TLPTP Wildlife Edition

NEWSFLASH : Groupie in the racing pits 

.... volunteers to polish the car, causes front to fall off :-)

NB That beastie is a twin turbo V8

Cheers, Mike.

Hi Magic !

Well I never heard of that. Two points immediately come to mind :

- reactions in compartments : what makes life work is not just biochemistry, but reactions in the right compartments. The smallest eukaryotic compartments are organelles within cells, that in turn are typically clumped into organs. The classic lipid bilayer is the usual wall that defines boundaries. The activated, or suppressed, expression of DNA in one compartment may be useful, but in another toxic/pathogenic. So whatever fancy gene clipping is performed in the lab is far from targeted therapy in a living person.

- side effects of DNA polymerase : this enzyme ( many forms actually ) is responsible for copying DNA. One can think of viruses and ( so-called ) junk DNA as a consequence of thermodynamics emboldened by Murphy's Law. Essentially if it can happen then eventually it will. In this situation the enzyme will reproduce anything that fits it's reactivity profile. Think of it as the village idiot that just randomly sticks whatever sheets of paper are lying around into the village photocopier. Multiply that by however many villages there are in an entire animal. If you like ( to be even more anthropocentric ) it doesn't care what it feeds in or spits out as long as the molecules fit it's active locus. Interestingly mammalian DNA polymerase has an error rate of about one per billion bases. So the adenine-cytosine matching, and the guanine-thymine matching sometimes slips a cog ( mismatch ). This gives rise to variation that gives impetus to a very gentle evolutionary drift of sequences. My question is what drift would occur in a single animal of lifetime the order of centuries ?

Probably a good premise for a SiFi novel ( rushes off to word processor ) meaning ultimately 'what is me/you'. Certainly not a specifically identifiable set of molecules and atoms, the interchange with our environment is quite vigorous, but a structure with a good deal of fungibility in its hidden makeup. 

{ FWIW : this is one excellent reason why the so called Schrodinger's Cat* debate is bollocks. There are an infinitude of ways to be alive, and that number to the aleph-zero ( way more ) of being dead. In reality there is no exclusively two-state cat to describe or even discuss. See quantum decoherence. }

Having just recently hit 58 Sun-laps myself I sense your angst, but alas I don't think there are any magic bullets forthcoming. More likely a good deal of dropped spanners. Probably zombies. Oh, wait they're already here [ & voting ] ..... :-))

Cheers, Mike.

* Initially a joke proposition for consumption by colleagues. The modern version is not the original. Schrodinger posed it in rhetorical fashion. It did bring out the right line of thinking : how does quantum mechanics impinge upon our thinking of macroscopic objects ? The short answer is that at human, or cat, scale atoms may be classically modelled or quantum modelled. Incredibly large numbers make both solutions converge. A dead cat will still bounce regardless ..... :-))