Slashdot Mirror
The Coevolution of Lice & Their Hosts
eldavojohn writes "It might be an uncomfortable subject but parasites are an interesting subject when it comes to evolution. Ever wonder if pocket gophers have lice? Well, they do. And most interesting of all is the evolution of these lice mirroring the evolution of gophers. To study the genes of lice may shed just as much light on evolutionary trees as studying the genes of the actual host the lice has evolved to. The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera. There were similarities between our pubic lice and the lice found on gorillas. Scientists came to the conclusion, which they published today in BMC Biology, is just as striking as their earlier one about head lice. But it is hardly the same. We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."
There were similarities between our pubic lice and the lice found on gorillas.
Look, I don't know what these scientists have been doing with the gorillas in this study, but this seems like evidence of *something*.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It's not that humans got crabs from gorillas. One human did. Skeezy McTarzan.
Start a happiness pandemic
I heard somewhere and I believe it to be true that African Americans hair has a oval shape instead of round. For this reason the lice cant grab on, and they don't have lice problems.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I remember something from my days of getting an anthropology degree where some scientists was trying to guess the approximate date when humans first started wearing clothing. Tools made from bone and rock last a long time, so you can easily get a good idea of when people started making new types of tools. But stuff like clothing, rope, or weaving rots away pretty quickly, so finding them in archaeological digs is pretty rare.
IIRC, there are two types of lice or fleas. One kind lived on human skin and hair, and the other preferred clothing and blankets and lived only in artificial fabrics. The scientists were trying to see when the fabric-preferring bugs diverged from a common ancestor by examining the genetics. Really clever!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
To be perfectly honest ... um, let me think about this ... no.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."
#10. Speak for yourself, professor.
#9. "coyote-ugly", move over...
#8. Shhh... Hear that? I think Dave Attell's head just exploded.
#7. Why is the waiting room empty? All I said was we...
#6. "Scratch-a while you can, monkey-boy!"
#5. Next on Springer...
#4. Time to bring the crab-infested brass monkeys in off the back porch, Radar.
#3. Yes, you heard me right, I need to get into those crabs' genes.
#2. Let's say we ask Jocelyn Elders to weigh in on this one.
and #1... Well I'll be a monkey's uncle, and a mighty itchy one at that.
(N.B., I know gorillas are apes not monkeys, so save the posting effort, it's just a freaking joke...)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
From the article: "And then there is the matter of where the lice live. Today, lice live on little islands of hair on an ocean of hairless human skin. They are clearly adapted to our relatively hairless bodies. The authors suggest that their results may mean that hominids were already losing hair 3.3 million years ago. The gorilla lice needed an empty ecological niche--pubic hair--that they could occupy in order to survive. If hominids had full-body hair, the lice that already lived on it might have been able to outcompete an invader."
In my opinion this is one of the most interesting aspects of this research - being able to date when we started becoming hairless. It's always been a puzzle why we are relatively hairless compared to the other great apes, and I would guess that being able to put some time constraints on it is a step toward understanding how this happened.
Ohh. You said 'pubic lice'. I misread the post. I thought you'd said "RIAA". Never mind.
Conclusion:
henry -- the human evolution news relay
That was the only thing you said that made sense
Anyway, best article linked from /. in ages. Great, thought provoking read.
It's an excellent article, but the summary makes no sense, which at least encouraged me to read the article to figure out what the hell they were talking about. For example, from the summary:
The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera.
1) What is "unsettling" about this? Anyone? No prior deeply held beliefs have been overturned. No profound conceptual schemes have been shaken to their very foundations. Parasites are known to be highly specialized. This fact has been published repeatedly for decades, always with great emphasis on how apparently hard it is to believe. After a couple of decades of being routinely reminded that individual species of ticks and fleas and lice are hyper-specialized, do you think we might ask that people stop presenting this fact as something astonishingly new?
2) The statement is contradicted by the article. What the article says is that head lice and pubic lice in humans are so different morphologically that "early taxonimists" assigned them to different genera. The article implies but does not say explicitly that this early assignment was not in fact justified.
In any case, this is an absolutely fascinating, albeit tentative and partial, reconstruction of the hominid evolutionary tree from parasite DNA, and I'm sure that as more data from different parasites becomes available we will be in for some real surprises. Internal parasites that are less likely to be passed between species should provide a record that is clearer than the lice record, where despite the relative paucity of inter-species transfers the record has clearly been muddied several times.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.