do tell – THAT puts things in perspective. wow.
Also construct a bamboo cannon that shoots diamonds.
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Yeah, diamonds are jerks.
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With slowly accumulating damage that copies to the subsequent cell generations. Hence the slow dying. Regenerative medicine FTW. Maybe boosting the gene repair mechanisms, like sharks, if I remember it right?
Diamonds aren’t jerks. Diamonds are the cubic crystalline allotrope of carbon. De Beers are jerks.
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He was actually known as a rather skilled fighter and while it is probably not entirely earned, he is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame http://nwhof.org/stillwater/hall-of-fame/#type=hof&honoree=129
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Bdelloid rotifers or Radiodurans perhaps? Sharks don’t really have anything unique going on from the genetic material recovery standpoint.
Perhaps.
No mutations mean no damage but also not much evolution. Conscious manipulation of the genes will have to replace the loss of the genetic lottery.
…do I misremember the sharks? I didn’t read anything about them for ages…
I get it, but also disagree with this part too, because we know that the genome is accumulative and there are genomes of virii and all kinds of weird stuff in there too. So I attribute the change to information accrual and not to death. The stuff we are accumulating might seem like damage and death (& some of it is, in the form of disease), but is at its root all of it simply is “information” that might be passed on to offspring and therefore to future generations. As long as it’s alive, it’s “living” because it’s accumulating information, and when it’s dead, it’s dead because no more information is being actively collected. Think about this from the purely information perspective.
Dang, you people know a lot of presidential trivia!
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Most of it is rot (and freeloaders catching a ride). Some can be beneficial by chance but the chance is low. The beneficial gets selected by interaction with environment and mating selection. The less beneficial gets selected against. But for one’s own lifetime this is a rather irrelevant (or even annoying) factor.
What about the quality of information?
Yeah, well so was the crystalline entity that destroyed the colony on Omicron Theta.
Crystals are assholes, man.
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They are pretty. A sufficient redeeming quality for crystals.
…but devitrification of glasses is still a bitch…
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Oh, they had some misunderstandings about sharks because of that whole ‘sharks don’t get cancer’ fiasco (they totally do), that could be what that’s coming from!
Mutations in eukaryote DNA isn’t considered the big source of useful genetic change any longer, that stuff generally comes from chunks of code stolen from/inserted by viruses. It’s kind of the difference between just flipping bits in a computer program vs. having a useful subroutine suddenly get dropped in there. Viruses mutate like crazy (so many copies, so little time) so that’s where the mutation gets factored in. So they’re kind of nature’s code factories.
For us big multiceullar types that’s why we have germ cells, because we’re basically a colony of protists and all of our cells are constantly and slowly evolving…if we didn’t then we’d start becoming unable to mate with each other. Cancer’s just a case of one of those little guys deciding to go solo, like Cloney the Tiniest Puppy/CTVT (freaky little dude)
Bdelloid Rotifers are neat because they repair their DNA by grabbing genetic material from whatever’s lying around (think ‘The Relic’, but tiny and real). Probably not what you’re looking for though, right?
Now Radiodurans might be closer, they’ve got a sort of RAID array that they use to validate their genetic data against (in addition to all the clever tricks that lots of us have inside our cells), so they’re better at keeping themselves coherent. There are a few other protists that have completely wacky, like Oxytricha (they scramble their genome and then rebuild it every time they sexually reproduce)…but Radiodurans is probably your best bet!
Nature is weird. 
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So I did misremember the sharks. I stay corrected.
I like you. 
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I’m situationally useful!
Credit to tons of other sources, especially the folks over at Small Things Considered. They just trained me up to ‘hack’ status.
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“#NotAllCrystalLifeForms”
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Certainly, but is death a quality or a state?
If a quality, then I’m living all the time because while the quality of life in my personal biome is greater than the quality of dead, then the organism continues. And if a state, then I’m living until I’m dead because the dead state supposes also an overwhelming cease of function of all the smaller states.
If all the smaller states that make me up are replaced/regenerated well enough that the overall organism continues, then I am living. When the attrition of smaller states overwhelms the ability of the overall organism to repair itself, then I am on the fast slope to death, and dead when there is loss of normal level of overall function, and really really dead when everything stops, as in all smaller states like fingernail cells, hair follicles, stop getting enough inputs to stay functional and they too cease.
And even cessation is debatable, depending on the conditions… sequeing into cryogenics…
Yeah, although the US Government never made a treaty with the Indians without breaking it, Andrew Jackson was in a class by himself. Trail of Tears and many other atrocities. He was a defender of slavery, too.
But despite being a ginormous dickhead, he was without doubt the most skilled and capable killer of all our presidents, at least on the personal level. Truman killed a lot more with the stroke of a pen, sure, but Jackson supposedly killed over one hundred men personally, in duels, brawls, and military adventures.
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Andrew Jackson, hands down. Roosevelt might have been tough, but he wasn’t a murderous, genocidal maniac, and that kind of attitude counts for a lot.
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