|
Genetics and Behavior
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
Latest News |
Back Issues | Get updates:
Subscribe Now
Survival of the Most Co-operative?
July 2, 2001
It may seem a silly question to ask, but a new book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan forces the question upon us. Pollan muses on the destruction of the forests of the world by human beings for agriculture, for shelter or to hunt game. What was the true beneficiary of all this? Human? Hardly, agriculture has brought us one of the most miserable and dysfunctional life-styles of any species on the planet. The only real beneficiary of this process were the grasses. As he puts it: "It makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees."
Darwin in the first chapter of Origin of Species came to much the same conclusion, but his ideas of how things evolved -- you know, the ape to man thing -- grabbed the headlines. His thoughts of how one species can manipulate its environment by acquiring traits which enable it to more effectively co-operate with another species were largely forgotten (at least by the anti-Darwinians).
Using Darwin's logic one might ask: Why are there more dogs than tigers in the world? Because dogs acquired traits that manipulated humans into loving them, wanting them close and numerous, taking them along on their own voyage toward global supremacy. In this Darwinian sense, dogs are more successful than tigers.
Pollan takes the idea further and explores how plants make use of humans for their own benefit. Take the tulip, the flower (which Mr Pollan sees as "mass-produced eye candy" whose appeal to humans led it to "world domination (in a horticultural sense). Mr Pollan speculates interestingly on why this should be, on what evolutionary advantage our love of flowers has brought us, on why we love tulips in particular as much as we do. He fills us in on the history of the tulip, from its development by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century through its place in economic catastrophe in 17th-century Holland and beyond. The most desirable (from a human point of view) alterations in tulips, apparently, are created by a viral infection that eventually sickens and weakens the plant. This would seem to violate evolutionary law, unless, as Mr Pollan reminds us, we look at matters from the virus's point of view:
"What the virus did was to insinuate itself into the relationship between people and flowers, in effect exploiting human ideas of tulip beauty in order to advance its own selfish purposes."
He uses the same sort of argument when he comes to consider genetic engineering and the humble potato. We humans have genetically modified the potato so that it produces its own insecticide and is free from most of the diseases that infect spuds in the wild. This produces potatoes that MacDonalds can use to make beautifully straight French fries. But how clever of the potato to use our desire to force us to create a world safer for potatoes.
Top of page
Height is the Secret to Longevity
July 2, 2001
Bones dating back to the Ninth Century suggest that taller people have always tended to live longer than their shorter contemporaries. Researchers from Bristol University found that the shorter the adult bones found in the grave, the more likely the person was to have had a shortened lifespan. It is certainly the case now that taller people tend to live longer -- their height is a sign that they are likely to have been better nourished in childhood, and be free from disease.
The team excavated 490 sets of adult skeletal remains from St Peter's church in Barton-on-Humber in north Lincolnshire. These dated from the mid 1800s right back to the Ninth Century AD.
The lengths of bones such as the femur, tibia and fibula, which are all indicative of total height, were measured to the millimetre. As the centuries passed, on average the bones increased in length. The length of the radius -- a bone in the arm -- increased by roughly 0.2cm every 200 years.
The age of the person at death was calculated by looking for subtle changes in the arrangement of the pubic bones. They found that 55% of the men, and 73% of the women died before the age of 45 -- and 39% of the men, and 56% of the women had not reached 30 years of age.
Almost universally, as bone length increased, the risk of that person having died before 30 decreased. Longer-boned, and by implication, taller, people tended to be more durable. It suggests that health and nutrition in childhood are, and remain, key factors in determining health for a lifetime.
The researchers pointed out that being short may well have increased the risk, for women, of dying in childbirth. However, they added: "Short bones, it would appear, have always been a marker of a short life."
I think I've got it: the secret of a long life it to be tall and to go to church often
(see "Religious Observance Leads to Longer Life") and live in Okinawa
(see "How to Live Longer!") I am six feet tall and give workshops in numerous churches -- and I plan to live to age 111! Recent research has also shown that tall men are seen as more attractive and produce more offspring. Please note that our Repatterning Movement (RPM) exercises have been shown to make people taller,
RPM audio tapes are on sale now ! BM
Read more in the BBC News
Top of page
'Stop Cloning Now' Warns Expert
May 22, 2001
Proposals to clone large numbers of farm animals to produce supermarket milk and meat should only be sanctioned when cloners have improved their record on animal welfare.
Ian Wilmut, who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep, says it is vital that large-scale, controlled farm trials of cattle cloning are carried out before any commercial production of cloned meat and dairy food is allowed. "If companies start marketing this food and there are problems it will bring the whole technology into disrepute," he told the New Scientist.
Wilmut says the cattle cloners "ought to be making systematic comparisons between clones and animals produced by embryo transfer, looking not just at their milk yield but also their health and lifespan." He also says that in the wake of the genetically modified food furore, cloners will have to prove to a sceptical public that food from clones and their offspring is just as safe and nutritious as conventionally produced food. Even small imbalances in hormones, proteins and fat levels could alter the quality and even safety of meat and milk.
The warning comes as cattle cloners continue to uncover evidence of severe pregnancy complications and defects caused by cloning. The current list includes dramatically oversized calves, enlarged tongues, squashed faces, intestinal blockages, immune deficiences and diabetes, says Jim Robl of the Massachusetts company Hematech.
Even cloned animals that look healthy often have subtle defects or weird physiologies that defy the textbooks. Herds of identical cloned animals would be a "welfare disaster", says Joyce D'Silva of Compassion in World Farming. "There would be a huge loss of genetic diversity with unforeseeable results in terms of animal illness."
The Wisconsin cloning company Infigen says it has amassed a huge database of blood tests from its surviving cloned cows. "The data suggested to the vets that some of them should be dead," says Infigen's Michael Bishop.
Meanwhile, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Ryuzo Yanagimachi is looking in detail at the activities of genes inside cloned mice. In light of the unpublished work, he says "all cloned babies have some sort of errors."
Britain's Food Standards Agency says that in Europe cloned meat and milk would, like GM produce, be classed as novel foods so sellers would need a special licence to market them. Unlike GM foods, though, there is as yet no legal requirement for cloned produce to be labelled. Nor is any special labelling of cloned meat or milk required in the USA.
And they want to clone humans? They're creating monsters in their cloning now! Sooner or later humanity has to say that because a thing can be done does not mean it ought to be done. BM
Top of page
Kansas Allows the Teaching of Evolution
February 15, 2001
It is reported in New Scientist and many other publications that Kansas has once again permitted the teaching of evolution in its schools.
Last year a group of fundamentalist Christians got themselves elected to the Kansas School Board and enacted a statewide prohibition on the teaching of Charles Darwin's theories. With a sigh of relief heard around the world, that has now been overturned by a newly-elected Board.
However the war is not over. The education committee of the Ohio legislature has been considering a bill requiring evidence against evolution to also be taught. And parents in Charleston, West Virginia have launched a complaint to the county school board that textbooks that teach evolution are "false and fraudulent".
Eugenie Scott, of the National Center for Science Education in Berkeley, California fears renewed opportunities for creationists under the new government of George W. Bush. Bush's campaign favored programs to partially privatize public schools, or to give private schools tax money. Such schools, fears Scott, might then sidestep US laws separating church and state, which have until now blocked efforts to mandate the teaching of creationism in US public schools.
Top of page
Was Methuselah Short, Squat and Fit?
February 10, 2001
Methuselah, so the bible and the famous song from Porgy & Bess stated, lived 500 years. But what if all humans had been designed to live beyond age 100 and remain free of many of the diseases and disorders associated with aging? We might have looked like short, stout elves. This conclusion may be drawn from illustrations that accompany the article, "If Humans Were Built to Last," by UIC Professor of Biostatistics S. Jay Olshansky in the UIC School of Public Health and his colleagues in the March 2001 issue of the magazine Scientific American.
Our bodies evolved to survive long enough to reproduce and raise our young, says Professor Olshansky, a noted demographer of aging. Human ingenuity has made it possible for us to extend our lives well past our reproductive years.
The article outlines design 'flaws' that lead to bodily malfunctions as we age, and some hypothetical, evolutionary design 'fixes' that would allow us to enjoy good health well into our postreproductive years.
For example, some of the extended-use features might include rewired eyes, bigger ears that are mobile, a curved neck, forward-tilting upper torso, extra-padded joints, larger bones and muscles, shorter limbs and stature and backward-bending knees. Walking upright probably contributed to human intelligence and an expanded foraging range, the authors note, but at the price of aging-related disorders, including slipped disks, lower back pain and worn-out joints. Where our heads are concerned, the authors cite the weak link between the optic nerve and retina, which is prone to detaching after decades of use, fragile hair cells in our ears leading to hearing loss, and a common passageway for food and air, raising the risk of inhaling food or drink as muscle tone decreases with age.
Then, there are what the authors refer to as 'plumbing problems' in males, these problems include a urethra prone to constriction by an enlarged prostate that may obstruct the flow of urine, and in females, bladder and pelvic-floor muscles and ligaments that weaken with time and multiple pregnancies, which may lead to incontinence.
Okay, Evolution, fix that!
Reported in the Daily University Science News
Top of page
Out of Australia
January 12, 2001
The accepted wisdom in paleontology circles is that all existing humans owe their origins to a single 'Eve' who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Her descendants, they contend, migrated from their home continent and spread throughout the world supplanting, but not interbreeding with, populations of earlier hominids such as homo erectus and Neanderthal Man. Studies of mitochondrial DNA (which is transmitted only from female parents) showed, they believed, that this theory was a proven fact.
However that has all now been thrown into question. A study was made of DNA extracted from a 60,000 year old Australian skeleton known as Mungo Man. What was found was that the mtDNA of Mungo was quite different to that of the hypothetical Eve. The finding was widely reported on January 9th in journals such as Science, BBC News and New Scientist.
The research was conducted by a team led by Dr Alan Thorne, of the Australian National University. The Mungo researchers contend that the DNA sequences isolated from Mungo Man's bones show him to have a genetic lineage that is both older and distinct from the African line. Given the undoubted modern appearance of Mungo Man, they argue, major doubt must now be cast on the so-called "Out of Africa" theory.
Other 'experts' who have based their reputations on the original theory are, not unnaturally, furious and are calling for more studies to be done. As evolutionary psychologists, we await the outcome with great interest.
Funnily enough I remember talking to the great Australian teller of Aboriginal Tales Bill Harney many years ago. According to him the Aborigines firmly believed that human beings originated in Australia. Could they be right after all? BM
Top of page
Out of Germany?
February 1, 2001
In our last edition we broke the (paelontologically speaking) earth-shattering news that modern humans might not have originated in Africa, as received wisdom had it, but may have arisen as a result of interbreeding between several separate sub-species who co-existed from 200,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Further evidence for this new paradigm was published in the latest edition of Scientific American. Following on the Australian, Mungo man, findings scientists are now having a second look at the mtDNA extracted from Neanderthal remains.
Commenting on the latest findings, John H. Relethford of the State University of New York at Oneonta says the absence of Neanderthal mtDNA in living humans does not rule out the possibility that they contributed to our gene pool.
Indeed a recent study headed by Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan suggested that anatomically early modern humans had more in common with Neanderthal than with, say, modern people from the Near East.
Early modern specimens from Central Europe also display Neanderthal traits, and the early modern Australians showed affinities to archaic Homo sapiens from Indonesia. "These features amount to a smoking gun for continuity within these regions," says team member John Hawks of the University of Utah.
"Ancient humans shared genes and behaviors across wide regions of the world, and were not rendered extinct by one 'lucky group' that later evolved into us," according to their report in the January 12th edition of Science. Wolpoff asserts: "the fossils clearly show that more than one ancient group survived and thrived." Eventually, multiregionalists argue, Neanderthals and other archaic humans as entities disappeared through interbreeding.
Stay tuned, like so many dinosaurs; it'll be out of the badlands of Montana next.
Read about this debate on the Scientific American and related links
Top of page
Out of China
February 21, 2001
I think we've got the idea: homo sapiens -- us -- did not evolve in Africa and spread to the rest of the world. Rather h. sapiens evolved from h. erectus independently in a number of places.
The latest evidence comes from China with fresh investigation into the age of a couple of 600,000-year-old h. erectus skeletons (a male and a female) called 'Nanjiing Man'. Chinese and Australian scientists claim that the fossils are old enough so that there would have been sufficient time for the development of h. sapiens to happen in isolation. Modern Asians, they claim, are descended from local populations of h. erectus and not from h. sapiens migrants from Africa.
I am still waiting for Out of the Badlands of Montana! BM
Top of page
Children of the Ice Age
February 1, 2001
About two million years ago our ancestors left the cosy food-rich rain forest to stake their future on the savannah. On the face of it, a very stupid thing for them to do. Its long been known that one of the determining factors was the shrinking of the forest due to drier and cooler times associated with the ice age.
But how much colder was it? The assumption, never very satisfactory, was that the cooling amounted to a few degrees centigrade. However now researchers examining deep-sea sediments off the coast of Namibia, West Africa, have found evidence of a global cooling of 10 degrees Celsius -- five times greater than was previously believed.
The discovery adds weight to the theory that climate change played a significant part in the evolution of early humans. Dr Jeremy Marlow, of Newcastle University's Department of Fossil Fuels and Environmental Geochemistry, who led the team of English, American and German scientists, said: "There have been arguments for many years about whether the emergence of our ancestors was linked to climate change. By looking at the molecular fossils of microscopic marine algae, we began to discover evidence of a 10-degree fall in temperature in the region of Africa where much of the early human fossil evidence has been discovered. We didn't believe it at first, but further tests kept producing similar results until we had to conclude that temperatures really had decreased so dramatically."
The scientists, from the Universities of Newcastle, Durham, California and Bremen, found that cooling was particularly rapid about 2 million years ago -- at the time when the first ancestors of modern humans emerged in sub-tropical southern Africa.
Reported in the Daily University Science News
Top of page
Stone Age Rock Music
October 30, 2000
A professor of music from Cambridge University, UK, theorizes that many stone artefacts previously thought to be tools could well be the earliest known musical instruments. The researcher has found that a group of flint implements with a distinctive wear pattern, when arranged like a "stone glockenspiel", produced a pleasant melody when struck.
Scientists who study the development of the human mind agree. Studies show that babies respond to music so early in their lives that the ability to appreciate music must be innate. Stone Age man may well have been able to communicate through rhythm and music before the development of language.
Find out more about this study on BBC News
Top of page
RELATED LINKS
Check our event schedule for workshops and seminars.
About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
Do you like our site? Recommend this page to a friend!
|
