Re: What causes aging? and death?

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Jerry, Judith, all,

Aging and death may be good processes by which to yet
again (I hope I am not overdoing it) raise my pet issue
about the important distinction between the life of
organisms and the life of communities/ecosystems of
organisms as interdependent (non-fractionable, complex,
self-organizing) wholes in their own right.

(To re-raise this issue with a thought experiment, if you
think organisms are independent, self-sufficient life
forms imagine putting any organism or even a population
of many of the same kind of organism into a sealed jar
and what would happen? To see the alternative, we
could put a more complete community/ecosystem into
a sealed jar and life would continue much longer if not
indefinitely.)

From the perspective of the life of an organism, death
and aging are perhaps externally caused and are
problematic, negative or zero sum relative to the life of
the organism. That is, an organism is either *alive or
dead*, either young/growing/developing or aging and
senescing. No win-win, synergy or etc.

But from the perspective of the life of a community of
organisms, death and aging (of organisms, but even of
communities perhaps) seem at least partly internally
caused and are not only problematic or negative but
instead are also normal and even potentially/likely
beneficial and functional.

In that sense, from this perspective there is everywhere
and always *life and death*, growth/development and
senescence/aging. At this community/ecosystem scale
life and death are no longer antagonistic or zero sum
but instead may be synergistic and win-win and even
complementary in terms of the two having to co-occur,
neither being possible alone.

Another angle to explore the differences is to ask what
would happen to a community if cells/organisms lived
forever? To me, this would not be beneficial to the life
of the community, closer I think to "life itself", but would
instead be harmful in that the part of the community
that lived forever would be essentially frozen in time
and unable to evolve in the way that occurs between
generations. (There might be learning or development,
but not evolution.) This frozen, static, non-evolving part
of the community could also be a liability in that since
environmental change seems inevitable, community
change seems required and all participants normally
share the work of this change to keep pace with (or
even outpace) the change of the environment.

Some thoughts...

Dan

Jerry Zhu wrote:
> Hi Judith,
>
> Enjoy your post. Thanks!
>
> I bought a book by MIT prof. about cancer. A two hour
> quick skim leads me totally disagree. I will get into
> that book in detail later time.
>
> Aging process is very important phenomenon to
> understand life. I doubt that science can privide the
> answer. I believe it belongs to the realm of
> philosophy. (I need to define science and phiolosphy
> here to support my arguments but I am lazy to do that
> here) How long cancer reserach has been done? any
> reasonable achievements?  Science and philosophy are
> not related in scientific way as we see today. Some
> scientists carry their research with philosophyical
> sense unconsciously. But I doubt this will address
> major issues like aging and cancer.
>
> the disappearance of "webing" tissue between fingers
> probably not killed themselves.  It maybe that they
> split in the middle to attach to both sides in the
> process of cell differentiation under the impact of
> substrates.  I also think that aging is self caused. 
> External cause maybe different chemical processes from
> aging's eventhough they may demontrate similar
> symptons.
>
> Later soon
>
> Jerry Zhu