Human life span vs animals: The average age of humans is 70 to 80 years, but animals like rats, cats, dogs etc. die within a few years. Some organisms grow old quickly and die, while the effect of age is seen slowly on many organisms. To find out, scientists did research on mammals. British scientists said that the secret of their age is hidden in the DNA of organisms. The faster the change in DNA, the shorter the lifespan of that organism. Let us know some interesting things about the age of humans and animals on this basis.
there are two types of age
The time a living being remains alive from birth till death is called its age. But this is the chronological definition of age. There is also a biological definition of age. Its scale tells the age of that organism on the basis of the quality of health. That is, if someone’s age is 20 years but his health remains poor, then it is obvious that his body is rapidly becoming weak and he is moving towards old age. By the way, it is not so easy to measure the biological age of an organism, but for that the frailty index is used. Under this, a person’s diseases, information about his day-to-day functioning and his understanding are tested.
Why is there a difference in the age of living beings?
Scientists did research to understand the difference in the age of different organisms. According to media reports, this research has been done by the scientists of Britain’s Welcome Sanger Institute. Scientists studied the DNA of 16 mammal animals including humans including dogs, horses, giraffes, lions, rabbits, rats, cats, in which these things have come to the fore. Scientists found that the number of mutations in DNA is almost the same in all these organisms. In the whole life, there are mutations of DNA about 3200 times in all these organisms. Scientists told that the organism in which mutations occur frequently, its death happens as soon as possible.
Mutation in DNA is the reason
The study found that a mouse that lives for less than four years undergoes an average of 800 changes in its DNA a year. Similarly, this change occurs about 249 times in dogs, 160 times in lions, 99 times in giraffes and about 47 times in humans. According to this, there is a difference in the average age of these creatures. Scientist Dr. Alex Kegan, a member of the research team, said during a conversation with the media that if the DNA of humans had changed as fast as the DNA of a mouse, then human DNA would have mutated more than 50 thousand times in a lifetime. On the basis of this research, it can be said that why the age of a dog is less than that of a human. Actually, it is the mutation in DNA that makes the age more or less.
Dr Cagan said that although mammals have similar DNA mutations at different ages, it is not yet known why this happens. Now scientists will do this study on fishes like Greenland shark which live more than 400 years. The Greenland shark is believed to be the largest living vertebrate in the world.
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