Re: Elephants vs mice (fwd)

[Dick King <king@reasoning.com>]

> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 11:09:15 -0900 (PDT)
> From: fhf <maay100@bgumail.bgu.ac.il>
> Subject: Re: Elephants vs mice (fwd) 
> 
> 
> 	May I add my 2 bits to the elephant/mice/LNT threads, ...
> 
> 	Cancer is a rather rare disease in young people and we are much more 
> likely to get the condition later in life. I submit the hypothesis that 
> the general time and likelihood of onset of cancer is 'programmed' 
> genetically as part of a general biological mechanism which has the 
> effect of limiting the lifetime of members of a species.
> 
>         It seems to me evident that all species have their natural
> lifetimes. That of man is three score and 10, perhaps a little greater for
> woman, but mother nature polishes us off when we aren't much more use for
> survival of the tribe. Evolutionary selection has led to this
> situation. Teleologically speaking, if we died too soon, we wouldn't 
> be able to educate the young ones, and I suppose if we persisted too 
> long, there would be too many around of no value for survival of the 
> group.
> 

Y'know, i've heard this argument before but it strikes me as a tad circular.

Why do people age and die?  Supposedly because they are genetically programmed
to do so, in turn because they are of no use to the tribe.  But why is an 80
year old human of less use to a [hunter/gatherer] tribe than a 25 year old?
Because he/she is getting old and crotchety and unable to hunt gazelles or bear
more children.  In other words, people are programmed to get old and crotchety,
and die, because they are useless to the tribe, because they are getting old
and crotchety.

Other species apparently do things differently...

> 
> 
> Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 00:03:45 +0000
> From: "Erik C. Nielsen" <enielsen@iw.edwpub.com>
> Subject: C-14 Dating
> 
> RADSAFE/RADCHEM memebers with knowledge of C-14 dating. Please consider the
> following article (Reuters):
> 
> Australian botanists find 43,000-year-old plant
> 
>          
>         HOBART, Australia (Reuter) - Australian botanists said Tuesday they
> had discovered a naturally cloned shrub thought to be 43,000 years old,
> which would make it the world's oldest known living plant.

Is this a series of cloned individuals or a single individual with a
discontinuous body?  It's a matter of definition.  Few would deny that an ant
colony is a single organism, and in that case the components are not even
genetically identical.

-dk