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[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

We're talking about a fantasy world that is very possibly magical in some way. Evolution might simply not apply to elves.

[Supermikhail]

Well, it's a safe bet, since the existence of demons and dragons... But I think I want to look for some element - some single constant, or variable - that, makes DF world (at least in my story) behave reasonably. And the concept of a god, who just made it this way, doesn't work for me. Maybe, because a universe, evolving according to rules, is much cooler to watch.

[Armok]

What abaut: the comon ancestor of all the DF races was imortal, and then *mortality* evolved in some?

[dragnar]

the main reason we grow old (i.e wrinkled and short) is due to the tendency of our DNA to "fail" at reproducing itself properly, creating errors in the code, so the daughter cells, RNA and proteins created from it will be corrupt or incomplete, and as we get older this gets worse causing all sorts of problems... Maybe it could be that elves don't suffer from such problems... after all it is theoretically possible to fix this in the human genome (it probably wouldn't stay this way and eventually revert back, probably with a vengeance... because it hates us...) causing us to not physically age, or maybe appear younger... but it is just a hypothesis.

just a suggestion really from a slightly biological point of view...

Hmm... wouldn't it then be possible for elves to possess some sort of symbiotic organism in their cells(similar to mitochondria) that hunts down and repairs broken DNA? But then that organism could mutate as well... Immortality really goes against our usual view of how life works: everything break eventually, no matter how many failsafes there are.

[Supermikhail]

They say (and write in Wikipedia) that hydra (the real animal) is essentially immortal. But I still have to look into it properly.
My first guess is, that hydra has so few genes, that it has no space for late genetic diseases. Like, any bad mutation leads to immediate death.

Edit: Hey, hey, when I was a child, I wanted to write a story like this. This guy gets infected with a virus, that inserts itself into his DNA (gradually in all cells), and makes cells quickly replicate, if the body is injured. Of course, I didn't know of Resident Evil then... I mean, in my story, the process got out of control, and the guy started turning into a freak and infecting everyone around him, and went into a nuclear plant and sabotaged it, to try to destroy the virus...

Afterthought on TOMzors post: I suspect, that DNA's reproducing failure is connected to genetic diseases.
And here I'd like to recall a story I've heard a while back. It's really from the news. About a French guy, who died at the age around 90, while surfing, and at the autopsy the pathologist discovered that the guy was completely healthy. Wonder if anyone else knows anything about it.

Edit edit: An article on the hydra's immortality. So, suppose, there is a mutation (or lack of thereof) that prevents the chromosomes from shortening (hell, we still have cancer, what's the use, then?). Cells become immortal, and...

Phew edit edit edit: Effect of sexual differentiation on hydra So, elves would need to have asexual reproduction?

[ArPharazon]

I am very disappointed by the lack of discussion on pointy-eared rats, cannibalistic maggots and arborophilic swine in this thread, given the title. Nevertheless...

Regarding old age, I don't believe it is just DNA. Sure, mismatches happen and in the end if nothing else gets ya, cancer will. Besides that, telomeres shorten with time and put an effective cap on how many divisions a cell can make.

Even if telomerase was somehow active in every cell and error rate was reduced by orders of magnitude, we'd probably not live much longer than we do now. In the short term, this is because the mechanisms for maintaining a body beyond a certain age do not exist. Say, your skin sags and you get dementia, and there's just no way to reverse that. I don't suppose there's some reason such mechanisms can't exist in principle, but apparently it's much more efficient to propagate your genes through the good old two-backed-beast. I guess it makes sense, since creating another organism's worth of cells would "dilute" oxidative damage and what not, but I'm really just talking out of my backside here.

It's difficult to say how longer lifespan could evolve without knowing why the short one did, but perhaps the elves have massive, extremely redundant DNA, which has the error resistance of a RAID array? This would make them grow much slower, and probably give them ludicrous gestation periods, and create pressure for long lifespan. As to why the DNA is so paranoid... Maybe a period of intense radiation in the past or something?

By the way, how come these assholes never get prion disease? They're all like, "hey let's eat grandma dudefaces!" and then they're like "hell yeah cannibalism!". Maybe they have a terrifying immune system and absurd cell turnover rates even in the nervous system. I guess elf corpses are a ready supply of nucleotides (what would they eat besides corpses though? What has nucleotide precursors? Sea weed? Great. As if it wasn't bad enough now all they eat is *blue green algae sushi*. Whatever happened to not killing plants?), which also works with the gigabase genome thing.

Anyway, they'd probably have unusually high stem cell populations too, which would nicely solve the macroscopic tissue damage problem. And give them starfish-like regenerative powers. And... asexual reproduction? I mean, if the DNA is ginormous to begin with, maybe you could have a mechanism "bootstrapping" back to totipotent in absence of certain factors. Which would have the side effect of causing a common disease of "elf growing inside elf" whenever the factor production fails for some reason. I dunno, maybe you could put a tourniquet on an elf's arm and have another elf grow out of that?

I'm most curious as to what constantly regenerating nervous tissue would mean for psychology. Technically, it's possible for new neurons to redo the connections of an old neuron pretty closely, so memory is not necessarily lost. Thing is, after a few centuries, you would either develop horrid anterograde amnesia or retrograde amnesia. Which sounds pretty horrible (See, I dunno, Henry Molaison?). Maybe they develop a ritual system for constantly refreshing memories they want to keep, hence a need for hours-long meditation sessions every day?

[Supermikhail]

Wow, looking at the topic's title, it seems we are short of plunging into philosophical discussions on the effects of immortality on ethical values... Which would be my next point...

Anyway, it appears that the only way for elves to exist is to be a product of alien technology that has been dropped onto the planet at the beginning of time.

Regarding the skin sagging and memory loss - I've heard they aren't a programmed result of aging, but rather of a person's lack of care for themselves. If somehow in elven culture elders played an important and active role... they would be more attractive to sexual partners and play a role in diminishing the number of genetic flaws related to age.

Why am I finding the concept of elven asexual reproduction so exasperatingly cool (and hilarious)?

An afterthought: Is there already a science called elvenology?

[ArPharazon]

Regarding the skin sagging and memory loss - I've heard they aren't a programmed result of aging, but rather of a person's lack of care for themselves.

Oh they aren't programmed- I didn't mean that. Quite the opposite, you'd have to program a process to stop them. Or get regular engineered tissue transplants and stem cell injections, I suppose.

[Deimos56]

I for one like Armok's idea. Here's a swing at fleshing it out a little.

All the sentient races share a precursor, and eventually, two variants developed that were not only mortal, but possibly didn't even resemble the original group. (We really don't know what any of these races look like, bear with me.)
An ensuing civil war over whether to annihilate or simply exile these mutants (read: humans and dorfs) resulted in another split which created the elves and goblins. They may have even been similar in belief (appearance too?) until the demons developed a habit of conquering the goblins.
The remainder of the precursor race is... I don't know, they turned into kobolds and managed to lose their immortality. Because the idea of all sentient life in DF being directly descended from kobolds is hilarious.

[Arrkhal]

You could try looking at the divergent evolution of gorillas, chimps, bonobos, and humans for inspiration.

Gorillas stopped climbing trees, got bigger, and stayed largely herbivorous.

Chimps got incredibly violent and sadistic, and are probably the closest thing to DF elves we've got.

Bonobos decided that having sex is fun.

Humans moved to the open plains and savannahs, and specialized in hunting via distance-running.

Elves?  Could easily be something sort of like a combination of all 3 non-human great apes.  Herbivorous like gorillas, xenophobic like chimps, and "free love" hippies like bonobos.

[Deimos56]

Herbivorous like gorillas

Except that the elves eat other sentient races. Whenever they're at war, or just plain kill anything that's not an elf (Sorry, Cacame. Forgot.), they'll eat it... Although testing suggests they also eat plants, so they're pretty omnivorous.

[Supermikhail]

I for one like Armok's idea. Here's a swing at fleshing it out a little.

All the sentient races share a precursor, and eventually, two variants developed that were not only mortal, but possibly didn't even resemble the original group. (We really don't know what any of these races look like, bear with me.)
An ensuing civil war over whether to annihilate or simply exile these mutants (read: humans and dorfs) resulted in another split which created the elves and goblins. They may have even been similar in belief (appearance too?) until the demons developed a habit of conquering the goblins.
The remainder of the precursor race is... I don't know, they turned into kobolds and managed to lose their immortality. Because the idea of all sentient life in DF being directly descended from kobolds is hilarious.

So, in the end, we come back to DF world being a huge Forerunner experiment.
I mean, it was seeded with all these weird and immortal creatures, and then they evolved... Uh, kind of lame.
But not so lame for my purpose at least. It's some theory, and it definitely lends a base to reasonable speculations on evolution, history, psychology etc. of different races.

Aaand, I might embarrass myself, but yesterday, when I was already lying in my bed, I started thinking sci-fi, and came up with an idea for adamantine being a material (or element), that moves in time slower, that's where its unusual properties come from. And some plants can (what's the proper word?) use it in their metabolism, and elves can eat such plants, and adamantine substitutes some co-enzymes (or something) in their bodies. But I have no idea why. Just a random fantasy.