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Well I'll Be A Monkey's Uncle
killproc writes "A new report suggests that interbreeding between humans and chimpanzees happened a lot more recently than was previously thought. The report, published in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, estimates that final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago."
"The Nature paper joins a wave of work showing that the lines between species are hazy ..."
This is the critical point that creationists who blather on about "macroevolution vs. microevolution" (a distinction without a difference) and "nobody has ever observed a speciation event" (just not true) willfully miss. Species lines are imposed by observers after the fact; they are not inherent in the nature of living organisms.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What this shows is that there was likely interbreeding between the ancestor line of humans and the ancestor line of chimpanzees. Unfortunately, all the headlines I've read skip that distinction and dive right into "humans and chimps interbred." They were not either modern humans or modern champanzees, and were likely much closer in genetics and appearance than we are to modern chimps, even though even now we are very close genetically after 5 million years of divergence.
I think I'll stop here.
What a great way to start off the day with a laugh!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
That being said, I don't think we descended from chimps. I've made a rather lengthy arguement about this before and I'm not sure I totally want to get into again, but I just don't believe humans came from chimps.
Dude, nobody thinks humans are descended from chimps. Chimps and Humans have a common ancestor (and now the divergence line is a little more blurred).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
A small zoo acquires a rare gorilla, who quickly becomes agitated. The zookeeper determines that the female ape is in heat, but there are no male apes available for mating.
The zookeeper approaches Rob with a proposition. "Would you be willing to have sex with this gorilla for $500?" he asks.
Rob accepts the offer, but only on three conditions: "First, I don't want to have to kiss her. And second, you can never tell anyone about this." The zookeeper agrees to the conditions and asks about the third.
"Well," says Rob, "I'm gonna need another week to come up with the $500."
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I hate to quibble, but the summary is not quite right. It isn't like there were chimpanzees, humans evolved "up" from chimpanzees, and the chimpanzees remained the same. This isn't how evolution works. What happened was that a single species broke into two separate species. Both species continued to change and evolve. A chimpanzee has done just as much "evolving" as a human has, it just went in a different direction. Whatever the case though, if you were to compare a chimpanzee ancestor to a human and a modern chimp, you would find that you are looking at three very different species.
I am not saying that human evolution isn't teh pwn, but keep in mind that things don't "branch" like in a tree where the original branch remains. When things branch they move off in different directions and the original species before the branch is lost.
Jeepers! For someone who said: I've made a rather lengthy arguement about this before and I'm not sure I totally want to get into again, you do seem to want to get into it again!
You post seems to have the base assumption that the 'goal' (or destination perhaps) of evolution is to produce humans (or at least culture/art/language).
That aint the case.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
You mistake in the way you think about selection.
There is no 'law of evolution' kind of thing that says that a species will involve into something more complex or intelligent.
Natural selection simply works because a certain species is capable to stay in existence.
Sometimes being stupid and just breed is more efficient than being intelligent.
Ants have a complex structure which allows them to spread very efficiently. Knowing how to paint for some reason wasn't needed for them to spread widely and thus such an feature would only result in extra lugage to carry around.
Maybe out species at some point managed to stay alive longer by being a little bit more creative than our cousins. That might have been an factor that resulted in more offspring.
Jeroen
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Abstraction is a strong part of the process used in learning. View a set of data, create an abstract theory. Humans happen to be better at it than most animals.
Art is simply one way of expressing these abstractions. Same thing with God - you see a bunch of seemingly miraculous things happening... something must be acting to cause those miracles. Ergo, God.
As to ants vs. humans, well, ants don't have the same needs we do because all ants are moderately simple. They just don't have the neuron mass to act independently. Nor is it likely for them to evolve the neuron mass, because of structural issues re: exoskeletons.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Let's not forget that Chimps have been evolving along the way as well - I highly doubt that they were the same 4.5-6.3M years ago as they are now, so *our ancenstors* were doing it with *their ancestors*, not with "chimps" per se.
Well, as a bioinformaticist who has been following this work for a while (both the first and last authors, along with most of the others present at our weekly group meeting), I'd say that the work isn't sloppy.
It is controversial, as it doesn't match with the fossil record. But if you knew the guys involved (and the internal vetting process at the Broad), you'd understand that this work has gone through massive peer review by some of the most gifted individuals in genetics I've seen.
I'd guess that John Hawks isn't a genetics specialist (Just as David isn't an anthropologist), so when data starts conflicting, it's hard for anyone to give ground. I think it's exciting, because it allows for more experiments to be divised on both ends, and for more clarification to be arrived.
In other words, the scientific process.
Just to agree with you, and add a little bit: in general, science doesn't need to explain the entire story. In fact, science has a long history of concentrating on the things it can explain, and ignoring the things that it cannot. For example, when Newton's law of gravity came out, there was a lot of controversy as to how objects could interact with each other at a distance, about which Newton's law of gravity says nothing. But how can you argue with it? It is so powerful, and so elegant, it must be getting part of the story right, so to speak. It wasn't until 200 years later, with Einstein, that physics had anything interesting to say about how those objects interacted with each other at a distance. Similarly, there seem to be a lot of big, important questions left in the evolution of the human species. It does seem quite little strange to understand evolutionary pressures that allowed us to carry food on the savannas also allowing us to go to the moon, or paint the Mona Lisa. Maybe there is more to the story then. But that doesn't need to mean that the part of the story we do have is wrong.
The point is specialization. Humans, for whatever reason, specialized in tool use as a means for survival. We learned to see the environment as something to be manipulated. Abstract thought became an advantage, so it prospered in our evolution, and we adapted to it. Art is an outgrowth of abstract thought and tool use. Doesn't serve any purpose really, it just happens to be a side-effect of the kind of brain that could produce gunpowder.
Ants, on the other hand, are pretty near perfect. They are utterly dominant in their niche, amazingly successful. The ongoing ant-ian evolution involves coming up with new and exciting ways to be dominant in their niche. Better venom, better reproductive turnaround, better coordination, ability to survive in other environments. The ability to create art is hilariously useless to them. Advanced cognition is hilariously useless. Can you imagine the worker ants going on strick because they don't get enough nectar, or get sent into too many hazardous situations? Any ant that started evolving in that direction would be less fit to live, an evolutionary flop.
Intelligence is not the end-all be-all in evolution. Why are chimps not intelligent artisans like us? Maybe because they climb trees better than we do. Why not? They didn't need to pick up tool use, because they could out-climb all their predators, whereas we had to have a big ass club up in the tree with us because panthers could climb better.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I also happen to think that as we investigate more and more pairs of close species, we will find this is not at all an uncommon pattern. There are lots of hybrids out there in nature, and you can be sure that genes make it across "species boundaries" with some regularity for quite a while.
One final note to destroy my credibility. Is anyone surpised that people had sex with chimps? (Okay, proto-humans with proto-chimps) We are a couple of horny species. I don't know too much about chimp sexual habits, but we humans sure are a kinky bunch to boot.
Most exciting phrase in science: not "Eureka!" but "Hmm... That's funny..." -Asimov (abridged for \. limits)
Exactly. The need to create controversy between creationism and evolution only arises when one places limits and assumptions upon God's abilities.
We look so much like monkeys, we must have fucked them at some point. Brilliant science! An epiphany struck over a pint of Guinness no doubt.
Psst... It's called sexual selection, an often underestimated evolutionary pressure. Lots of artsy things that animals do (humpback whales singing, birds/insects constructing way too elaborate nests to impress a mate, bowerbirds showing off their collections of flowers and junk) are to attract the opposite sex.
Ok, well, then the answer is simple: they're lying.
First of all, by all respects, positive mutations in practice DO happen, and indeed one can point to any number of recent examples just in humans, just recently. Tetrachromaticism in women is recent. So is the immunity to the negative effects of LDH cholesterol developed in a single man in Italy (creating descendants among whom heart disease and strokes are vanishingly shockingly rare).
Second of all, think about it logically. Mutation is random. That means that anything it can do, it can undo. So if it can have bad effects, then it can also have good effects (for instance, if one mutation breaks something by changing a T to an A, then the next mutation can change the A back to a T, thus having a positive effect).
Thirdly, creationists generally also admit that mutations can cause observeable variations in a species: longer beaks, shorter legs, etc. But any of these can have positive effects, so they've just unknowingly admitted to something they elsewhere deny.
Finally, talking about mutation and function in this way is itself misinformed. Whether or not a mutation is "beneficial" or not depends a great deal on context. A particular mutation can have a negative effect in one context, and a positive effect in another one. There are certainly mutations that very clearly are better or worse than what came before in all contexts, but by and large there is no objective measure of whether a mutation is beneficial, neutral, or positive. It all depends on a lot of other factors and how it plays out.
There's a lot of bad science that has passed through peer review . . .
Granted, Nature is a very respected journal, but just because things are peer reviewed doesn't make them fact. Interesting ideas, right or not, are sometimes published to get more minds thinking on the problem. In a case like this, I'm sure this will stir things up a bit.
Microevolution has, obviously, been observed and validated.
So, just where does 'microevolution' stop and what stops it precisely? Does DNA know when to stop changing too much? This isn't a blow to Creationists, it is a blow to Evolution, because, yet again, they've been proven wrong on a supposed human ancestor
If the fact that science is a dynamic process and biology is a highly dynamic field offends you please quit the Internet and go live in a cave. Science doesn't pretend to get the answers right the first time or even ever have the right answers ever.
What kind of alternative are you proposing exactly? We should give up and just shrug our shoulders and go, "phew, that's too difficult to grok, let's just stick to the first thing we come up with and go home."
I don't get you creationist. You obviously don't like science. Why even bother with the pretence of being scientific?
1. Non-human animals evolved into their present forms and were not created as-is by some magical force.
2. At no point did a non-human species evolve into humanity.
3. Humans exist.
We can only conclude that you believe that at some point in the past, humans came into being by the same sort of process that brought the first single-celled animals into being, whether that process was a biochemical accident in the primordial soup or the fiat of a magical being. Given those 2 choices, I think the Creationists have a much more plausible story of where humans came from, since you're never going to convince me a bolt of lightning hit some collection of random proteins and created a fully-formed human capable of art and culture. Although it also seems a lot more likely that your second premise is flawed.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Art's value in an early society would be the capacity to express, prior to any scientific method or reasoned understanding of that capacity, ideas that could not be framed using early simple language alone. The later discovery that certain art is pleasing to our visual or auditory senses is not the advantage, but a refinement on the advantage I get from the very practical ability to discuss something in detail without actually standing next to it.
You and I are in a small tribe. I need to describe to you how to stalk a mammoth, and I can't explain it while we're actually dodging the mammoth's tusks. Everything in my life and your life we've learned by watching other people do and by our own painful trial and error, so either you come along on the hunt but can't participate the first time, or I have to coach you in advance. We need every hand we can get to have a chance of bringing these monsters down, so I will coach you, but I don't have military tactical theory, survey maps, anatomy books, video recordings of other hunts, watches, geometry, more than two dozen words, or even a hard count of how many spears it will take to kill a mammoth.
I make a mark on a stone to be the mammoth, and I draw marks to be you, and I indicate with my hands how you are to move and when it is best to throw your spear. I do this in plain sight of the tribe, so even children too young to come on the hunt can see how it is done. Not everyone will understand right away, but I will do it before every hunt, again and again. I'm not good at describing it and you're not smart enough to get even 25% of what I'm saying. However, if this gives us even a slightly improved chance of being successful, or more likely reduces the number of our fellow tribesmen I lose to the mammoth by even one, then our tribe has a huge advantage in those situations where the extra tribesmen becomes useful in a communal tribe: all labor is divided by the total number of hands. That one preserved tribesman becomes one less woman I have to send out to hunt, which is one more who will likely live long enough to breed one more child, and in the tough times, the extra people are the difference between our small tribe breeding and inbreeding. My simple, practical 'art' has given us a non-inherited but biologically meaningful advantage.
If our early social nature was expressed in no other way than 'human see, human do' then being able to see a representation of a thing as the thing itself for the purpose of discussion is both an emergent property of our neurological biology and the most significant adaptation in our cultural history, as we can have no continuous culture without it.
I'm going to turn the tables on you a bit with a later cultural adaptation. Between the above and what's next you can infer which parts of our heritage are biological and which are social, sometimes you can make these inferences in a testable way, but I'll leave it to you to learn the science.
Our tribe is fat and happy, but there's other tribes near our territory and resources won't hold out forever. Thanks to my aggressive nature, I stay in charge of the tribe by being pretty much the most dangerous, and I have my brother and a few cousins to back me up. Now when I go to raid the next tribe over to take their women, I normally have to leave my brother or two of my cousins behind to keep the women I took last week from running off. I need more spears against the enemy, but I don't want to risk losing women.
So I tell a lie about the other tribe I was in before this one. I draw the angry face of a mammoth, and say how a few women ran off when the men were gone, and an angry mammoth stomped all over the children who had been left behind. My lie is ridiculous, but since 75% of my tribe is functionally retarded by modern standards, and the picture's pretty angry looking, now I only have to leave one cousin behind instead of two. We can fight better, and will be more successful taking women (or whatever else we want). More valuable is that the extra spears and our
-jpowers
I was using the term chaos as in chaos theory which describes the behavior of nonlinear dynamic systems. Random truly is the wrong word, there is order as you say, but it is not directed order, and considered as a continuous process, the system consisting of environment and evolution is nonlinear, meaning a small change in one part can cause a big change in another part. Anyways, according to your bio-blurb, you're a Master's student studying dinosaur paleontology, so I rather suspect you have an even better understanding of evolution than I do.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Actually, I base my 'extra weight' based on the fact that I've seen larger presentations and heard more discussion on the topic than what was in the Nature paper. I've heard the arguements go back and forth between experts on exactly how this data was collected and how to interpret it.
It's not that I'm friends with the author. I happen to have a much greater exposure to the study as it was in progress than anyone outside of the institute who attended all the talks.