Slashdot Mirror
Did Humans Get Their Big Brains From Neanderthals?
MCTFB writes, "According to CNN, human beings may have acquired a gene for developing bigger brains from Neanderthal man. Apparently, 70% of the world's population has a variant of a gene regulating brain size, with this variant being most common in people of European descent (where Neanderthal man lived alongside ancient humans), and least common in people of African descent (where Neanderthal man was non-existent). While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions, people such as myself, who happen to be of northern European ancestry, may find it fascinating that somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and Neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia."
While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions...
Eugeneticists may use this information to claim the superiority of Europeans, a counterpoint can be made that these people can't be superior because were having sex with sub-humans.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
People have been fired from Harvard for saying less than this.
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Apparently, 70% of the world's population has a variant of a gene regulating brain size, with the variant of this gene being most common in people of European descent (where Neanderthal man lived alongside ancient humans), and least common in people of African descent (where Neanderthal man was non-existent).
Oh, great. You just know some wingnut wackjob is going to latch onto this nugget of information and try and use it as "evidence" of racial superiority. Then you'll get the 24-hour news networks milking it for all the ratings as they can.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Do they realize that they are implicitly suggesting that Europeans have bigger brains than Africans? Even if this is true (and I will not comment one way or another), I think they can kiss your careers goodbye.
While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions, people such as myself, who happen to be of northern European ancestry, may find it fascinating that somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia."
I have a hard time believing that these ancient humans and neanderthals "made love". I would say it's all the more likely that one group forcibly intermingled with the other.
Err, so I guess this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with brain size OR intelligence. The only really significant result of the finding so far is that Homo Sapien and Neaderthal may have interbread. We don't even know what this "brain gene" does.... just that some people have it. It could make people more prone to schizophrenia for all we know. That is, until somebody actually tests for measurable, statistically significant differences between the 30% with and 70% without...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Making love and war are not mutually exclusive. Throughout most of history, you made war on your neighbors and stole their women.
I'm thinking that they made war not love and did the whole rape and pillage thing.
What does bigger brain really mean anyway?
Sort of as a crude example, does a bigger CPU in terms of size mean anything? It might mean more memory, or more pipelines or maybe just old technology when the fabrication needed to be a little more coarse.
The brain controls all sorts of things in all sorts of region. If one region is bigger, it might be for sensory recpetion in your leg. So, you tickle worse or something.
It's like that picture of Homer with a small brain. If his brain was like that, he wouldn't be able to walk or speak.
So, big FU to MCTFB, you little Hitler.
This summary and article, which I list complaints about below, is symptomatic of the sparse and incredibly poor science reporting that has been coming out of slashdot. This "news for nerds site" has better coverage of battlestar galactica, and whatever RMS and linus torvalds has for breakfast this morning than anything substantive about the sciences. I for one would like to see some effort to improve on the part of the editorial staff. If you are with me on this and would like slashdot to become a more informative and less glitzy news site, please post replies outlining problems you've seen and possible solutions.
The article mentions that more neanderthals lived in europe than africa, and that distribution of this gene that may or may not have come from neanderthals corresponds to that. However, the article also mentions that *70% of the human population* has this gene. If the gene's presence in africa is lower, they don't say how much lower. The data mentioned in the article gives no indication whether the gene is present in a majority or a minority of africans.
Given all of these qualifications present in the article, the submitter was obviously trying to spice up his submission to get it posted by playing up the race element and drawing a strong connection between this gene and race *that the original article doesn't actually show*.
Personally, I would be curious to see more of the data that these people collected; maybe even see the actual distribution of this gene by geographic location. However, lately a lot of incredibly poor science reporting has been posted on slashdot. By poor science reporting, I mean articles that include a lot of fantastic speculation (often primarily in the summary...) but no hard data.
This is a site for news for nerds! We want numbers graphs and PI charts! Not some f*cking cnn article with incredibly vague details about research the submitter obviously doesn't understand. Let's see some positive change hear.
(a) Did Humans Get Their Big Brains From Neanderthals?
Article says:
(b) The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development
(emphasis mine). Doesn't look like the article claims bigger brains for any group overall. Article further says:
(c) it is not yet clear what advantage the D allele gives the human brain
And both the slashdot summary and the article highlight the notion that the genetic difference in question is prevalent in Europe and not in Africa. So just to put this all out on the line here: do Europeans have bigger brains than Africans? Slashdot headline implies this, but article does not say this. Do Europeans have bigger brains during temporary stages of development? Article implies this with (b), but does not actually say this. Does this gene confer an advantage? It's implied by all of this coverage, but (c) disavows any evidence of such.
So this whole angle (from the slashdot header) of "modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions" would seem to be just a baseless, inflammatory statement injected for sensationalism... or am I missing something here?
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