A Zombie Gene Keeps Elephants from Getting Cancer | SciShow News

"Zombie genes" a name chosen for the explicit purpose of garnering public attention through news editors slapping front page headlines like "Elephants protected from cancer by ancient zombie gene."

Went shopping today and left my new expensive Levi's in the car. Like elephants, I have special jeans in my trunk.

Before video: why can't we have them? After video: Wow, elephants are cool.

I gotta ask, just who and why does someone downvote this? I think it was a pretty good video, didn't leave any strings dangling and wasn't clickbait.

Peto's Paradox isn't really a paradox at all, it's just something that initially seems counter-intuitive if you don't account for Natural Selection. 1) Large animals generally require more resources to live in day-to-day terms. 2) Because of this additional demand offspring tend to be birthed in smaller numbers so that the parents can take better care of them - and so that they are less likely to immediately overwhelm the local carrying capacity and starve everyone in their niche to death. Evolutionary lines that do not do this are extremely unlikely to survive for long. 3) Because of the low birth rate, natural selection tends to favor longer life spans and longer windows of fertility. 4) The factors of 'large', 'long life span' and 'low birth rate' all strongly favor selection for genes that are cancer-resistant. Animals that get cancer and die before breeding enough times to maintain their 'market share' of the gene pool will ultimately be out-competed by the ones that don't, and eventually become phased out. 5) The combination of 'large' and 'long-lived' means that the animal's genes will both be resistant to copying errors (selected for by the higher copy rate) and to degradation (selected for by the longer window of fertility).

oh yeah, since I'm strong I also have this gene.

You would expect bigger animals with more cells to get cancer more often, which in turn leads to the expectation that they would find ways to handle it explicitly /because/ they are bigger and have more cells, thereby requiring it in order to maintain a remotely viable species.

Thank you so much for naming your news episodes as Sci Show News! It makes it so much easier to watch my favorite videos

In a few decades there will be Humans and possibly some animals that will be modified to be mostly immune to cancer. This discovery also shows how important is to conserve the variety in life species - of all the animals that had these genes and could have been studied, only Elephants survive and they're not doing too hot either. If they would have went extinct too we likely would have never known about this and it could turn out to be one of our greatest discoveries.

I seen people hate on Hank and sci show but for real I'm glad their doing what their doing thank you all !

This makes me happy! Elephants are the best animal, they deserve this! ❤️

"Long-lived creatures like bats" ?!? Didn't know about that. (Out of context, I'd be more likely to assume that's some sort of vampire joke.) Surely such active animals must have fast metabolisms and die quickly right? checks google 30 years?! Wow!

I suppose that large dinosaurs would have had similar defenses against cancer cells

This was massively informative on so many levels. Thanks, science people guys! You, guys!

I have no joke, this is pretty interesting!

This is amazing, and so awesomely explained!

mitochondria is the muscle hank of the cell

That's some nice John you're rocking Hank

This is absolutely fascinating :D

You thought sitting next to a baby on a plane was bad, try a zombie elephant and youre the only guy with nuts. Not good.