By Jonathan Silvertown
With The lengthy and the fast of It, biologist and author Jonathan Silvertown deals readers a witty and engaging travel in the course of the clinical examine of sturdiness and getting older. Dividing his daunting topic through theme—death, existence span, getting older, heredity, evolution, and more—Silvertown attracts at the most recent clinical advancements to color an image of what we all know approximately how existence span, senescence, and dying range inside of and throughout species. At each flip, he addresses interesting questions that experience far-reaching implications: What explanations getting older, and what determines the size of anyone existence? What alterations have brought on the typical human lifestyles span to extend so dramatically—fifteen mins according to hour—in the earlier centuries? If evolution favors those that go away the main descendants, why haven’t we advanced to be immortal? The solutions to those puzzles and extra emerge from shut exam of the entire usual historical past of lifestyles span and getting older, from fruit flies, nematodes, redwoods, and masses more.
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Extra info for The Long and the Short of It: The Science of Life Span and Aging
Sample text
Though the church and clergy frequently ignored this doctrine when it suited them, usury was not tolerated among the laity. Therefore, those who wished to lend money had to find a profitable method that would not get them into hot water with the church. One acceptable solution was based on the idea that a lender could legitimately be paid for taking a risk with his money. Thus, if the return on a loan was in some way uncertain, earning money by lending could be allowed. What is more uncertain than life itself?
Cancer is a hazard of multicellularity in animals, but it does not determine how long different species live, and this is another puzzle. When death rates from cancer are compared between animal species, they do not vary as much as one might expect. For example, cancer kills about 20 percent of dogs, 18 percent of beluga whales, and as we have already observed, 25 percent of humans in the United States. This trivial variation among species is remarkable because cancer rates seem to bear no relationship either to how long the different species live—from about 10 years for dogs to 40 years for beluga whales to about 80 years for humans—or to how big they are (belugas can weigh up to a ton and a half).
Large size could be a direct cause of longevity if being big protects an animal from predators that would like to call it lunch, or if it helps an animal to survive cold winters. On the other hand, it takes time to grow large, and if large size offers other advantages that have nothing to do with survival, such as greater reproductive success, they would provide an incidental reason why longevity and size are correlated. Of course it is also possible that both direct and indirect causes link size and longevity.