Comparative ages

[hallenhe]

People talk about their dogs in terms of "dog years" and "people years", and I've heard 7 dog years to one people-year (with occasional variants, such as the first year of the dog's life is worth 14 years, or something like that). With the understanding that this is in no way a scientific formulation, just some rough approximations, I'd like to propose the cham year. From what I've seen in terms of development and lifespan (5.5 - 7 years for a male panther, reaching full color potential at ~ 18 months), it looks like 12 (male, panther) cham years to one people year/solar year, or approximately one cham year every month. Does that sound vaguely reasonable? Am I just being loony?

 

[Chameleoco]

What a good thread!? I think that sounds very reasonable!

 

[LittleLionLover]

To prove such a theory you'd have to take a look at things on a cellular level. You see, everything ages as time passes, as days become months and eventually years. But on a cellular level it's a completely different story. Cells in the body are constantly replicating and dividing and changing, creating new cells,and carrying on their life processes until they eventually die. It's the rate at which cells divide and change that determines how quickly an organism deteriorates.

Take for example dogs and humans. Dogs age much more quickly than we do, because, their cells divide at a rate much faster than ours, therefore they become older quicker.

Im sure that there's much more to it, and it would take some extensive reasearch, this is simply a broad perspective of things. This was a very reasonable question by the way so your not a looney hope this gave you some insight.
-Jaz

 

[GooglezNvincent]

I would def. agree thats a good approximation!

 

[hallenhe]

To prove such a theory you'd have to take a look at things on a cellular level. You see, everything ages as time passes, as days become months and eventually years. But on a cellular level it's a completely different story. Cells in the body are constantly replicating and dividing and changing, creating new cells,and carrying on their life processes until they eventually die. It's the rate at which cells divide and change that determines how quickly an organism deteriorates.

I agree; that's why I added the qualifier that this was by no means scientific. I suspect that if we were to try to be rigorous about it, we might hit some major snags brought about by the difference in reptiles and mammals (e.g., in mammals there have been studies correlating lifespan and aging with number of heartbeats and other metabolic indicators, which also correlate roughly with size, while chameleons and other herps are going to have drastically different heartrates and metabolisms than mammals).
However, while I do technically have the means to do it, I think I'll let Thaxter be, and not go sampling his chromosomes to look at teleomere length.