The ice-age world is starting to look cosmopolitan. While Neanderthals held sway in Europe and modern humans were beginning to populate the globe, another ancient human relative lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone in a cave in southern Siberia. A comparative analysis of the genome with those of modern humans suggests that a trace of this poorly understood strand of hominin lineage survives today, but only in the genes of some Papuans and Pacific islanders.
Named after the cave that yielded the 30,000-50,000-year-old bone, the Denisova nuclear genome follows publication of the same individual's mitochondrial genome in March1. From that sequence, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues could tell little, except that the individual, now known to be female, was part of a population long diverged from humans and Neanderthals....
When the ancient genome was compared to a spectrum of modern human populations, a striking relationship emerged. Unlike most groups, Melanesians - inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia - seem to have inherited as much as one-twentieth of their DNA from Denisovan roots. This suggests that after the ancestors of today's Papuans split from other human populations and migrated east, they interbred with Denisovans, but precisely when, where and to what extent is unclear.
More answers could come from a closer look at Denisovan, human and even Neanderthal DNA. So far, conclusions about interbreeding have been drawn from a relatively small number of human genomes using conservative DNA-analysis methods, says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the Denisova analysis. "There may have been many more interactions," he says. Pääbo says it may be possible to determine roughly when humans interbred with Denisovans by examining the length of DNA segments lurking in various human genomes, with shorter segments corresponding to more shuffling of genes and a longer elapsed time.
The idea that humans and Neanderthals interbred is itself still a shocking new revelation. Now we find another distinct homonid ancestral group, whose very existence had only just been discovered. It begs the question how many other ancestor groups may be out there, waiting to be discovered. Or not. The story of human origins is getting more and more complicated.
But, of course, we're told that "evolution is just a theory", and around 40% of the American people believe humans were created 10,000 years ago or so, according to a literal reading of Genesis, despite overwhelming mountains of data to the contrary.
Evolution isn't the only example of how human knowledge is exploding on the one hand, while modern kludges of ancient narratives are used by ignorant fearmongers to keep us trapped in cul-de-sacs that are not just dead ends for human progress, but quite possibly for human existence itself. And it's not just religious fundamentalists who play this deadly game of psuedo-morally sanctioned deception.
The parade of zombie lies Paul Krugman has been writing about of late is no less rooted in long-discredited dogma that ignores a similarly vast and growing mountain of evidence to the contrary. Free market economic theories are just as divorced from reality as fundamentalist Biblical literalism, but even more dangerous to us, given their role in legitimating existing oligarchies that threaten to choke off our ability to respond to the larger problems confronting us, which are increasingly the direct result of those very oligarchies.
The world is simply more complicated than such narrow-minded and dogmatically-held narratives allow us to see. And the more tightly we cling to such narratives, the more they fail, causing deeper panic, leading us to cling even more desperately, fail even more painfully and panic even more deeply and profoundly.
This is the cycle of failure we as a nation and a culture are captured in today. We have the capacity all around us to be so much more, but the no-win narratives we've bought into blind us from seeing what's right in front of us. Instead, we see only the phantoms of false promises past.
One of the presentations at Netroots Nations that I wanted to share came from Josh Roseneau, Programs and Policy Director at the National Center for Science Education NCSE). NCSE is a really incredible organization, especially considering how small it is compared to the anti-evolutionary forces arrayed against it. But the problem it elucidates for us is our continued inability to think in terms of hegemonic warfare, the way that conservatives do. This is not a criticism of NCSE, but rather of how we failed to build a larger framework, both organizationally and conceptually.
In this presentation, Josh covers a lot of ground, but two things struck me particularly--and I've gotten some images from him on the flip to underscore them. First is that we're making progress in the teaching of evolution. The second is that evolution is becoming more and more important as a framework not just for understanding the world around us, but for developing new techonologies. A picture of an evolved antenna from NASA awaits you on the flip. This is an example of how evolution is becoming increasingly important for understanding our world in the modality of logos, the explantion of how things work in the world. I would argue that one important elements what's currently missing from our side is a similar expansion of evolutionary understanding in the modality of mythos, the explanation of meaning in the world. This is a tremendous lack on our part, that needs serious addressing, and I hope that bringing it up here can help spark more of a discussion about that.
Now, here's Josh's presentation from Netroots Nation:
Anyone who's ever seen a monkey at a zoo, or on tv knows that monkeys have a sense of humor disturbingly similar to that of boys age 3-30 or so. The similarities in behavioral genetics are so undeniable, it's hard to see how anyone could deny them. But now, science has gone quite a bit farther, and there's been quite a media buzz about it.
It's been suggested before that human laughter grew out of primate roots. But ape laughter doesn't sound like the human version. It may be rapid panting, or slower noisy breathing or a short series of grunts.
So what does that have to do with the human ha-ha?
To investigate that, Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth in England and colleagues carried out a detailed analysis of the sounds evoked by tickling three human babies and 21 orangutans, gorillas, chimps and bonobos.
After measuring 11 traits in the sound from each species, they mapped out how these sounds appeared to be related to each other. The result looked like a family tree. Significantly, that tree matched the way the species themselves are related, the scientists reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
The article goes on to note work by Jaak Panksepp of Washington State University, which goes even farther:
Panksepp's own work concludes that even rats produce a version of laughter in response to play and tickling, with chirps too high-pitched for people to hear. So he believes laughter goes even farther back in the mammalian family tree than the new paper proposes.
And Kent Jones on Rachel Maddow Thursday goes even farther still:
I was tempted by a book the other day, its title was "Why Evolution Is True". Last night, I read the short version of that book in a news story entitled, "Resistance to flu drug widespread in U.S. - study":
Virtually all cases of the most common strain of flu circulating in the United States now resist the main drug used to treat it, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Monday.
CDC researchers said 98 percent of all flu samples from the H1N1 strain were resistant to Roche AG's ... Tamiflu, a pill that can both treat flu and prevent infection. ... Last flu season, only 19 percent of H1N1 viruses tested were Tamiflu-resistant, Dr. Nila Dharan and colleagues at the CDC reported. ...
The generational split between Clinton/McCain and Obama, between boomers and post-boomers alarms me -- and I have five decades under my belt. There are too many boomers.
Here's my thesis.
1) There is an evolutionary, physiological basis for identity-based politics.
2) We use policy arguments to affirm and rationalize our identity biases.
3) We are a small minority who understand and feel the fierce urgency of now: impending overshoot and collapse. (Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?)
3) Unless the Clinton/McCain pair trips, boomers will deliver to us in the presidency another eight years of more of the same.
4) That is really unfortunate.
The Evolution of Mike Huckabee
By Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally
Ah, the ghosts of Christmas past. Here's a souvenir from the days when Mike Huckabee was a morbidly obese diabetic whose doctor gave him ten years to live if he didn't shape up.
That was four years ago. Huckabee took his doctor's warning to heart and shed more than a hundred pounds by adopting a healthier diet and
becoming a marathon runner. Now that he's half the man he was, Huckabee's a great poster boy for eating right and exercising. He's one of those rare Republicans, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's been willing to condemn the sale of junk food in schools.
He's also one of the only two Republican presidential candidates (along with John McCain) who's willing to concede that climate change is a real crisis. But as progressive as he may be on issues like the obesity epidemic and global warming, Huckabee doesn't believe in evolution. Guess he hasn't seen this video:
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