Could our world have been different?

[BH]

You are starting 4 billion years ago.

How realistically speaking could our world have been using the evolutionary model for its eevelopment? Could we have had a world without cancer, or is it something that would have developed or something like it no matter how many times you run our thought experiment.

Also, could we have evolved, or something like us, where we would have experts in different subject matter and a high degree of civilization, yet no one worries about how much income they make, like ants somewhat?

 

[BH]

Also, I wanted to ask too. We and other creatures have and emit pheromones. Could pheromones, or our production of them/ability to make them, have evolved to be used in place of language we use today?

 

[rousseau]

You can't have a world without cancer, no. Cancer isn't a disease as much as it's a process that happens when the body starts breaking down. It's inseparable from life.

A world where no one worries about how much income they make? That's a bit fuzzier of a question, and could still be possible in the future - maybe we just haven't gotten there yet.

 

[skepticalbip]

You can't have a world without cancer, no. Cancer isn't a disease as much as it's a process that happens when the body starts breaking down. It's inseparable from life.

It isn't really that dire... there is hope. Cancer researchers are studying several animals that do not develop cancer.

http://https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/12/05/some-animal-species-never-get-cancer-what-can-we-learn-from-them/#:~:text=In%20recent%20years%2C%20scientists%20have,personal%20favorite)%20naked%20mole%20rats.
Some animal species never get cancer. What can we learn from them?

There are examples of long-lived mammals who simply never develop cancer. These include horses, cows, whales, bats, elephants, blind mole rats, and (my personal favorite) naked mole rats. Something in their genetics or their biology is hardwired to fight against cancer.

 

[Bomb#20]

Well, first you have to assume nondeterminism -- if the world is deterministic then it would have come out the same way down to the last TFT post. But since there's no empirical evidence for determinism, let's assume quantum mechanics really is random...

There could have been late asteroid impacts or nearby gamma ray bursts or something sterilizing the earth, or at least keeping it from evolving anything more advanced than single-cell organisms. Cancer is a disease of multicellularity, so if everything is one-celled then there can be no cancer. But failing that, cancer is probably inevitable. Multicellularity only works because cells reproduce in a systematic way, and this happens because some mechanism keeps those cells' individual reproductive switches on or off in conformity to that system. And for every mechanism there's a way for the mechanism to break...

As for ants and income, ants are the way they are because they're in the wasp family, and instead of XY-vs-XX chromosomes, wasps have a weird sex-determination mechanism that causes a girl wasp to be more closely related to her sisters than she is to her own children. This causes the whole "eusociality" system with sterile workers focused on helping the colony prosper without regard to an individual's personal interests to be in the genetic self-interest of the genes that make the individuals operate that way. Eusociality has consequently evolved independently at least a dozen times in the wasp family, but is very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. So yes, intelligent life could certainly have evolved to not care about income. It's only chance that made that system of sex determination evolve in proto-wasps instead of in proto-mammals.

 

[rousseau]

You can't have a world without cancer, no. Cancer isn't a disease as much as it's a process that happens when the body starts breaking down. It's inseparable from life.

It isn't really that dire... there is hope. Cancer researchers are studying several animals that do not develop cancer.

http://https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/12/05/some-animal-species-never-get-cancer-what-can-we-learn-from-them/#:~:text=In%20recent%20years%2C%20scientists%20have,personal%20favorite)%20naked%20mole%20rats.
Some animal species never get cancer. What can we learn from them?

There are examples of long-lived mammals who simply never develop cancer. These include horses, cows, whales, bats, elephants, blind mole rats, and (my personal favorite) naked mole rats. Something in their genetics or their biology is hardwired to fight against cancer.

I don't think dire is the right word here. The reality is that the body breaks down, and cancer is one of the mechanisms of this happening. People die, and I think it's more realistic to accept that death happens, than to rage against everything that kills us.

Hopefully we continue to make progress toward additional treatments, but my point remains - you can't have a world without cancer. And other species who don't develop cancer isn't a sign that this can be replicated in humans.

 

[BH]

Thanks for the replies. What about pheromones evolving or developing into a form of actual language?

 

[rousseau]

It isn't really that dire... there is hope. Cancer researchers are studying several animals that do not develop cancer.

I don't think dire is the right word here. The reality is that the body breaks down, and cancer is one of the mechanisms of this happening. People die, and I think it's more realistic to accept that death happens, than to rage against everything that kills us.

Hopefully we continue to make progress toward additional treatments, but my point remains - you can't have a world without cancer. And other species who don't develop cancer isn't a sign that this can be replicated in humans.

Another point that's worth mentioning - is that other animals not developing cancer may be a sign that cancer in humans is a feature, not a bug. One of the more counter-intuitive implications of evolution is that some of these phenomena are actually adaptations.

For example, in our species we live to be grandparents because we can assist in the raising of our grandchildren. It may be the case that we tend to die en-masse in our 60s and 70s because after that point we become more of a strain on our family than help. This explanation is a bit of a leap without corresponding evidence, but it's within the realm of possibility.

Similarly, if some species don't develop cancer this is likely because their body has evolved to be resistant to it - it is more beneficial for their young if they never succumb to cancer. And so it's possible that various species haven't so much developed resistance to cancer, but developed resistance to cancer at various rates. In humans we are very resistant until after child-bearing age, after which point it may actually be better for our young if we die more quickly.

 

[Jokodo]

You can't have a world without cancer, no. Cancer isn't a disease as much as it's a process that happens when the body starts breaking down. It's inseparable from life.

It isn't really that dire... there is hope. Cancer researchers are studying several animals that do not develop cancer.

http://https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/12/05/some-animal-species-never-get-cancer-what-can-we-learn-from-them/#:~:text=In%20recent%20years%2C%20scientists%20have,personal%20favorite)%20naked%20mole%20rats.
Some animal species never get cancer. What can we learn from them?

There are examples of long-lived mammals who simply never develop cancer. These include horses, cows, whales, bats, elephants, blind mole rats, and (my personal favorite) naked mole rats. Something in their genetics or their biology is hardwired to fight against cancer.

The claim that horses, cows, whales, bats or elephants "simply never develop cancer" appears to be simply false.

What is true is that several species of mammals develop cancer at much lower rates than what we would expect based on the human model. For larger animals (where we would expect exponentially higher cancer rates than in humans because they have simply more stem cells that might mutate, but see rather comparable rates), that observation is known as  Peto's_paradox. But significantly rarer than we'd expect does not equal "never".

horses: https://ihearthorses.com/the-5-most-common-types-of-cancer-in-horses/
cows: https://www.nadis.org.uk/disease-a-z/cattle/lymphatic-and-other-tumours-in-cattle/
elephants: http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/the-elephant-in-the-room-gene-copy-number-and-cancer/ (about 5% of deaths are attributable to cancer, vs. 10-25% for humans)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

You are starting 4 billion years ago.

How realistically speaking could our world have been using the evolutionary model for its eevelopment? Could we have had a world without cancer, or is it something that would have developed or something like it no matter how many times you run our thought experiment.

Whales and elephants have systems that are much better at preventing cancer. Some animals can eat anything and have a digestive system that can handle it.

Humans got lucky with a negative mutation that weakened our jaws, but managed to allow our craniums to not fuse at smaller sizes for the support required for those jaws. Add in the thumb and we are the big man on campus, but plenty of life out there have evolved incredible adaptations.

 

[lpetrich]

I think that we can get a clue from what has evolved multiple times. Wikipedia has a huge list:  List of examples of convergent evolution

Horns evolved several times, for instance. Ceratopsian dinosaurs, Uintatherium, Arsinoitherium, brontotheres, rhinos, ruminants (likely at least twice: antlers and horns proper)

Powered flight evolved four times. Birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects. The first three all evolved wings from front limbs, though with a lot of differences in detail. Insect wings are likely gills -- arthropod gills look much like them.

Multicellularity evolved several times, mostly among eukaryotes but a few times around prokaryotes.

• Animal-like -- only once
• Plant-like -- several times, including cyanobacteria
• Fungus-like -- several times, including actinobacteria (actinomycetes)
• Slime-mod-like -- several times, including myxobacteria

The bacteria ones are all prokaryotes.

Imagine landing on a distant planet and finding big forests on it and lots of mushrooms on the forest floors, but no animals, not even small ones like bugs and worms.

There are two possible causes for single evolution: that evolution was difficult, or else that evolution preempted repeats of it.