Marine biologists are very excited this week over a clam that was dredged alive from the bottom of the seabed off the coast of Iceland, and which had reached its 405th birthday!
This mollusc, nicknamed Ming, briefly took over from Harriet, the giant Galapagos tortoise, who will be 175 next week (
The Independent), as the world’s oldest living animal. I say ‘briefly’ because, sadly, the 3.4 inch Ming is no longer alive, having been eaten before anyone realised how old he actually was.
(
Times Online)
Much like trees grow ring patterns, the shells of molluscs grow rapidly (rapidly for a mollusc that is) during the summer when the seas are slightly warmer and food more plentiful, while lying dormant during the winter months, resulting in 0.1mm thick layers in their shells that can be counted, like the rings of trees. Ming has 405 of these layers, which dates his emergence as a larva to the time of the Ming dynasty in China (OK you guessed –that’s why the mollusc was named Ming), or about the time when Shakespeare was penning the immortal words ‘to be or not to be…’ .
Leaving aside what he tasted like, this exciting find raises two important questions:
- what is it about this particular specimen that enabled him/her to live so long?
- how much longer might Ming have lived, if he/she has not been eaten?
Molluscs live a rather boring life. They don’t really compete with each other for food, there are not many predators around, and they don’t do much in the way of reproducing and raising families, and receive no emails. They just quietly filter plankton from sea water for the nutrients they need to survive and reproduce.
Biologist speculate that this low-stress low-metabolic rate living might be part of the answer, but are trying to find out from the shell (which is all we have of Ming now) , with the aid of £40,000 grant from ‘Help the Aged’, if there are any other secrets that would contribute to human longevity.
All of which reminded me of another longevity record – the biblical Methuselah, who was the son of Enoch and grandfather of Noah, and clocked out at 969 years old according to the account in
Genesis Chapter 5. (An age just over twice that of Ming the mollusc)
Of course there has been a lot of scoffing about the great ages of the biblical Patriarchs (‘ancient myths’ etc) because in modern times only one person in a billion lives past their 116th birthday.
Interestingly, stories from the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian cultures also tell of extraordinary long life spans, and they claim that their most ancient kings lived a thousand years. Fourth century Babylonian historian Berosus drew from archives in Marduk’s temple to name 10 kings who lived before ‘a great deluge’, who live thousands of years each. The
Weld-Blundell prism, which dates back to the third millennium BC, and the
Nippur tablets, also list ten pre-flood kings who lived thousands of years (not implying that kings lived longer than everyone else, but no one else was considered important enough to have their lives recorded in expensive stone tablets.)
The bible records in
Genesis Chapter 6 that, after the Flood, God exponentially shortened the life span of humans to 120 years, but it doesn’t say how he effected this change. Can science offer any explanation?
I am going to summarise a complex argument here, but one of the major factors limiting human longevity today is the fact that the number of times cells can reproduce is limited because the ends of the chromosomes get ‘frayed’, and shorter and shorter so that eventually important genes fail to get replicated. Once such damage occurs, damaged cells cannot be reproduced.
A higher level of the enzyme telomerase would help prevent this, but would also make the cells more susceptible to cancerous growth in the event of mutations, most of which are a result of the cosmic radiation that the earth is now ‘enjoying’.
It turns out that around the time of the great deluge (eg Noah’s Flood), 20 to 30 thousand years ago, there was a supernova explosion ‘near’ the earth (known to astronomers as the Vela supernova). It would have been seen in the sky at about the size we see the moon from earth, but faded over time until the cosmic radiation source is now the only evidence of its existence.
Whether or not this is the only factor, this, together with Ming the mollusc, helps to give some unexpected scientific credence to the long lives of the pre-flood ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, and an explanation of why no-one today lives longer than 120 years.
So Happy Birthday, ex-Ming.
Read ‘
The Genesis Question’ by Hugh Ross
See article '
Long Life Spans' on the website 'Reasons to believe'