Bio 103, Week 10

 Following the trend of other posters this week, I, too, find the concept of death as an inevitable and natural decomposition of parts comforting. It makes death easier to deal with. But what about children and young adults who die early from degenerative diseases? How can we explain the difference between a slow, timely, conventional movement from improbable to probable and a quick, erratic, and surprising completion of the process?

Sometime last week, someone said that they were unsettled with the concept of human DNA "falling apart." I disagree--I actually find it pretty cool. Not the act of falling apart, but the phrasing of it. I (and I hope so does everyone else) know for a fact that we are all going to die eventually, so there is no point in wallowing in the idea, but I have never heard of the act of dying described as "the natural tendency of falling apart." I don't know of anybody who has had "death" explained to them in such a way. I find it kind of refreshing, that dying isn't this big mystical, incomprehensible concept, but rather just the improbable reverting back into the way it always has been.

What I find most intriguing is that this whole new way of "story telling" has really got me thinking about how oxymoronic life is--chaotic and random, yet orderly and purposeful at the same time. And as cheesy as this will sound, I am so amazed at how ridiculously lucky we are to be able to exist.

Although it is morbid to view everything, including ourselves as breaking down I think it almost comforting in a way, it offers us a sense of camaraderie with basically the entire universe as we are all striving for the same thing: probable, simplified states (in our case, death). We know that nothing in our universe can last forever- not even the sun, which seems eternal. However when we say that life has to end at some point, we basically are saying that the concept of life as we understand it is limited, but other forms of life, other planets and new universes could possibly form. Entropy to me more represents a lack of commitment to our current status, and endless  future possibilities (or it could just mean the end of everything). 

Even though the concept of everything falling apart from less probable to more probable holds true for most things, I feel it very unsettling to apply this to humans as well. It maybe a subconscious feeling of superiority of the human race over others, but I find it hard to come to terms with the fact that at this very instant, our bodies/cells/macromolecules or even our very entity/ our existence is being broken down into less complex, "more probable" states of being. Prof Grobstein explained in class that this is, in fact, true and the eventual outcome of this process is old-age and later, death. But.. this would mean, that from the time a baby is born, the journey towards getting "more probable" begins, that from the moment life begins, it is directed towards death. This seems very.. morbidly unsettling. I can't comprehend.

I feel this concept could be applicable to non-living entities because when we talk about.. desks or water-wheels, one isn't affected as much. I can accept physical, tangible matter continuously striving for a "more probable" existence. But in context of living beings, I find it hard to maintain the same level of detachment/indifference. But then again. This brings us back to what IS living? How do we differentiate between living and non-living? Would it even be fair to make the distinction?

 Quote from Mental Floss T-Shirt: 

Entropy: It Ain't What It Used to Be.

(http://www.mentalfloss.com/store/product.php?productid=16260)

oh, science jokes.

This week, I was particularly interested in the concept of how things falling apart relates to aging and death. Can you die of "old age"? From my Biology class in high school, I have an interest in the role of telomeres, which are basically junk sequences of DNA on the end of a particular strand. Each time replication occurs, some of this sequence is deleted. It protects the good parts of the DNA, the sections that code for proteins. But what happens  when these junk sequences fully disintegrate? The DNA molecule itself would probably start to wear away. 

This raises the question, are our bodies only meant to last for a certain amount of time? And if so, is there any way to artificially extend that time period? Do certain people "break down" at different rates? I know there are specific world populations, such as certain Japanese islands and some Mediterranean peoples, that have a much higher life expectancy than the rest of the world. These people have both genetic traits and lifestyle choices (diet, stress levels) that seem to extend their life range. Entropy is a really interesting concept to apply to biology.