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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 05 Feb 2023

Taken: 05 Feb 2023

1 favorite     1 comment    32 visits

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Aerobic capacity

Aerobic capacity

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . We do have a high aerobic capacity relative to other great apes. We do live a lot longer than them -- we live nearly twice as long as chimps and gorillas, which have a similar metabolic rate. Perhaps we own that to our formative years as species, chasing gazelle across the African savannah. You might not gain enormous pleasure from endurance running, but it sculpted us as species. There’s no gain without pain. From a simple consideration of the requirements for two genomes, we can predict that our ancestors increased their aerobic capacity, decreased their free-radicals leak, gave them a problem with fertility, and increased their lifespan. How much truth is there in all that? This is testable hypothesis tht might prove wrong. But it emerges inexorably from the requirement for mosaic mitochondria, a prediction that in turn rests on the origin of the eukaryotic cell, which on one singular occasion, nearly 2 billion years ago, overcame the energetic constraints that keep bacteria bacterial. No wonder the sun setting over the plains of Africa still holds such a strong emotional resonance. It ties us to a wonderful, if contorted, train of causality right back to the very origins of life on our planet. ~ Page 279

THE VITAL QUESTION
21 months ago. Edited 21 months ago.

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