It is a Female's World

Whoever told you it was a man's world was lying to you. It is definitely a women's world. Males may be more aggressive and more abusive but females control reproduction.

There are a lot of little things we don't ever think much about but without a synthesis of all the little things there would be no big things. We think in terms of "us" when us is really a whole bunch of them. Maybe that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you right now, but hopefully it will as I go forward with this - for those of you who read it to the end because you are asking yourself, "What the hell is he talking about?" I hope you don't give up yet.

I'll take it showly. I think this is an important subject and I've thought about it and perhaps you have also. Surely you have thought about your own mortality. Who hasn't? Everyone does and it is a problem because the answers are slow coming, but we do know a lot more now than we have in the past.

We all realize that we will change as we age. Sometimes we just don't realize how fast until it happens to us. Believe me, it will happen faster than you would like. You will wonder (everyone does) where all that time has gone. Anyway, back to what I was talking about. I wrote to my brother's girl friend about this, but in much less detail than I will here. I was answering her note about my brother, about his age, which I underestimated by a few years and she corrected me but my perspective on age is different than hers because I tend not to think about chronological age as much as I do the transformation we go through continuously, some of us slower than others because of oxidative stress and other genetic and environmental reasons behind why we wear out (our cells) and why we lose the ability to fight all those immunological assaults on our bodies, which I refer to as the host. We are host to mostly foreign organisms but it is that total collection of us and them which together form what we tend to be.

My father, by the way, is 102 years old. That is ancient to some people and I can't imagine me living that long - for a bunch of reasons I won't go into here (not now anyway). Many of us often think about our mortality - especially as we age and when we are sick like having a heart attack or discovering we have diabetes, etc. I think we probably waste entirely too much time thinking about it, but it is a tough subject to avoid.

A problem biologists think about is what evolution attempts to accomplish. With particular emphasis on evolutionary biologists, not all evolutionists are the same. Like so many disciplines in science and other areas of scholarship there are various schools concerning questions which we deeply ponder and for which we develop hypothesis. We're animals and our hormones very often over-power our intellect.

We are all an amalgam of various chemical constituents but those same chemicals exist in other amalgamations. Life is determined by behavior of those chemicals. Like Lynn Margulis tells us life is more of a verb than a noun. It is not just those chemicals but how those chemicals self-sustain themselves, how this thing we call life "repairs, maintains, recreates.."

That behavior of cells is more than just heredity and the blueprint for life in DNA is more than just replication. And, cells are the fundamental structure which compose our bodies and those things which live in there too, unless they are viruses which are chunks of DNA. When cells wear out (or go through the process of apoptosis which is programmed cell suicide), it contributes in no small degree to the aging process.

No one can reduce what happens after reproduction to a simple process. Biological process and the decline of function is a very complex phenomenon. Some age faster. Individuals within species don't age in exactly the same rate. There are variations in their metabolism, in their environment and also their genetic background.

None of us are simply the result of just heredity - although it helps or hinders. The primary purpose of DNA in each of our nucleated cells is the production of proteins, which are composed of amino acids which are the end result of specific sequences of the language of DNA and that blueprint is a genetic cipher of three letter words (codons) which are combinations of four letters: A,C,T and G * (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine)

RNA is like DNA, a long macromolecule of sugarphoshate backbone and 4 bases, repeating subunits. DNA is a double stranded molecule which replicates. DNA is entwined strands, a double helix - and the separate strands are each templates for each other.

RNA is a single stranded molecule that does not replicate. They share three bases A,G & C. DNA and RNA differ in one base. In DNA thymine is replaced in RNA by uracil. There are also three different types of RNA: messenger RNA (mRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA), and ribonsomal RNA (rRNA). AND, RNA is 10 times more abundant than DNA in eukaryotic cells.

During cell division the double strand of DNA each provides the blueprint to reconstitute another full double helix for two identical copies. Gene is the code for a single protein and the genome is the library of genes by an organism. But, I said I would not get too complex and I won't. I'm not writing a thesis. This is not a thesis and I don't want to get into too much complexity - though for some of you I'm sure I have already gone too far, but really what I have described are just the basics. And, there are enough understandable basics to construct a cogent perspective.

Sometimes too much detail can obscure the truth. So, I just want to mention one more detail that will polish off that perspective; the additional function of RNA. (And I apologize ahead of time if I repeat anything)

Cells build proteins with RNA. The messenger RNA exited the nucleus going into the cytoplasm (the rest of the cell) where the code of life is read by ribosomes and that is where amino acids are strung together in the order prescribed by the mRNA bases. In cytoplasm there are these ribosomes, but also lipids and mitochondria. There are hundreds of mitochondria, which has its own DNA and it comes only from the mother - although there have been some exceptions of mitochondria passed on from male sperm. There are hundreds of mitochrondria in each cell unless it is a metabolic-ally active liver, kidney, muscle or brain cell where the mitochondria organelles is as much as 40% of the cytoplasm.

As noted these come from the maternal lineage. The egg or oocyte pass on about 100,000 mitochondria. Blood cells and skin cells have very few mitochondria - or NONE at all. In male sperm there is less than 100 mitochrondria so very few, if any, are passed on. All together there are about 10 billion mitochondria in a _human adult_.

In an adult human the mitochondria (an organelle which evolved from bacteria) is about 10% of body weight.

The code in DNA is made up of the four chemicals are 3-letter words which are transcribed to RNA, the mirror image of DNA, and the errors in transcription, which are introduced by viruses, by radiation, pollution, etc. are debugged in the RNA and most of them are fixed - but some of them are a benefit and those changes which survive are the proteins which benefit the host organism; that is, considered better able to survive to produce and over a very long time those are what is evolutionary change.

The amino acids from RNA produce proteins; the corpus of all eukaryotic living things. There are many different combinations of instructions of amino acids for the same proteins.

Proteins have almost (seemingly) infinite functions which presents in a rich variety of life. And proteins fall into broad groups according to their functions, such as metabolism and movement, flight and sight, immunity and signaling, hormones, antibodies, DNA binding, histones, structure, receptors and enzymes which are also referred to as the catalysts. This was one of life's secrets until only recently. Most of what we know now wasn't taught when I was in high school because it wasn't known then. Even today what was taught in the college in the 90s has changed. It is so important to continue to read and know the research because we are learning new secrets of life everyday.

It is therefore not surprising that no two species or individuals within a species would age in exactly the same way nor does variability from DNA and from mutations, environment, genetics, metabolism, etc. result in exact copies of individuals.

Most of our current knowledge is just at the beginning of this vast body of information of underlying mechanisms which affect aging and behavior.

Most of you remember from biology that evolution is about reproduction; adaptions for the sake of reproductive success.

"Replicative or cellular senescence was observed and proposed as a model for aging at the cellular Level over thirty years ago by Leonard Hayflick (1965; Hayflick and Moorhead, 1961)." (Replicative senescence - Generations - April 1, 2000 Bertram, Michael J; Pereira-Smith, Olivia M)

Oxidative stress, though not the only theory of aging, but I think one of the most important theories of aging is part of a complex process where genetics and environment both affect aging - along with mutations from pollution, gene transfer from viruses and bacteria and other reasons we haven't even discovered yet - but mostly oxidation; that is, oxidative stress.

At the smallest level of life, oxidative stress on cellular replication and survival has the effect of limiting and sustaining life.

The biological purpose of life is to replicate and emotions hugely affect behavior. Men and women are different. Proximate mechanisms which control behavior include a number of things, including a lot of hormones and neurons and accouterments of males which tend to make them attractive to females - some even as encouragement, under some circumstances to seek out multiple males - other than those they pair bonded with because they have the attributes or seem to for additional successful reproduction. The result is occasionally extra extra-pair copulations.

One more thing extra-pair copulations (cuckolding), "we defind adultery in evolutionary terms as behavior that potentially raises the genetic success of the extra-pair copulator at the expense of another individual" (John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobilogy - 2001 - Oxford U Press) And the same term applies to many animals including humans. They don't help to preserve species per se because that is not what evolution is, but they do contribute to individual success and the passing on of genes (and it seems that would be mostly the females genes); the female passes on her mitrochondrial genes; the male doesn't. Who said it is a man's world? Next time you hear that, know that it will be a female saying it. It is a females world. The male is there to service the female.

Males get duped. Adultery raises the genetic success - and some women cuckold their partner and dupe the male into caring for another male's offspring. Extra-pair copulations is not so unusual.

Hank Roth

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