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Neanderthal Sex Boosted Immunity In Modern Humans

Posted by timothy on from the check-out-greg-bear's-darwin's-radio dept.

NotSanguine writes "Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins were critical for our modern immune systems, researchers report (paper itself is subscription only) in the journal Science. Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day, they conclude."

4 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The good old days of evolution... by V!NCENT · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You do realise that being the fittest (read: more succesful) in our current society, means being a total asshole with shitloads of money to pay for every single need?

    There have been some tests that show that the happiest (non-suicidal people) are the people who arent stupid (120).

    So that leaves us with a 110 IQ, rich asshole to mate with everyone.

    That doesn't sound so nice to me.

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  2. That is what sex is for... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Apparently, one of the major upsides of sex(from a darwinian, rather than purely recreational, perspective) of the not-intuitively-all-that-sensible arrangement of having to seek out a conspecific, risk sexually transmitted infection, and mate simply in order to reproduce, is the rapid genetic diversification you can achieve by recombining genomes with others. Your asexual organisms have it much easier; but they have to depend on mutation(or, as with some bacteria, quasi-sex genetic exchange mechanisms).

    The neat organisms, in my opinion, are the edge cases that can go either way. this piece(sorry about the paywall...) examines snails that can either reproduce sexually or spawn clones asexually. As it turns out, in areas with higher parasite loads, the snails resort to sex at much higher rates in order to keep abreast of the parasite threat, while the less pressured snails go for the rapid and low-risk strategy of asexual cloning.

    1. Re:That is what sex is for... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Probably don't need to worry about our slimy overlords; but it would be interesting to know if this bit of immune-boosting quasi-bestiality helped make humans the pervasive species they are:

      Compared to hunter-gatherers, residents of combination agricultural and town/city civilizations are horribly disease riddled. Animal husbandry means zoonotic diseases and parasites in horrific quantity, grain-based agriculture means truly hideous oral health, and urbanization means drinking and sleeping where you shit. It's only in places with 19th+ century sanitation and 20th+ century medicine that the advantages of wealth and technology in sedentary civilizations started to translate into disease levels less horrid than pre-agricultural ones(even then, things like the yearly flu shot because some new combination of porcine, avian, and human viruses has emerged is a classic animal-husbandry parasite issue).. One wonders if any other reasonably-smart hominids ever took a crack at farming; but had to give it up or die because their immune systems just couldn't hack it...

  3. Re:The good old days of evolution... by rtb61 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now would that be a society based upon psychopathic greed or intellectual prowess or humanitarianism or athletic ability or to stupid to plan ahead and use contraceptives.

    Just want to clarify the basis of selection and not even look to touch on the issue of which is better for human society a matriarchy or a patriarchy. Just that at the moment it is fairly clear that majority polygamy based societies seem to be pretty unstable, treat the plural members of that relationship more like chattel, child abuse seems to be a national pass time and fairly backward.

    Perhaps someone needs to explain the fundamental difference between humans 'a social species' and say lizards. It is not competition within human society, it is competition of the species who by collective and social effort establish species competitiveness. In fact it is very likely that to promote psychotic, lizard like, competition within the human species would break down human society and thus leave humanity vulnerable to direct physical competition with the rest of the biosphere (a guaranteed physical loser).

    In human society it is basically insane to think of the rest of human society as the competitor and as something to be preyed upon, exploited and competed with. This is regardless of the last thirty years mass media messages that psychopathy and narcissism are desirable states of a mass consumption humanity (selfishness and forcing ones ego upon others).

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