Comment by guerrilla
Comment by guerrilla 4 days ago
This sounds good, but it can't be right. There are animals that live centuries. Greenland sharks may live up to 500 years, for example. There are trees that live millenia.
Comment by guerrilla 4 days ago
This sounds good, but it can't be right. There are animals that live centuries. Greenland sharks may live up to 500 years, for example. There are trees that live millenia.
Can you expand on that subject? What are the traits of warm blooded species that lead to higher cancer rates?
not just higher cancer rates, but higher rates of all kinds of aging-related deaths
the advantage of being warm-blooded is that your metabolism is more precise and much faster, but, as james dean quoted willard motley saying, 'live fast, die young'
most of the causes of aging are unwanted chemical reactions; https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2813%2900... is a highly-cited paper reviewing what we knew about the causes of aging 11 years ago. chemical reactions of all kinds follow the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation which makes them happen about 2–3 times faster per 10° temperature rise
(being old is a more important risk factor for cancer than anything else i can think of, even smoking and radioactive fallout)
small sharks around greenland, to take an extreme example, are at essentially the temperature of the seawater, about -1.8°. larger sharks could conceivably raise their internal body temperature, but greenland sharks swim very slowly to avoid this even when they are large. so their metabolism is about 16× slower than yours is—both healing and aging processes happen slower. their gestational period is about 8–18 years
Turns out they have lower mutation rate which helps them. Their chances are much lower, but still not zero. https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/sharks-cancer-secret-al...