Is death a product of evolution

Unicellular organisms do not necessarily die in the sense that multicellular organisms do - they divide and become two new organisms, and when this happens the 'old' organism is gone but not dead.Sometimes these organisms die (when resources are gone or habitat is lethal), but all the ones now alive are descendants of "split personalities" - the chemical contents have been changed to protect the innocent.Likewise cells within multicellular organisms also divide, sometime they die, but all the cells within a living multicellular organism are descendants of "split personalities" of cells that make up that organism.But it doesn't end there. When that multicellular organism dies there is still cellular life that has been passed from that organism to any offspring -- all multicellular organisms are descendants of "split personalities" of previous organisms.There is no organism - according to the theory of common descent - that is not linked back in a continuous chain of "split personality" cells to the ur-life.This is why abiogenesis is fundamentally different from evolution.The only question then is why multicellular organisms are 'discarded' after a certain time.It may be due to the strains of having to put up with all the other cells. The cost of repairs exceeds the budget for them.It may have to do with sexual reproduction, where the eggs are produced in females at one time and then wait for the opportunity for fertilized life - but how long can a cell last without division to replace it? We know the age of the eggs affects the viablity of offspring.It may also be a mechanism that controls the rate of mutations within a population so that new alleles are introduced in sufficient quantity to provide enough variation for natural selection events to allow some to pass.Organisms don't evolve, their offspring are.Food for thought?

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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great, another paper to read ... Just to pick a point: (see article for graphic)You could also call the two curves "potential" vs "realised" as opposed to "protected" vs "wild" - certainly we as humans are reaching a level above "protected" to include "repaired" and "treated" eh?There is another thing to consider, and that is the relationship between longevity and overall population turn-over. The longer lived individual organism are (that participate in the reproductive process) the slower the population turns over to alleles of new organisms, and thus the longer it takes for mutations and selection to work their way through the population in the absence of severe survival selection events.Having a generation length of 20 to 25 years for hominids with substantial removal of adults from the population older than 30 to 40 years could have been critical in having enough genetic variation available - every 20 to 25 years? - to meet the needs of long term climate and ecological changes as selection operated on the populations.In other words, longer lived populations could be selected against because they wouldn't adapt fast enough to long term changes.We see mechanisms in unicellular life that can affect the rate of mutation to increase it during times of stress.It could be that the length of life of sexual organisms is also a reflection of the base rate of mutation needed in a population over a long term natural selection cycle.Just some thoughts.Enjoy.

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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welcome to the fray GVGS58, interesting. But what is growing on is not the same molecules chemicals that were living before - there is constant replacement, renewal, in the process of living.Are you connected with the linked website?just curious.

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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Perhaps the question is in why we\organisms stop growing, why we\organisms change from using chemical reactions to {make more us} to using chemical reactions to {make more organisms} - procreate, make new packets of living cell matter from mixing disposable parts of the us\organism with those of another\organism.

To continue the difference between an individual organism growing and one spreading material to make copy organisms that grow from pieces of the original ...It could be the point of view.We see aspen trees covering a mountainside -- all with the same genetics, each "tree" grown from a sap root. Each tree is born, lives and dies, but it is not the organism that is born, lives and dies.We see fungi grow fruiting bodies that explode and cast spores into the wind. The fruiting body is born, lives, spreads its clones, and dies, but it is not the organism that is born, lives and dies.We see corals and muscles that cast sexual spores into the water to mix with other sexual spores to make new corals and muscles. The corals and muscles are born, live, spread their seeds, and die, but are they really the organism that is born, lives and dies?A crab sheds its shell and is it born again? Has the shell cast aside died?Does a caterpiller die to transform into a butterfly? The body liquifies inside the chrysalis and then reorganises.Multicellular life is not {created} with new individuals - it has a continuous linear ancestry made by cell division (and sexual combination) from single celled life just as unicellular life has a continuous linear ancestry.At the cellular level this is no different than a crab changing shells eh?

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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From Message 47

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How, then, is sexual reproduction less costly than asexual propagation?

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For the same reason that having specialized organs within an organism is less costly than having all the cells capable of doing all the jobs: specialization and sharing.

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Think of a population of a sexual species as a number of super organisms, where individuals are specialized organs within a {population body} -- it is essentially "asexual" in its reproduction of new {population bodies} of the same species, and the {population body} divides when conditions are right, without input from other {species}.

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(hmm. this applies to the Thread Is death a product of evolution too ... )

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So we can also look at this from a {population body} perspective (as oppossed to the cellular gamete point of view) and see that the {population body} doesn't necessarily die (unless due to significant and persistant natural selection causing extinction of the population), and that individuals are just interchangable parts in the {population body}, like new skin cells. Edited by RAZD, : linked link later

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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Let us consider what we mean by death by old age: it is the break-down of one system or another to the point where the organism is no longer viable, able to maintain existence.This is from a number of very different systems: heart failure is one (although may be linked to viral infections), cancer is another (where control on replacement manufacture of cells goes into overdrive and ends up blocking other systems from operation), brain failure is another (parkinsons, ementia, alzheimers, etc).What we see is that these systems all seem to fail at about the same age, although different people have different susceptibility to each kind of failure, and some get hit with multiple failures at a younger old age than others, while others seem more immune from all of them -- they are on different parts of probability curves on each form of failure.What we see is that these do not really come into play until an organism is beyond an age where their continued contribution to the population is beneficial to the care and raising of their children.Thus each of these systems would have evolved to ensure that sufficient age was reached to provide the care needed, with variable results due to standard variablity within populations. There would be nothing to maintain a need to be older, especially when the same resources can be spent on progeny.It is more noticeable in the human population than in other organisms as we have been able to reduce environmental causes of death (predation, disease, accident) which results in two things: births > deaths and more old people.Enjoy.

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