this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Damn, that was an interesting read before sleep.
But I still don't understand. Is it basically a mass of cancerous dog cells that just keep spreading around endlessly, nearly unchanged in the last ten thousand years? If so, can it even be considered a life form? Or a form of life at all?
It's called the immortal dog. Same thing is happening to tasmanian devils right now, the devil's tumor evolved in the 1980s and has been jumping from one devil to the next since then.
The interesting thing about the immortal dog (canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor, CTVT) is that is has continued to evolve and become an ever more efficient parasite. This is a stark reminder that evolution is something that happens to genes, not to organisms.
The cancer cells are genetic clones of some dog's cancer from 11000 years ago. Yes, they're alive similarly to how your and my cells are alive. The cells themselves live, die and reproduce asexually. I'd say they constitute life forms, but I'm no biologist.
I mean... there is an argument to be made that... genetically... hell, cladistically, the cancer is a dog. It's just... a very special one?
This absolutely stretches our understanding of what is a dog and maybe even what is a life form. Maybe we should start looking even at viruses as forms of life. In the end the only distinguishing factor might be if it has inheritable properties which are subject to evolution
Yeah, life is weird! Viruses are life forms in my view.
How much have we evolved in the last 10,000 years?