Talk:Phenoptosis

Etymology of Phenoptosis

I find the explanation in the first sentence of the article (ptosis - programmed death) rather hard to believe, especially given that "Programmed death" is a (relatively) sophisticated concept.

Also, any etymological explanation must surely include the language the original words or roots belong to. In the absence of this information, I suggest that this etymology be removed from the article.

194.74.6.54 (talk) 10:14, 13 February 2008 (UTC)Srikanth Madani[reply]

I just edited to provide this information and Ðℬig XЯaɣ removed it. Ptosis is a noun that originally just means "falling" as can be seen in the medical condition ptosis (eyelid) where the eyelid "falls" (oddly enough, it's also the word the Greeks used to describe grammatical cases, and "case" itself comes from the Latin verb cado, cadere, cecidi, casurus with the same meaning -- cf. English "cadaver" which means something like "one who has fallen"). Its sense in programmed cell death is derived from the compound word apoptosis (lit. "falling away") which was used by Galen to describe medical phenomena such as a scab dropping off a healing wound: this is logical when one considers that programmed cell death is what causes the toes to divide in fetal animals as the connecting tissue sort of "falls away".

There's your etymology. 207.188.232.179 (talk) 15:50, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Does this exist?

The article on the evolution of aging claims that the mechanisms here proposed are those of one theory of aging, and not even a modern one and one that is most likely untrue, however this article makes it seem like this random Russian came up with THE theory of how aging evolves. So which one is it? Is this a fact that exists out there in the world, or simply a theory someone had that is being described? Moreover, the article even contradicts itself when it says that extant examples of semelparity evolved due the high extrinsic adult mortality (which is in line with current theories on how aging evolved), but then goes on to just recap the scientifically unsupported "altruistic aging" theory not as a possibility, but actuality. While it's fine to have articles on outmoded theories (like Newtonian Physics), or downright fantasy (Hollow Earth theory), I think the article needs to be rewritten so as to be a description of a theory, not an explanation of reality from the viewpoint of a theory. It also needs to be rewritten for internal consistency. --Don Ecchi (talk) 10:15, 21 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]