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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?"
...A talking dog..." - Gecko
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
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--
Sounds like they never read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
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.
If you gave specific examples of erroneous data or conclusions, I'd be interested
The whole book is erroneous. It's blantly obvious that evolution happens, no intelligent creationist denies that. To deny that evoultion exists is to deny that the last two thousand years of selective breeding in agriculture and livestock had any effect at all, which is obviously irrational.
They don't argue that spontaneous speciation doesn't happen, they deny evolution in general.
To satisy your Christian mind, however, I will quote parts of the book and make my arguement more specific.
The book is "Earth Science for Christian Schools"
The theme basically is to discredit science. It was written in 1979.
Quotes
"Erosion is wearing away the continents -- an example of degeneration in nature"
"Even the most powerful electron microscope are unable to let us see the inside of an atom. What scientist would pass up an opportunity to look inside a neutron or electron? However there is presently no way to see these things, and many doubt there ever will be"
"Through a rapid series of miracles, God created a mature, fully-functioning earth ready for man's use."
"The probability that the world happened by chance is less than the probability of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary forming from an explosion of a print shop"
"Evolution did not develop from modern science. Evolutionary philosophy can be traced back to the Greeks of the Sixth Century"
"Comets break up to form meteors, an example of degeneration in nature"
"A store that loses money to some of it's customers and breaks even on the rest can never nake a profit. Similarly natural processes of conservation and degeneration cannot combine to produce an improvement"
The next interesting section is on Geology.
They basically attempt to assert that the Creation, the Curse, and the Flood happened, and provide "evidence" as such. They point to the existance of "Fossil Graveyards" as proof of the Flood. They also attempt to discredit all methods of dating ancient materials. They admit their science isn't science with one like that sums up the whole book:
"The Bible is the source of truth for Christians"
They start with what the Bible says and then they shape their "science" to fit it. This is not science.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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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