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Mutant Gene Responsible for Speech?
An anonymous submitter writes: "A new study published in Nature reports that humans developed speech and language 200,000 years ago as a result of gene mutation. Washington Post story with more background. The mutation in the FOXP2 gene allowed humans greater control over their mouth and throat muscles, and gave them the ability to produce new sounds. It was apparently such an advantageous mutation that it quickly swept through the human population (10,000 - 20,000 years) almost entirely wiping out earlier versions. This development seems to also match up closely with the time period humans began developing culture. Researchers next want to try altering the gene in mice to see what happens, although they suspect there are many other genes involved. So, how long until I can get a talking dog?"
Now those "Would you eat me if I talked?" Greenpeace ads will actually be reality. Goodbye Big Mac :( - s200.org
...A talking dog..." - Gecko
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
...isn't evolution based on genes mutating? Why is this such a surprise?
They had a show on there about human evolution abouta month ago. The chick said that the reason humans can speak is because we can swim. Being ablt to hold our breath and control our breathing in gerneal allows us to controll the air over the vocal chords. She seems to believe that way back when we were semi-aquatic monkeys or something. Can't say I totaly disagree
Isn't that exactly evolution at work?
Aren't we all what we are because of a series of accidental gene mutations?
Parrots can make most of the sounds that humans can make ( and then some). Does that mean parrots can "speak" like humans, or develop a culture? I don't think the ability to make sounds has anything to do with culture.
...when speech is about to be ruled a DRM circumvention device under the DCMA.
I mean....uh.....::grunt::::grunt:::
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
They had better not give this to an ape! Or he'll start talking and become super intelligent and start rallying the Earth's apes under his super power and then take over human kind only to establish a new ape government onto of a nuclear wasted planet so that some astronaut sent up and forgotten can wake up on this new Earth and find the broken statue and fall to his knees a scream...
This gene:
/. headline is misleading. It is suspected that this mutation in the FOXP2 gene is responsible for language development and not necessarily speech. Some birds can "speak" but they do not have language abilities.
may have played a central role in the development of modern humans' ability to speak
could have given them a critical advantage
may at least partly explain why humans can speak and animals cannot
The
The confusing part to me is the fact that gorillas obviously have language ability, as seen in Koko, a gorilla that is able sign. So the mutation in this gene does not determine whether a species has the capacity for language or not, perhaps it only determines the proficiency in language.
The future isn't what it used to be.
>Next they find the gene for understanding math
Well they might.
If your assumption were true, it would be possible, with enough patience and care, to teach a chimp to talk and be just like us, so the chimp could go to school, get a job, and say, run slashdot. This is clearly not the case despite more and more findings that chimps have really advanced mental capabilities.
Of course we could not have gone from mischevious banana eaters to programmers just like that. Chimps have nearly all the abilities. But they are lacking some crucial genes. Even if those only are regulatory genes.
And those genes are to be found, logically, within the fraction of a 100th percent that separates us from them.
However the recently discovered genes don't account for speech. You can use sign language!
Being able to produce sounds is not enough, otherwise parrots, as clever as they may be, could also go to school and get a job.
So the gene(s) that have just been found are not the whole story. Plenty of genes are sure required for speech, including chimp legacy ones.
As far as culture is concerned, it's the other way round. You can't retain culture if you haven't got the intellectual mechanisms to understand / store / re-phrase. So we have culture because we have speech. No the other way round.
-T
PS. Sign me up for a talking dog too.
I wonder if you read the article?
:)
No halfway modern geneticist nowadays believes that there is a single gene responsible for more than the most simple of traits. And I had the impression that the Nature article linked from this story expresses that view quite clearly with statements like:
Finding one gene is like finding one part of a car. It looks useful, as though it's part of a larger mechanism. But we don't know what it does, what other parts it interacts with, or what the whole vehicle looks like. "It's an unbelievably complex system, and we've got one tiny glimpse," says Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
A very nice explanation on the limited usefulness of trying to assign "the" function for a particular gene was proposed in the book The "Collapse of Chaos : Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, a molecular biologist and a mathematician, respectively.
In general, it is easy to remove one part from a network of interacting parts, and observe the mechanism breaking down. Naively, these parts are then called the "key regulators" of this or that phenomenon, be it speech or whatever. Only lengthy experiments will then reveal the whole underlying mechanism maybe.
The stance that you attribute to geneticists, that they expect simplistic, monogenetic solutions to complex problems is actually more caused by the press (not only laymen's journals, btw), which always go for a snappy headline without "maybe" or "can be a part of a complex mechanism".
just my 2 centimorgans
It was apparently such an advantageous mutation that it quickly swept through the human population (10,000 - 20,000 years) almost entirely wiping out earlier versions
Realize that what we're saying here is that the individuals who had this mutation had a reproductive advantage over others. Since making new sounds doesn't increase the number of live births per "litter", this finding inevitably means that smooth-talking cavemen got all the girls.
Clearly, it must be that this mutation allowed the creation of the earliest dating technology: the pick up line.
Doubtless, such old pick up lines as "Hey, baby! Want to come back to my cave and see my bison paintings?" date back to this early period and have been passed down to us through the ages.
Now those "Would you eat me if I talked?" Greenpeace ads will actually be reality. Goodbye Big Mac :( - s200.org
Best Deep Thought Ever:
"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason." - Jack Handey
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Talking dog: "Homer, find your soul mate!"
Homer: "Wait, there's no such thing as a talking dog!"
Talking dog: "Arf arf!"
Homer: "Damn straight!"
It's even possible that complete languages existed before humans were able to speak. American Sign Language is an example of a language with its own complete, unique grammar and morphology, which does not make use of speech. (See Pinker's book again.) Its existence supports the hypothesis that the parts of the brain responsible for language can operate independently of the parts that co-ordinate speech. In summary, there is a lot more to language than co-ordinating the muscles of the mouth and throat.
A couple years back, I read an interesting article about this parrot point. It can very well go beyond mimicry.
Couldn't find the original SciAm article, but this looks like an interview with the same researcher. read this.
Now, I believe this parrot is pretty old, and has been trained for years by Ms. Pepperberg. But Alex (the parrot) isn't just responding on cue, it is doing some abstract and symbolic thought.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I wrote a paper on this year before last. There are quite a few PhD's in cognitive science and cognitive ethology who think chimps, dogs, and others are communicating quite well. They'll tell you it's simply a matter of degree of language skills, not "yes these animals have it" or "no they don't".
No primate has signed a sentence longer than 3 signs, it is true. But hand signs aren't the only thing they're testing. There's another group of chimp researchers who use a button pushing mechanism.
Anyhow, the point is, one dumb chimp doesn't collapse the theory. It's far more compelling to me that these high level animals could understand some basic emotions and drives and assign a label for those concepts than to accept that they are complete automata, lacking comprehension of any ability.
So, I demand more proof than a one-off experiment with one chimp to prove the research is off-base.
For reference, you can read my paper here: http://arrakeen.dynodns.net/paper.pdf
-l
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Evolutionary biology suggests that the original claim in the article is not unfounded...
Look at Susan Blackmore's _The_Meme_Machine_, or _The_Mating_Mind_ by Geoffrey Miller for instance. Essentially, the claim is that higher vocal capacity would allow higher communication abilities. That is a major advantage, which would explain killing off/out-reproducing the non-mutants. But then, over the course of the next say...10k years, the advantages of being able to communicate more clearly become more and more pronounced...hence an arms race for clarity of communication--once the mouth works well enough, then the brain evolution towards language (Pinker's stuff is interesting here) has a reasonable chance of following.
Vocal cords + Big brains drive evolution of culture, and of the mental capability to run slashdot.
--K
"Gourmet meals from out of the trash and sniffing crotches would probably also become popular conversation topics."
Not to mention kvetching about being neutered. "Yeah, you wanna try it boss? Better not let me catch you comin' out of the shower, ya know what I mean?"
Evolved speech is one thing but how about music? Here is a few little questions for the evolutionary crowd.
What is it about appreciating music that is evolutionary important? Does loving music make one more fit for survival? If not, where are the music-insensitive humanoid species? Why were they wiped out if they ever existed? Was it war? Di the music lovers kill off the others? Is there something about a mutated music-loving gene that makes some of us violent and want to kill off non-music lovers?
If Evolution is possible, then where are the fossils from all of the missing links between evolutionary stages? That would be proof. Where is it? Am I to believe that every evolutionary stage between Entity A and Entity B died without leaving a single fossil? And if macro-evolution is possible, then why isn?t each Entity on the face of our super-ancient planet it its own stage of evolution. Isn?t it an amazing coincidence that all of humanity is on the same level of evolution? Shouldn?t at least some of us be a few millennia behind others? And primitive cultures don?t apply, I am talking physical, not social development.
Archaeopteryx is a bird with teeth and a lizard-like tail. That sounds like an intermediate between evolutionary stages to me. Also, a very small percentage of animals are fossilized, and a smaller percentage of that have been discovered so far. Intermediate stages are rarer still, considering Gould's punctuated equalibrium. So it isn't unusual that we don't have a complete record of every developmental stage of an animals evolutionary development.
As for humans being at different stages of evolution, until recently, (30,000 years ago) that was the case. But humans at our stage killed or out-competed the rest. Because that's the way evolution works. Survival of the fitest.
I'm not sure what you meant about each Entity being at its own stage of evolution. Evolution isn't like a pre-planned route with certain pre-planned stages to reach the "top stage" or anything like that. Essentially the rule is "Whatever survives survives." Simple as that. You need a population of a certain size with genes similar enough so that they can reproduce with each other. Scientist call them "species".
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
People using this argument aren't looking for missing links, they are looking for a frigging family tree.
And people who use this argument don't understand how unlikely fossilisation is. To be fossilised an animal not only had to die (a fairly likely occurence), it had to die in such a way that it's bones weren't exposed to the elements, scavengers, bacteria etc. The chances are one in millions if not billions. So yes, it's quite likely a whole group of animals lived and died without leaving a single identifiable fossil. And I think that religion exists because most people can't believe that life is as pointless as it is. You live, you breed (maybe), you die. Deal with it. No comment necessary I don't think. Ahhh, you've hit on something that real science has gone to work on. There's quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the great flood actually happened. Except it wasn't a world wide disaster, it didn't even happen to the ancestors of the Jews and there was no ark. It is most likely the flooding of the Black Sea after the last ice age. When all the ice melted, sea levels rose which left the black sea (which was then fresh water) seperated from the Mediterainian sea by a high dam of mountains. Eventually these gave way and flooded the black sea. The people who fled this kept the stories and became the Assyrians. The Jews got the story from them.Not exactly a world wide disaster but a good example of how an actual event becomes "biblical".
That is not research. Research requires you come up with a theory that fits with the evidence and then find more evidence to see if it's correct. If it's not then you throw out the theory and find a new one that better fits with the evidence. Christian "Science" works on the presumption that the bible is correct and then finds evidence to "prove" it. Thing is you can prove anything correct if you ignore enough of the evidence. No, something somebody wrote in a book a couple of thousand years ago cannot explain away the massive body of evidence to support evolution.Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.