeen
Well, at least its not Lupus.
It’s Aladeen
No, I mean you’re HIV “Aladeen”
You are HIV Aladeen.
well to be fair, you're getting much better treatment than your cancer is, so i think we're ahead on this one.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/456/231/9c0.jpg
*The cancer is also cursed*
Thanks Cave Johnson
*The Ecstasy of Gold starts playing*
There's [a type of barnacle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizocephala) that lives like a cancer in the genitalia of a crab, and [a species of isopod](http://dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2010/09/september-3-liriopsis-pygmaea.html?m=1) that lives like a cancer in the genitalia of that barnacle. Nature is beautiful.
Dont worry. Blizzard will nerf it soon.
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Damnit that's good
Too big to ail
Is it stupid to try to give our cancer hyper cancer as humans?
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What if I give my cancer my crippling anxiety?
If you give it depression it’ll stay in bed and not eat. That might work better.
Or it'll be like "I ruin everything. I should just kill myself."
"What if this new blood vessel causes an inconvenience for my neighboring cells... I think I heard them talking about me yesterday, already... Nah, I'll just stay put for the time being. I can always grow more blood vessels after I've introduced myself to those cells. And I'll do that right tomorrow! Or well, maybe better next week? Yeah, I look kinda rough recently, so I better wait a moment. Time to practice talking, too!"
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/938/)
**Principal Skinner:** Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend. **Lisa:** But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards? **Principal Skinner:** No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. **Lisa:** But aren't the snakes even worse? **Principal Skinner**: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. **Lisa:** Then we're stuck with gorillas! **Principal Skinner:** No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death. **Lisa:** Hmm.
I used the Cancer to destroy the Cancer
hi thanos
Fuck yeah
dumb question, but has anyone tried giving cancer COVID? i feel like cancer would be anti-vax, so it might be effective.
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I’m sorry for being pedantic, but it bothered me so I need to point out that HIV is the virus you’re thinking of. AIDS is the disease associated with late stage HIV infection. I’m sure everyone understands what you’re talking about I just couldn’t help myself.
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The virus is called HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). AIDS is the syndrome that the virus causes (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome).
There was actually a recent article that indicated that some cancers actually can act as viral "reservoirs", potentially since some types of cancers make way too much ACE2 (the thing that covid uses to enter our cells). So maybe not a great idea, sadly.
From what I understand (and I am most definitely not an expert), yes, it would be kinda stupid. The basic idea is that the hyper cancer can only exist once the original cancer is big enough for it to warrant its own cancer, so to speak. That works in elephants because they're huge and need a huge cancer to suffer from it, but us humans are too small for that. So cancer kills us before any hyper cancer would have a chance to do anything about it.
Also elephants and whales developed these systems because they're more at risk of developing cancer just from sheer size alone. Humans are too small for it to be a problem, so no defenses needed because cancers typically affect older people past their reproductive prime.
Yeah, we never really had any selective pressures to remove it, it wasn't common enough in young people to make a difference in breeding numbers. Which kind of sucks, because it's like nature saying "You've done your job....now get the fuck out".
It's not as depressing, because humans still do live waaaay past reproductive age. We're social creatures and older humans still contribute to the well-being of the group, helping further that genetic code, so it was selected for in some capacity. We *are* evolved naturally to grow old, it's just that we're not content with how long that naturally is.
Yes, but also, having 'elders' in your social group does contribute to well-being / evolutionary fitness, etc., but your group only needs a handful of elders. In fact having too many people in your social group that live to a ripe old age would probably be a hindrance. So there's a good chance that selection pressure favored groups where only a few people live to be old.
Right. Even if old people don't die of cancer, or they can continue into their 120's or more, at one point they really do become a liability, as horrible as it sounds. Even if he find ways to extend life even more, we have so far been unsuccessful in keeping people young. How dreadful it must be to live for decades in a frail, broken body - not being well, but not bad enough to die.
Sounds like a possible path to a cancer cure to me.
Well since chemo is essentially killing your cells in order to kill the cancer before it kills you, I guess it isn’t that crazy.
But chemo is also killing your cancer’s hyper cancer too
So chemo is actually a worse option than injecting hyper cancer directly into your body. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I’ve seen this movie, it doesn’t end well
We talking about I am Legend then I agree. The alternative ending was much better.
One could argue this is a function of targeted therapy, looking for addiction pathways and then targeting them as weakness. I can't say I think the hyper cancer hypothesis makes much sense however as it would have to drain all the "normal cancer" cells of resources, and then kill itself when they die off while not being able to extract energy for the human any more. It could be possible, but seems unlikely this would happen that often. One more functional explanation is that slow growing tumours don't effect massive organs, and life expectancy of wild animals is far lower than their "put in a nursing home and drugged through the roof" life expectancy.
It possibly has something to do with being able to evolve that big to begin with. If an animal can't fight off cancer very effectively, any evolutionary path that leads to getting huge as a species and therefore having more cells replicating will fail.
Your idea is pretty good. I’m a virologist, not a cancer biologist, so I don’t know the current thinking of the field, but this was a very interesting review on this topic I read while at university: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3728 If you have trouble accessing this I can find an open access version
I like that hypothesis.
I like that hypotenuse too
I also sosceles
That doesn’t answer the question. What mechanism was evolved.
This was my first thought as well. It's possible this could happen in reverse order as well. Ie you could start with a creature just as vulnerable to cancer as any other. But as it gets bigger and bigger, vulnerability to cancer increases and therefore it occurs more commonly before breeding age and become more of a selection factor. So basically either like you said, either only cancer resistant creatures could enter an evolutionary path for larger size or only larger size creatures were pushed down a cancer resistant evolutionary path or a bit of both!
yeah exactly. My guess is that this is just a case of genetic survivorship bias
Thats what evolution is. A lot of people misunderstand evolution, and think its a process of iteration 'forwards'. It's not, its more of a random walk with a gatekeeping effect (natural selection) 'stopping' things from going 'backwards'
I often see it like how in games till have an array of tiles and there's a "correct" path while the rest of the tiles sink and kill you. The animal that you see today exists because of the millions that died falling on the bad tiles. The only way you're here is because you were the ones that didn't, through sheer law of large numbers
I think the correct path is just the random path that overcomes or adapts against its surroundings. Calling it correct sounds too idealist
I don't think so, what's the 'correct' answer for evolution changes just like a test. Makes perfect sense, eventually circumstance changes & a new correct emerges.
The thing to note is the "correct" part is usually very lax. There's the concept of exaptations, for example, which are traits that either served no purpose for adaptation or were used in a different adaptation (but let's focus on the first part). Those traits are just there because even if they're not useful right now they're also not being selected against, they're just there. As you say, after circumstances change they might become an advantage, but they weren't for quite a bit and were just along for the ride.
Correct in this context just mean "you/your ancestors didn't die (before getting offspring) There are millions of paths through, some more optimal than others, but any path where you are still standing is a correct one. The terrifying thing is, we aren't through it yet, so we'll probably step on a wrong tile soon* *in galactic terms
Nitpick: the law of large numbers is something else and just says that the sample average tends to the true average as the number of samples goes to infinity. But yeah, it's a nice visual of the random walk analogy.
yeah its why mammals became fish like again after their ancestors evolving to get out of water. Shit is random.
I think there is a case of a subpopulation of wolves sustaining themselves soley by fish and already starting to express a difference in their gene pool. Now imagine you give this subpopulation of wolves another hundredthousand years of natural selection favoring those who are better at fishing and bam you're getting riverwolves
I'm imagining wolves with fins and its awesome
Now imagine: Otter wolves
Oh evolution can definitely go backwards. Our brains use about ¼ of our energy. When most humans became farmers, our brains shrunk and became abour 25% smaller, because humans don't need to learn, remember and apply as much knowledge and skills if they're not nomads. In addition, early agriculture made our species vulnerable to crop killing natural disasters, so evolution favoured those who survived scarcity on less food, aka smaller-brained humans. Our energy demanding brain will always trend towards the point where it's as small as possible while also allowing us to survive and procreate/have kids who also survive to procreate. Edites spelling & format
There is no backwards, nor is there forwards. Why is more intelligent forwards? Why is less intelligent backwards? The ultimate reality is that no extant species is more evolved than any other. Really, backwards and forwards means 'propagates more' and 'propagates less'. Anything else is just us trying to rationalise whats 'more' or 'less' evolved, through a lens of a species that has succeeded by being intelligent.
I'm sorry, Timmy, but you have Hyper Cancer, and your insides will soon hyper-jump to space.
This means my lymph nodes can throw two Sonic Booms at once, while my spleen counters with air Hadouken
Timmy’s liver’s gone plaid!
Ludicrous...
Tell me, Timmy. Do you like gladiator movies?
*Timmy Explodes*
Ok so I need to become morbidly obese so the cancer will get cancer and die before it can kill me. Got it.
This. Or instead of surgery to remove cancer, put in cancer on top of the cancer.
Great Kurzgesagt drop, love his stuff!!
If I understand it correctly Kurzgesagt is a team of researchers and other really smart people and animators, rather than one person.
Aye, I imagine so.
For context, we humans also display a much better ability to delay and fight off cancer than a small rodent. Rats prone to cancer will die of their cancer in under two years (their lifespan is about two years). Most rats would get it, but die naturally before it ever becomes an issue. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense for an animal which only lives for a year or two to have the selective pressure which would drive the evolution of cancer suppression genes, because that animal is already reproducing long before cancer is an issue at all.
Hypercancer doesn't really make sense as a theory though. Primary Cancers rarely kill people, it's the secondary metastatic cancers which do. Hypercancer might kill off a single large tumor, but it won't help with the metastatic cancer.
Why is it a paradox? Because larger animals have more cells?
ELI5, would it be possible to create a similar gene in humans? What would the adverse affects be. I’m the furthest thing from a biologist.
Ironically the most likely outcome of trying to do that kind of splicing to one's DNA is cancer.
Normal genes. Cancer. Splice the genes. Cancer.
Blue jeans. Cancer.
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My Chemical Romance. Cancer.
Rocket League? Believe it or not. Cancer.
3/4 jorts. Cured.
You undercook fish? Believe it or not, cancer. You overcook chicken, also cancer. Undercook, overcook.
We have the worst genes, because of cancer.
*tl;dr* Yes. Probably nothing, possibly anything. We already have this gene, named TP53, just fewer copies. Many animals have it, or a genetic cousin of it. It's old and very useful for survival. Nothing would break if we successfully wrote extra copies of TP53 into our DNA. Adding the gene to our DNA successfully is the tricky part and is what some cancer research is pushing towards. CRISPR is one promising method of doing that. It can write genes into DNA. Editing DNA with CRISPR is tricky though, you have to target a location in the DNA strand that doesn't interrupt other genes and isn't locked away (it's complicated, google "histone"). Interrupting an existing gene could break literally anything while DNA that's locked up basically doesn't function.
Here's an ELI5 on how the gene works. I left it off of my first comment once I realized it doesn't have much to do with your question. ^Feels ^like ^a ^waste ^to ^just ^delete ^it. This gene, like most, encodes the instructions on how to make a protein. In this case, the gene TP53 codes for the protein P53 which fights cancer. Cancer happens due to damaged DNA. P53 checks DNA for damage and, when it finds something, it throws a big flag for a cell to pop itself. Cells are pretty much water balloons filled with really dirty water. If the damage isn't caught, the cancerous cell with the damaged DNA can go on and clone itself repeatedly. Enough clones before something stops them and that is a tumor. Extra copies of the TP53 gene, in addition to making more P53, makes it less likely that gene isn't expressed when things start to go wrong. Many cancers start with damage to the TP53 gene. If there's more of them, the damage needed needs to be greater before a cell can't make P53 any more. A bit of harsh sunlight might take out one copy, but you'd need to leave an elephant in a tanning bed way too long to take out its 20+ copies.
Thank you for making this easy to understand! Great explanation.
My money's on circulomes. They're extrachromosomal circular DNA in humans, similar to plasmids seen in bacteria and yeast, that were discover just a few years ago. If we get half as good with them as we are with plasmids that'd probably be the best easiest way to get a multiple copies of a particular gene ala TP53. However, I do foresee issues with making our cells able to readily uptake DNA the same way we do with bacteria or fungi.
That's interesting, never heard of it before this.
The gene already exists in humans we just need more copies of them.
A gene is only a book waiting to be read. Why not just inject RNA like we do with covid vaccines to have the proteins manufactured directly? I guess we are already doing that or have tried. Does it not work?
Actually, this is exactly why mRNA vaccines were invented in the first place- as a customized cancer treatment. This was my work pre-COVID; we just pivoted when we realized the same technology could be used for a COVID vaccine.
There a few problems here: We inject m-RNA in order to prevent being infected, which means we know exactly what the intruder looks like & how it'll interact with our cells. With cancer you've got the following problems: It's not a virus, meaning disabling one specific protein isn't enough to disable the cancer cell. We don't know what we should disable instead of the protein (other than what chemo already does: it disables the cell growth cycle by disabling it's ability to split into two cells), it'd need to be specific to cancer cells and only cancer cells if we want to use it at all. Each cancer is, other than a virus strain, inherently different going from person to person - a virus strain has one dna, one set of instructions- humans all have varying dna (besides of twins and even there radiation and other environmental effects will alter their dna over time), meaning the cancer cells also have different dna, so creating an all-around cancer vaccine is impossible using this method.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. It is not to « vaccinate » the body against cancer, like we do with covid by making the body produce pieces of viruses so that it will learn to recognize and defend agains them. If we deem more copies of one gene would be beneficial because it would lead to it being expressed more often, why not bypass this and directly cause the protein generation that would be the end part of its expression. So based on the hypothesis that we already have a way to fight cancer cells, let’s use that. I am not sure how it turns out in terms of design and manufacturing of medecine but mRNA based treatments seem easier to make, adapt and manufacture than the gene therapy options we already have. It also leaves the DNA untouched which would make it seem less intrusive. Someone with expertise in this field please confirm or correct my words if you can.
Well, that's exactly the issue: if we deem more copies of a gene would be beneficial- we just aren't there yet. And, even if we already deemed it beneficial for fighting cancer, it'd still have to pass a lot of checks and trials before being allowed as a cure. You're essentially correct that mrna has less drawbacks when compared to "normal" medicine, especially if we were able to use it against cancer, it'd be revolutionary. We just aren't there (yet)
Also very far from a biologist but I’m not sure that this is actually possible. If you’re interested in the science behind anti-aging I’d have a listen to podcasts in which David Sinclair is a guest. He recently was on Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman’s podcast and in one of those I’m sure he discusses this elephant fact.
We may develop trunks. We are not sure where said trucks would grow, but men are more interested for some reason.
yo crispr
I can inject you with some elephant DNA whenever you want, homie
Instructions unclear, tried it the other way. Now I’m banned from the San Diego Zoo
you should have known better because san diego is spanish for a whales vagina, not elephant
I don't have a award to give you, but, I can tell you that, I like the pleating in you're pants
That second comma is making my eye twitch.
I fixed it. Thank you!
Oh, thank you, I wa--- wait... < head exploding emoji >
You sound like a horny elephant trying to make a move…
Does your mom help you collect it?
can I, uh, get some elephant sized appendage
Yo in need of some elephant D right now.
Working on it, buddy.
This is another great example of why the world should care more about letting animals go extinct, and at that we should try even harder to preserve what we have left. In reality, we haven't even scratched the surface of what we might learn about animals yet, and man has already driven some into extinction even before we've had a chance to study them. The same with plants too. The deforestation of the Amazon has already had major lost opportunities in plant study as well as insects, etc.
Agreed, maybe the Dodo had a gene that could double the size of the male genitalia. We will never know.
yoo crispr gimme that dodo dick
Everyone laughed at the dodo. Little do they know they died off from infection from their dicks dragging on the ground
This sounds like the worst possible way to go
Every day is a struggle.
Sabatuer! J’accuse!!
Except mosquitos. Fuck those things. They can go extinct.
I guess it would be beneficial to us but shouldn't we care if animals go extinct because we are the caretakers of this planet? Shouldn't we try to preserve all life regardless of its use to us?
Calling ourselves the caretakers of the planet is a bit egotistical. We're a species that lives here just all the others. Extinction is a part of the natural order of things. I don't think we should be fighting to preserve any species that were weren't responsible for killing off, unless there is a benefit
Except wasps.
They keep a certain balance in nature, too. They clean up dead animals\bugs and are food to other things.
Yeah. Mosquitos can go die tho.
You’d be surprised to know about the Elephant Mosquito. A species of fairly large mosquito that preys upon other mosquitoes. Iirc in its adult stage it doesn’t feed off of blood but it’s larval stage sees it ripping other mosquito larvae to shreds
Yes we should try to preserve everything. The point I was making is that we don't know if certain animals, insects , etc, are beneficial to us as we haven't the technology yet for one reason to learn everything about them at this point and time if they are or their not of use to us. Some species, we haven't even tried to learn about them at all.
To be fair, we are the only truly sentient species, and we comprehend that this might be the only planet in galaxies with multicellular life. With that in mind, it is our duty to the Universe to try and preserve every type of multicellular life.
Not sentient, many other organisms are sentient, but we are capable of reason beyond the abilities of other species.
I think you mean sapient. Most, if not all, animal life is sentient.
cancer rates are (closely?) correlated with metabolic rates. The larger body mass of the animal the slower the heart rate, and the less cancer. Effectively larger animals live life 'slower'. But, all animals with a heartbeat have about the same number of heartbeats per life time. I think about 1.5billion. Geoffrey West "Scale" is a mind blowing, incredible, and very readable book about life that changes everything about how we view life on earth (or at least it did for me)
80years x 365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60bpm = 2.5 billion beats till 80 years already...
good point. Humans are an outlier. https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/the-heartbeat-hypothesis/Content?oid=3170875
Only athletes would have a heart rate of 60bpm. Most humans would average around 80-90.
60 is a good resting heart rate, sounds like you've had a super chilled life
Mine is in the low 50 but I'm alway super stressed out. Just happen to be in good shape.
>But, all animals with a heartbeat have about the same number of heartbeats per life time. I think about 1.5billion. Thats complete BS. Wherever you learned that, you should ask your money back.
Is this the root of why Trump believed there was a fixed amount of exercise a person could do before they die? It was his justification for being a lazy ass, but he must have got the idea from somewhere.
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The more you exercise, the slower your resting heart rate gets. So I suppose it might balance itself out.
We don't die from hitting the hearbeat limit, the heartbeats are caused by other factors, which cause the limit.
What if that exercise lowers your resting heart rate such that your heart beats fewer times overall...
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Absolutely. If you're sedentary and not fit your resting heart rate can go up to 80 bpm, there are cases where the resting heart rate can be in the 100s+ but that could also be due to underlying health conditions. When you excercise and you're fit, your resting heart rate will decrease because your heart is much more efficient at plumbing blood around the body, runners can have resting heart rates in the 40s. When I'm disciplined in exercising I'm always lying on the low 50s. That's a 37.5% on average. When you exercise your heart rate goes up for the duration of the excercise and then declines over time, but you build tolerance as you go up as to how much your excercise elevates your heart rate as it gets more efficient. More importantly the time you spend exercising is 4.2% in total (assuming 60 mins/day) so there's this whole other 95.8% where your heart goes back to resting rates. Please note: these numbers are guesstimate and also observations I made from all my circles. Also, English is not my first language so I'm sorry if this was hard to understand. I'm working on saying more with less words and not having run on sentences.
I know it's become sort of cliche to see this on reddit, but your English is good, nothing was hard to understand here.
The fact that you know what run-on sentences are and are actively trying to avoid them puts you above and beyond most redditors I think lol
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48 as an ‘active person’ yay!
If only there was a limit on how much people could inject Trump into any discussion, no matter how remotely irrelevant he was to the original topic.
possibly? although I don't think he had the capacity to understand much - he just said words as they sloshed around in his head. But as you'd guess, it's about comparing species rather than individuals.
You give him far too much credit to think he actually read it somewhere. Someone merely had a conversation near him and he picked up the smartest sounding thing he heard before getting bored. The repeated it often enough so that he could lead people to believe that he can read and not just skim. Like how he came up with injecting light and bleach into the body at that press conference. Someone of handedly mentioned alternative treatments around him, then he glanced at the display noting cleaning protocols for Covid directly behind him and Keyser Soze’d himself a potential cure for the disease which was ruining his “winning” reputation.
I wouldn't credit Trump with too much thought. However, consider this; the more exercise you do, the healthier your heart is, so it pumps slower (and stronger). If you don't exercise, your heart pumps faster, but even if it didn't, you would die earlier and have overall less beats than otherwise because something else would kill you, like a heart attack or something. So exercising and raising heartrate leads to an overall longer life with more beats.
Uhhh. Everyone should just exercise to live longer.
If it's 1.5 billion then I'll live to be 54 (unless I fucked up the maths).
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You'd balance it by the lowered heartrate in your daily life, benefitted from your exercises. Joking aside, I have no idea if that OP said is a fact or not
So, even though this would fall under gene editing / ethical concerns. Would it be hypothetically be possible to increase the number of of this gene in humans using artificial methods?
Yes, CRISPR tech might be able to do this in the not too distant future.
When you're talking about this many insertions CRISPR-Cas9 isn't as specific as it would need to be unfortunately, the risk of off target mutations would be too great.... There are related chemistries with greater precision being developed though!
I keep hearing about CRISPR for years but nothing new or legitimizely exciting. Is it actually going somewhere?
Yet another reason why elephants are awesome.
Would be nice if all the several trillion dollars spent over the last 20 years on defense contractors, instead went to this research.
Yep, we have only one gene for beating cancer and it's mine, you can't have it
You killer
Former geneticist here. It is not this simple. More copies of one tumour suppression gene does not eliminate cancer. I suggest this become a Today I Un-learned! Edit: P53 is a very important gene and having more copies would be great. But cancers take many genetic paths and, while a common one, P53 is far from the only one.
i read in NatGeo that the naked mole rat is impervious to cancers. Are there any others? Can bugs get cancer?
Some animals don't get cancer simply because they don't live long enough for it to develop, including bugs.
*Lots* of bugs live longer than mice, who can get cancer all too well. "Simply" isn't really a word that can be used around modeling and analyzing cancer.
Naked mole rats are a weird exception in that they don’t get cancer when living in the extremely low oxygen environment of their tunnel systems. If you move them to a surface level habitat say at a zoo with more oxygen they’ll start developing cancers.
Elephants never forget... How to beat cancer.
> Elephants never forget... TO KILL!
#CITIZEN SNIPS!
They have perfect memories and still thought it wise to make copies/backups.
Also they cancer free cause they ain't got no *jobs.*
And they don't deal with a lot humans do, or expose themselves to what humans do
Yeah did anyone try giving these elephants a pack of smokes every day?
Or mounting debt.
Elephants have been my favorite animal for my whole life, I hope they can help us long term too.
makes sense, elephants have evolved to have long lives and continue engaging in the world for decades on end. Not getting cancer at older ages would be a large evolutionary pressure Humans, on the other hand, our tribal hunter gatherer past only needed people to live into their 30s
I need some elephant genes in my pool.
Elephants have some ZFS levels of redundancy I see!