
Improved radiotolerance of human cultured cells by tardigrade-unique protein - ricardolopes
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160920/ncomms12808/full/ncomms12808.html
======
nkrisc
It's interesting to imagine a hypothetical future where something like this
leads to genetically engineered humans that are far more fit for space
exploration than those of us walking around today.

~~~
SEJeff
Sounds a bit like the Culture humanoids in Ian M Banks's Culture book series.

------
jbb555
Often when looking at things like this, the reason that most organisms don't
have the protein is that it's not cost free. It's expensive to make, or there
are other downsides so it got evolved away by natural selection.

For example bacteria that evolve resistance can often lose them fairly quickly
if they are not needed as they are not without cost.

Interesting though :)

~~~
bitwize
Everything is like this though. Humans can't synthesize their own vitamin C,
because, as frugivorous apes, we got enough of it in our diets that evolution
decided the energy savings of omitting the vitamin C pathway was worth it.
Same thing with cats and taurine.

~~~
dave_sullivan
Evolution doesn't decide of course, although your comment just brought to mind
another thought:

Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, before moving on to
higher energy configurations. The surviving lower energy configurations are
then in effect used as legos to create higher energy, more expensive
configurations. If any of those building blocks are "deprecated", perhaps this
effects things up the line, leading to the probability that cheaper, more
basic constructions will survive longer because they have fewer steps in a
given dependency chain.

Maybe this is obvious to people that understand evolution well, but I hadn't
considered it that way before.

In this way, upon reaching some equilibrium where there are base features that
reliably survive, evolution "decides" to try more complicated things. My
abstraction could be totally off though, so feel free to tell me so if that's
the case.

~~~
posterboy
> Evolution doesn't decide

> Evolution exhausts

So, the remark is not about evolution being passive, but that the ability to
decide requires sapience? I think, decidability is elementary to programming
and in that sense completely mechanic. Anything else is begging the question
of free will and the jury's still out on that one, so your "of course" is
illegitimate.

> Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, before moving on
> to higher energy configurations.

that's basic arithmetic. You can't have all the other numbers without the
first.

> higher energy, more expensive configurations.

 _Expense_ and _state_ are not equal. First, energy from the current state has
to be expensed to activate some process, that will in turn increase or
decrease the energetic state.

> If any of those building blocks are "deprecated", perhaps this effects
> things up the line, leading to the probability that cheaper, more basic
> constructions will survive longer because they have fewer steps in a given
> dependency chain.

That's a non sequitur motivated by observation. The idea of entropy is from
thermodynamics and I'm not fit at that, but I think it is just defined for
closed systems. Same basic Issue as with the free will, it depends on your
knowledge of the limits of the system. If you deem free will a thing, why
would you consider a bigger system, that works on a much larger timescale than
humans, that is virtually limitless, to have a lesser degree of freedom, ie.
none?

~~~
dave_sullivan
> so your "of course" is illegitimate.

> that's basic arithmetic.

> That's a non sequitur motivated by observation.

Gotta say I'm unconvinced by your argument.

~~~
posterboy
I was tempted to delete the "illegitimate". I'm sorry for that, I'm a bit
tempered. I was going to insert to write more on thermodynamics and
philosophy, ie. metaphyiscs, and canceled that edit all together.

Note that "observation" is a literal translation of theory and your statement
is purely theoretic. In practice we have all kinds of complex "energetic
configurations" roaming the earth, locally increasing the entropy.

