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Galápagos tortoises.
Credit: Ylenia Chiari
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Galápagos tortoise.
Credit: Ylenia Chiari
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Galápagos tortoise.
Credit: Ylenia Chiari
Hidden away inside the cells of the giant Galápagos tortoise is a secret that, if Creationists are to be believed, the same magic creator who designed humans and who also designed these long-lived reptiles, could have shared with humans, and indeed all other species prone to cancers, but it apparently chose not to.
The secret is in the way the giant Galápagos tortoise can detect cells that have gone wrong and rapidly destroy them in a process known as apoptosis, so killing the nascent tumour before it gets going. The scientists from the University of Buffalo, USA, who made this discovery believe the key to the tortoise's ability to do this lies in that embarrassment for Creationists - gene-doubling - so creating additional information in the genome. Increasing the amount of information in the genome without the intervention of their invisible friend is something Creationists will assure you can't happen because so they claim, new genetic information can't arise naturally, despite the evidence that it can and does.
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Oxford University Press
for The Society for Molecular Biology and EvolutionOpen access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
From the University of Buffalo press release:
A new study concludes that compared with other turtles, these animals evolved to have extra copies of genes — called duplications — that may protect against the ravages of aging, including cancer.
Laboratory tests on Galápagos giant tortoise cells corroborate the idea that the animals have developed such defenses, says Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo.
Specifically, experiments showed that the creatures’ cells are super sensitive to certain types of stress relating to damaged proteins. When exposed to these pressures, the cells self-destruct much more readily than other turtle cells through a process called apoptosis, the research found. Destroying glitchy cells before they have the chance to form tumors could help the tortoises evade cancer, Lynch says.
In the lab, we can stress the cells out in ways that are associated with aging
and see how well they resist that distress. And it turns out that the
Galápagos tortoise cells are really, really good at killing themselves before
that stress has a chance to cause diseases like cancer.
The authors explain more in the abstract to their open access paper
published in Genome Biology and Evolution:
Vincent Lynch,
Associate professor of biological sciences
University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Associate professor of biological sciences
University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA.
AbstractSo, the obvious question then for Creationists who deny evolution and seek to attribute all genetics to the intentional design of a magic creator who is one and the same as the supposedly omni-benevolent god of the Bible and Qur'an, and similar to the one I asked in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, without any answer forthcoming so far, is:
There are many costs associated with increased body size and longevity in animals, including the accumulation of genotoxic and cytotoxic damage that comes with having more cells and living longer. Yet, some species have overcome these barriers and have evolved remarkably large body sizes and long lifespans, sometimes within a narrow window of evolutionary time. Here, we demonstrate through phylogenetic comparative analysis that multiple turtle lineages, including Galapagos giant tortoises, concurrently evolved large bodies, long lifespans, and reduced cancer risk. We also show through comparative genomic analysis that Galapagos giant tortoises have gene duplications related to longevity and tumor suppression. To examine the molecular basis underlying increased body size and lifespan in turtles, we treated cell lines from multiple species, including Galapagos giant tortoises, with drugs that induce different types of cytotoxic stress. Our results indicate that turtle cells, in general, are resistant to oxidative stress related to aging, while Galapagos giant tortoise cells, specifically, are sensitive to endoplasmic reticulum stress, which may give this species an ability to mitigate the effects of cellular stress associated with increased body size and longevity.
Scott Glaberman, Stephanie E Bulls, Juan Manuel Vazquez, Ylenia Chiari, Vincent J Lynch
Concurrent evolution of anti-aging gene duplications and cellular phenotypes in long-lived turtles
Genome Biology and Evolution, 2021;, evab244, DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evab244
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
If your supposedly omniscient designer god chose to give species as diverse as elephants and Galápagos tortoises this protection against developing cancers when the mechanism for replicating cells that it also designed goes wrong, as it frequently does in humans and other species, why did it not give this protection to humans and these other species? Does it prefer to watch as people die of cancer?
Cancer is an example of pure evil. In this case, its Natural evil. This h ellish disease tortures and kills both animals and humans. Our beloved pet dogs, cats, and birds are vulnerable to getting cancer and other diseases, and its all because two ancient humans ate a forbidden apple. How stupid. What a lame, stupid exercise and what a lame, stupid explanation to ruin and torture the entire creation.
ReplyDeleteThe creator of cancer is a monster worse than Hitler. He created us to torture us. That's just the way the creator is. He has no conscience.