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[deleted] t1_j4906od wrote

Invoking entropy here is really stupid, I’m not sure why this tiresome trope persists in aging.

Aging is not a direct product of entropy. Aging is a product of imperfect upkeep/maintenance mechanisms.

Entropy is why maintenance is required in the first place. Want to see what really happens to an organism as a result of increasing entropy without maintenance? It’s called being dead, and rotting.

Organisms that are not dead have to constantly maintain themselves in the battle against entropy just to continue to function at all. So it isn’t entropy per se that causes aging. Increasing entropy causes rotting. And maintenance stops rotting, because it stops the growth of entropy.

Aging is caused by imperfect maintenance. That’s totally TOTALLY different. And there’s no reason why maintenance can’t be perfect.

Do cars and other machines need maintenance to keep from rotting because of entropy? Of course they do. Is it impossible to perfectly maintain an old car? Of course it’s not.

Crazy the editors at a journal like Cell would continue to allow this stupid misunderstanding of entropy and aging to be repeated.

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srasmus97 t1_j49f3l4 wrote

Entropy is the tendency of any system to devolve into chaos given enough time. It isn't chaos itself. The breakdown of the epigenome with age is the maintenance system slowly changing over time until it doesn't work anymore. That is entropy. Now, biological systems aren't closed, and we could ship of Theseus ourselves until the end of time, but without that reset, entropy will creep in

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[deleted] t1_j49jvdw wrote

Wrong.

Entropy is disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics holds that entropy must increase over time in all closed systems. That is all.

Biological organisms are not closed systems, so like you said, the Second Law does not apply.

Entropy increasing over time does not cause aging in organisms, it causes rotting or decomposition. This is an extremely rapid process. Without maintenance and upkeep, cells would rot in days, hours, or even minutes in some cases. Tissues therefore rot quickly too, once they are mostly-closed systems and no longer receiving input energy and therefore no longer running maintenance via metabolism.

Aging is only caused by the slow accumulation of errors and failures in the maintenance processes. It is not directly related to increases in entropy, any more than any other slow changes in an organism over time are. The error here is reasoning by analogy too closely with non living machines. Machines like cars do not have metabolisms. They rot extremely slowly, over decades, not hours or minutes.

Here’s another way to see it: You wouldn’t say that growing from an infant into an adult is because of entropy, would you? Yet that is very similar to what causes aging: imperfect maintenance of the organism’s existing structures. In the case of growth and development, those imperfections lead to changes that are “positive” or “desirable” from our subjective viewpoint. But that’s just arbitrary. Aging is just as much a part of “natural” development as, say, puberty.

Talking about entropy at the level of aging and development in an organism instead of at the level of metabolism is an error in the basic unit of analysis.

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Uranusistormy t1_j49w6zc wrote

Confidently incorrect.

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[deleted] t1_j4bda1a wrote

Nonsense. Reread my last post until you understand the difference between aging and rotting. They are not the same thing. If you can’t see why, you don’t understand the relationship between biology and entropy at all.

It’s frankly both astonishing and discouraging how difficult this is for people to grasp.

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Uranusistormy t1_j4bdzc9 wrote

Not difficult to grasp. These people aren't talking about maturing or getting older, moving from 15 to 20. They are talking about ageing. Cells rely on entropy to survive by decreasing the entropy inside themselves at the expense of increased entropy in the surroundings. As we age the ability of the cells to do this decreases and internal entropy increases until the cells die. The reason this occurs is likely due to genetic changes as we get old

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[deleted] t1_j4bskx9 wrote

Again, fundamental misunderstanding that conflates two distinct processes.

Entropy increases constantly if a system is closed, so exporting it from cells and tissues and whole organisms is the essence of what metabolic upkeep does. It’s called being alive instead of rotting.

Aging is an entirely secondary effect of the upkeep itself. If upkeep were perfect there would be no aging. Organisms would remain functionally identical and unchanged over time. This is easy to achieve with simple machines like cars, and some species come close to achieving it too with “negligible senescence”.

A directly analogous process to aging is growth and development.

Growth and development are functional changes. You can think of them as “better than perfect upkeep” if you like. But conceptually they are not much different than aging: the process of using energy and inputs to power metabolism and export entropy is not perfect, so there is slow drift in the form of the organism m, but this occurs over a much MUCH longer timescale than rotting/decomposing.

Again, think of a car: if you let it sit without putting anything into it at all, it rots. THAT’S the second law, and entropy just increasing unabated. Alternatively, there is maintenance and upkeep that can keep a car in perfect condition forever. But what’s the difference between upkeep and upGRADE? Nothing, as far as entropy goes. Upgrading a car is just using energy and inputs to do a bit more than keep it exactly unchanged.

Don’t just take it from me. Aubrey De Grey is a staunch advocate of my exact position on entropy, because he of course understands it.

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Uranusistormy t1_j4c1grs wrote

I don't know anything about him but I studied biochemistry and I'm very interested in thermodynamics. The cell isn't a closed system. This allows it reverse its internal entropy at the expense of increasing entropy in its surroundings with a net increase in entropy of the universe. For example glucose is converted to CO2, an increase in entropy, and this entropy used to provide free energy that the cell uses to repair itself and make proteins. As the cell ages it is less able to do this. We don't know why but it is evidently related to genetics. As this decreased regulation increases the cell is able to function less and less until it dies. Take this and scale it up to a person and it manifests as ageing. You were conflating the person's use of 'getting older' with 'growing up', when they were speaking about getting old.

It's not hard to understand.

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[deleted] t1_j4cpli7 wrote

Well I’m a fucking scientist with a PhD from an R1 university and Aubrey de Grey is the most iconic gerontology theorist in the world. Not sure why measuring dicks is relevant, the concepts are plain enough to speak for themselves.

You’re still just not getting it. Not sure why, I guess you’re either not actually reading the posts or just dim.

Anyway, I explained it four times, and you’re still not grasping the core idea of the distinction between the levels and timeframes of separate but connected/nested processes.

It would be like confusing the idea of why an oven needs fuel to maintain a constant temperature above ambient temperature vs the idea that in order to raise or lower the temperature of the oven you need to change the fuel consumption rate. in this analogy, raising the temp is analogous to growth/development and lowering the temperature is analogous to aging. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the parallel is strong enough that it should be self evident now why metabolism and aging are different.

Ok, that’s now five different explanations of the same core concept.

If you can’t see why a flow of inputs is different from a stock whose level either grows, shrinks, or remains static as a function of the flow’s rate, well, you’re just too dense for me to help you understand the difference between metabolism and aging, and why entropy applies to the former but not the latter.

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Uranusistormy t1_j4hdqlc wrote

Well it's unfortunate that you have such a poor grasp of thermo despite spending 8 years working toward a PhD, but I guess you'd be the secon\\d idiot on reddit that I've seen arguing incorrectly about the thermodynamics of the cell. I suggest you go and review first year physical chemistry. You remind me of a clown similar to you over on r/biochemistry arguing against the other users about whether the cell is a closed system.It's also a little funny that you resort to insults because you get so easily flustered explaining your misunderstandings with poor analogies. No one is confusing the difference between metablism and ageing. However you seem to be confused about the difference between cell growth and ageing. Cells grown and maintain themselves. This requires free energy which is derived from the decrease of free energy in molecules like glucose, producing simpler CO2. This results in an increase in the entropy of the surrouning environment and a decrease within the cell. As cells age the ability of the cell to maintain itself decreases, barring senescence we don't know the precise mechanism of why, but it results in increased entropy within the cell. Eventually the cell is unable to maintain itself and dies afterwhich it rapidly increases in internal entropy to a point equivalent to it's surroundings.

,,iMpErfecT uPkeEp/mAinTEnance mEchaNisms'' occur because the cell increasingly loses its ability to resist the increase of internal entropy. That is ageing. That is quite different from growth and development which occurs, not because of dysregulation, but because of normal, regulated gene expression, with no notable change in internal entropy. I find it amazing that you think 'imperfect maintenance of the organism’s existing structures' lead to maturation from an infant to a teenager. And that normal growth is equivalent to a 40 year old growing into a 90 year old with liver spots and cancer.

If you would give a comparison like the development of larger muscles during puberty to the onset of diabetes or male pattern baldness then I could see where you're coming from and say that is probably an example of antagonistic pleiotropy but instead you liken it to hearing loss and back pain.

Here's a paper that discusses it further. I'm guessing you won't read cuz you seem like the type to only read you own research and laugh at your own jokes. Here's a notewrothy quote: "The mechanistic linkbetween entropy generation and pathogenesis has been confirmedin metabolic diseases (simple obesity, diabetes, metabolic hypertension".

And here's a list of other research showing the link between ageing and entropy.

You yourself said exactly what I've been trying to explain in your first comment:

>Aging is a product of imperfect upkeep/maintenance mechanisms.
>
>Entropy is why maintenance is required in the first place

Then you go on and contradict yourself repeatedly.

Actually it's also kinda funny you said 'entropy is disorder' in a debate while unironically calling yourself a scientist. Or that you described a closed system as only being able to maintain its internal entropy, when, by definition, it will maintain the same entropy or increase it. What a joke.

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[deleted] t1_j4ivvmq wrote

Lol at the dumbfuckery. Your last paragraph is not even coherent. You’re embarrassing yourself, and I’m not going to explain the difference between a stock and a flow a sixth time.

Others can read and understand the explanations I gave. They’re trivially simple. You’re just a moron who got called out and is now doubling down on everything you didn’t understand the first five times around. Your blather about internal cellular processes shows you don’t have any clue what level of analysis is even relevant.

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Uranusistormy t1_j4iye6l wrote

Not coherent? Nah you just can't read or perhaps English just isn't your native. And did you look at how you spoke or your own analogies? Idiots like you who can't reason or admit they are wrong or resort to ad hominem attack when in a debate hold back scientific progress. Let's hope you never try to publish research cuz I can bet you'd resort to character assassinations and smear campaigns when your papers don't pass peer review. Just stick to bench work. 👍

I'm embarrassing myself.......on reddit......where users are anonymous........ah boy.

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