I’m creating this thread as a “follow-up” to the Introduction one because talking endlessly about exciting and unanswerable questions is awesome. (And that way, people can actually introduce themselves on the Introduction topic 🙂 ).
In the Introduction thread, Kenna asked about the one question in the field of science that we’d like to see answered, and I talked about the observation that “bigger organims live longer”, wondering about the biological basis of this.
We’ll start with this topic because I’ve been itching to reply to what Kenna said:
“Could it be that larger organisms survive telomerase shortening/cell aging better because they have more cells? “.
The problem is that ‘bigger animals have more cells’ implies more cell divisions so it would increase the issue of telomere shortening in bigger organisms, as it is related to the number of cell cycle, and it would not explain the lenghtening in lifespan :/.
A link with metabolism is highly probable. An older observation (see Kleiber’s law) is that although bigger animals use more energy than smaller ones, the increase in metabolic basal rate is less than the increase in size i.e. larger animals need less energy per kg of body weight than smaller ones, maybe because a lesser weight mean more structural tissue and less reserve tissue.
I’ll be curious to hear what you think before going any deeper.