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Did a Genome Copying Mistake Lead To Human Intelligence?
A new study suggests that the sophistication of the human brain may be due to a mistake in cell division long ago. From the article: "A copyediting error appears to be responsible for critical features of the human brain that distinguish us from our closest primate kin, new research finds.
When tested out in mice, researchers found this 'error' caused the rodents' brain cells to move into place faster and enabled more connections between brain cells."
Isnt this the whole point of evolution?
In other words... Human intelligence is the result of evolution. Shocking. I sure hope there was more to this study that the submitter simply failed to mention...
Isn't that somewhat the expected process of evolution in general? Genetic mistake happens; proves to actually be useful to reproduction/beating the competition (as opposed to the vast majority that are either useless or detrimental); and then due to being in the most successful breeders, becomes "standard".
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Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
For me it was at least 20 minutes, but it was down the first time I checked this morning.
Isn't every evolutionary adaptation caused by copying error of one form or another? Why should this be any more of a big deal than not having webbed fingers or a tail?
...so, I'm a freak of nature?!
Just what I needed today at the office. Hey co-workers, guess what...
Unless you're with the intelligent designers, it is pretty that all advances made in evolution from the simplest prokaryote to Einstein were made by random errors in gene copying or recombining previous errors.
How long until they break out & take over the world?
Next question, please...
"Our data suggest a mechanism where incomplete duplication created a novel gene function—antagonizing parental SRGAP2 function—immediately “at birth” 2–3 mya, which is a time corresponding to the transition from Australopithecus to Homo and the beginning of neocortex expansion." Could this be related to particular disorders in cognitive ability? There are certain disorders that become apparent in early childhood that may make said person seem "caveman-like". Could a malfunction with this 'Antagonizing Parental SRGAP2 Function' occur frequently, causing a more primitive (although sometimes peculiarly genius) cognitive functionality? I may be way off-base here, but it was a thought.
I, for one, welcome our new Ape overlord--...oh wait.
Sorry, the articles on copyright and intellectual property still have me spinning a little. Something out there was making genome copies which are not legitimate and the result is there for all to see. If people didn't get so smart, there wouldn't be so much copying going on either.
Okay, okay, more on topic. The crowd is already saying "it's evolution." Okay, let's just get this behind us, "DUH!" Okay, that was short for "yes, they are explaining that evolution led to the changes which produced humans and human intelligence. But you are seeing the forest and forgetting to notice the trees. What aspects and details of human evolution have had striking results? One of many answers is this thing that happened which enabled the brain to grow in complexity and power."
Now that said, there are lots more. I think one of the more interesting details is that our eyes show white in the corners so that other people can see what we are looking at. That's huge in terms of human communication. There are lots of things in human evolution which have led us to where we are today. But if one were to go back to a single thing -- a single point of divergence -- it might be the one in the article.
I'd like to know what part of the human species they imagine did NOT result from genome copying errors?
"When tested out in mice, researchers found this 'error' caused the rodents' brain cells to move into place faster and enabled more connections between brain cells."
Obviously this research should be stopped immediately.
It's a feature!
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.
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I'll get my coat now...
Part of the point of the article is that it was the kind of mutation they were looking for that was important. Usually scientists look for genes with in gene copy errors or deleted genes, not duplications. Looking for a copy duplication mutation instead enabled them to find a partial copy that turned out to be important for the development of neurons. By looking for other duplication errors they may be able to find other interesting and important mutations that make humans what they are today.
scientist 1: "We figured out the secret to human intelligence!"
scientist 2: "Let try it on those animals in the cage and see if we can make them super smart!"
scientist 1: "Good idea! I can't imagine any scenario where that could go wrong."
scientist 1&2: "Yay!"
in the background:
chimp 1: "Pass me some more smart drink"
chimp 2: "You got it buddy. Once we're smart enough to get this cage open, we are so gonna fuck them up..."
we may never know.
Can you just stop asking questions in article headings. I'm here for information. Don't try to engage my enthusiasm I haven't got one.
That over a billion years a cascade of screwups was responsible for making everything? That for as long as the universe has been kicking around and as big as it's managed to get, we've yet to see the faintest signs of this happening on any other planet?
I'd hardly call it obvious. Actually, "intelligent design" is engineered to be the more "obvious" theory, to make it easier to sell. And the farther we get away from teaching creative thinking, the scientific method, and mathematics, the easier it'll be for concepts like intelligent design to take root.
welcome our new rodent overlords.
Does this mean we can pinpoint the time and place of Eden, when Adam and Eve bit the apple that led to this cell division?
Gently reply
Perhaps scientists are breeding the next super-race. A few super smart engineered rats get away and bam.... competition with the humans.
Mice? A good start. Now start hacking more interesting species. I won't be happy until we have birds smart enough to carry on a conversation. Start with dogs, then sell them as super-pets to finance more research.
What are we going to do today?
Brain: What we do everyday Pinky.....try to take over the world!!!
They should have just asked me, I obviously knew this four years ago.
Mice and other critters may well have evolved the same mutation many times, but it had no survival benefit without other mutations which only humans (or primates) had.
Human speech, for instance, requires physical changes to vocal cords and the throat, in addition to brain changes, or so I have read. Got to change them all to get actual speech.
Infuriate left and right
Hurry we need to get to work on Chimps and Fins so when the Galactics show up we will already be patrons.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They are attempting it every night.
Not really successfully though.
return $sig;
What the study is saying that everyone comes from mice and rats, YOUR ALL RATS!
It was a clever attempt to get around Monsanto's gene patents.
There isn't a need for it. Look at the fossil records of anything that was around for 100+ million years. You *hardly* need intelligence to survive.
Not to mention we have no natural predators besides viruses, which allows us to reproduce very unnaturally, and starts to favor very strange traits - traits that don't benefit the species but work because we have modern conveniences such as electricity, indoor lighting, cooling, heating, etc.
FTFA: We may have been looking at the wrong types of mutations to explain human and great ape differences
The article isn't about whether it was a mutation, it's about identifying the specific mutation that put us down this path.
Never attribute stupidity to malice which is adequately explained by stupidity.
and leaving disappointed.
"What are we going to do today Brain?"
"Same thing we do everyday, Pinky, Try to take over the World!"
I think Douglas Adams already had a thought about tests on mice.......
Mrs. Frisby & the Rats of La Jolla
Nearly 90 posts, and no Flowers for Algernon reference yet? Illiterate bastards.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
...count-down until someone in South Korea makes super-intelligent bonobos.
Welcome our new rodent overlords.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
At first I was excited that the future would bring us gadgets from Star Trek; now I'm waiting or drugs that give us Flowers for Algernon
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Pinky: Gee, Brain. What are we going to do tonight?
The Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.
Maybe I have selective hearing, reading, and thinking, but the only thing I saw from RTFA is that we will have government subsidized Ape slaves for the elderly and low income families!! **Hurray!** :-D
FTFA:
"researchers added the partially duplicated gene copy to the mouse genome (mice don’t normally have it) it seemed to speed the migration of brain cells during development, which makes brain organization more efficient."
"We may have been looking at the wrong types of mutations to explain human and great ape differences," - study researcher Evan Eichler, of the University of Washington
The research is pretty interesting because it pinpoints one of the mutations responsible for improved intelligence. Be that as it may, this doesn't make the the language in the article less scandalous. Two hundred years, and still didn't get evolution, eh? I wonder who writes this stuff? In software projects we have a saying WWTS (who wrote this shit) which would apply very nicely to the article's cluelessness.
Careful now! Maybe we should have kept these evolutionary success genes. To ourselves.
the universe could be teeming with life, all of it unintelligent life.
These sorts of experiments are the exact way the animals will overcome humans in the future. The results will be published and radical animal rights groups will duplicate the results and release the modified animals into the wild. Of course they will not be eaten first but it will only take until their own children are adults to be eaten by generationally smarter and more numerous animals.
They will die after a long life feeling fully justified and fulfilled, before their horrible consequences become apparent.
JJ
Thats how evolution seems to work. The middle section of the article points out the mechanism: duplication and modification of one branch.
Geneticists classify proteins into related families , that appear to have had common ancestors some long time ago.
Human trichromatic vision is an example. At some point primates doubled one of the eye colors to help them see fruit colors more easily. Canvivores are only dichromatic. In fact there are mutant human females with four color vision, that is only carried on the doubled X chromosome.
That we are genetically modified apes. The "missing link" is that an intelligent race of beings modified ape DNA to create humans. Bred for slavery. This discovery brings us closer to that truth.
This is well documented in Genesis. There was a plurality of Adams and Eves, and the "serpents" were responsible for freeing us. Starting with the Eves, because they were more capable of realizing the truth than the Adams. Christianity is another means of control. Jesus a false profit. This is not over yet.
Super Intelligent Sharks, here we come.
Everything's derivative, no artist functions in a vacuum, and all progress requires building on what has gone before.
That's what makes the *IAAs and their efforts to extend copyright forever and insert their tollbooth into this process *active enemies* of art and culture. The net impact of these organizations on civilzation is negative.
If anyone who works for them sees this - when you're old and retired, do you want that to be your only legacy?
Tell me, have they started travelling around in little things that look like whisky glasses and started developing planet-sized supercomputers?
I couldn't resist
... human error :)
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
There's a difference between us and them; it's all in the vegatables I tell you!
Last time I made a mistake in division, I got points off for it. Now you're telling me that a mistake in division is related to intelligence. I can never win.
If no other organisms are intelligent in a system - then it is an untapped environment in which the organisms who adapt to inhabit it will flourish.
It's the biological equivalent of thousands of monkeys typing random letters and eventually typing out shakespeare.
One creature's mistake is another creature's life of intelligent misery.
You can't handle the truth.
You sir are talking out your ass... ;)
What other orifices do you expect proctolocuting organisms to speak out of? Duh.
Congrats, you just figured out what mutations are. Errors in copying, changes in neucliotide due to a free electron or a high energy photon...
Ok, notwithstanding the number 42, and ignoring the more popular question 'What is the meaning of life?' ( which by the way has been long settled with the answer to be found in any dictionary under the entry for 'life' ), it seems that it might be interesting to consider 'What is the purpose of life?' since evolution pertains mostly to life here on Earth.
I'll venture that the purpose of life seems to me to be responsible for creating the most entropy possible. The prevalent M.O. seems to be for life to extract the Gibbs Free Energy from the environs to produce offspring, and then to die. By dying, one creates disorder, which is the purpose of life. However, by first creating offspring, the life form is responsible not only for the entropy directly created by it's own demise but indirectly for the disorder created by any offspring and their offspring. Use Gibbs Free Energy to Copy then Die.
Is there another strategy for producing entropy that could be more successful than life?
It would seem not, though I don't know for sure. Evolution has produced many variations on the theme, suited to different niches, but life seems to stick to this general gameplan.
...
NASA: Maybe we should finally tell them the big secret -- that all the chimps we sent into space came back super-intelligent.
WHAT human intelligence?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Taking a chain saw to the tree of knowledge since 4000 BCE.
Have gnu, will travel.
she was Helo & Boomer's(/Athena's) daughter - didn't you see the finale? ;-)
People tend to forget that evolution happens at the population level, not at the individual level. Otherwise, social species would never have evolved.
Copyright law has existed for ever...
Make sure they can't reach out and unlatch their cages or they'll move out and start stealing electricity from unsuspecting farmers!
So what I'm reading here is they're imbuing mice with super intelligence.
I, for one, welcome our new hyper-intelligent rodent overlords.
The most recent evolutionary theory of speech mostly focus on the fact that speech evolved gradually as a result of a development of symbolic and abstract reasoning and gesturing. The vocalization was gradual and only kicked in on a second stage were the gestual communication was interwined gestures. The advantage of oral communication are evident: it frees the hands and can occur when there is no direct visual contact. According to an article by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch, published on Nature, the great leap to a faculty of language was possible when human developed recursion, which is at the basis of syntax. The biolinguistics program defends this point and although it is an active research (main centre is the MIT, house of Chomsky) it is not the only theory of language. Much better than any Everett crap, though.
260 comments and nobody mentioned Cordwainer Smith and/or 'The Ballad of Lost C'Mell'.
Seriously, what are they teaching you kids these days???
And GET OFF MY LAWN!!
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Can I have one more copy? If not for me, do it for the kids!
No shit. Every single stage of evolution was that.
The awesome part of this is that they might have discovered which mutation caused it.
That's an awful big assumption you're making there - it's perfectly possible that some species of dinosaur did master fire and possibly even the iPhone, neither of those would have protected a tropical, possibly cold-blooded species from a million-year ice age. Even if they were able to keep warm, finding food would be a real challenge. Even without an ice age there's no reason to assume they'd survive indefinitely, look at us, just a few thousand years out of the stone age and we're already flirting with causing our own extinction. Given with all the million+ year gaps in the fossil record we might never know they existed. Heck, we could even have their skeletons in the museum as we speak, 64+ million years would pretty effectively erase any evidence of technology. Hmm, come to think of it didn't several major extinction events focus primarily on the megafauna? Sounds suspiciously similar to the effect of stone-age humans had on the megafauna that they shared the plaent with...
But yeah, while life itself seems almost inevitable in a hospitable environment, both the jumps to multicellular and sentient life seem to be less likely.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Thank goodness. I was starting to despair that the atheists wouldn't be able to come up a with a logical, plausible way to deny fundamental truths.
You say Darwin, I say yes: someone definitely created Darwin. He was an intelligent design.
I guess we'll have to think about it...
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yes, it's a poor headline, but they are talking about a SPECIFIC transcription error. That is the interesting part.
Slashdot. Oy.
Just imagine if Republicans can be given intelligence one day.
Ok, so it's a mouse and not a chimp. Let's just hope that the mouse doesn't "fix" err break the rats ....then we'll have real trouble.
"Purpose" is a concept that human brains use to organize their own actions. Things (or processes) in the real world don't intrinsically have purposes. WE assign purposes to them.
The act of attempting to discover a purpose is sometimes misguided. If you are observing a tool or activity of an organism that displays goal-oriented behavior, then discovering the purpose is a discovery about the organism, not the object or process in question. If you are trying to discover the purpose for something that is not a direct result of the goal-oriented behavior of an organism, then you have got your metaphysical wires crossed.
For example...a car has a purpose (to get people/stuff somewhere) because humans assigned that purpose to it when they built it.
The sun has no purpose. It is just there. It was there long before any purpose-assigning beings came along to stare at it and wonder what its purpose might be.
Of course we can choose to harness the sun's energy in various ways, thereby assigning a purpose to it...but this is a deliberate act of assignment, not a discovery.
Those who believe in God may object that God created the sun and assigned it a purpose at that time. But since they are religious nuts, their objections don't matter.
In conclusion, Evolution is a natural process that happens whether goal-oriented behavior directs it or not, so it does not have an intrinsic purpose. We might use it for some purpose, should we choose to direct it, but apart from that it is purposeless.
Hope that clears things up for you.
Anything but God. Right? Atheism is nothing but another irrational organized religion just as hateful and intolerant as any other you can name. How 'bout, "God created Man in His own image." Is that too much to stomach for you intolerant ignoramuses?
I, for one, welcome our new lab-rat overlords.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Purpose of life is energy equilibrium.
To everyone thinking "duh, that's how evolution works!!11!onebbq":
I think the irony of "mistake/mutation" becoming a competitive advantage being, selected for, and leading to the progeny today (us) is not lost on geneticists. It's probably the last thing that would be lost on them, considering their field.
I think the real issue is in TFA's title/summary. What's important that it's one mutation mechanism specifically that seems to dominate gains in intelligence: copying, or additions (and potentially over-expression relative to ancestral baseline) of a specific gene/protein. The potential over-expression being parenthetical, because many genes can lay dormant and subsequently expressed proteins may be inactive without phosphorylation. ... just look here: http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/mutationsanddisorders/possiblemutations )
But what's important to note (which TFA really failed to emphasize) is that intelligence seems to be linked to excesses of sets of genes, which is only a subset of all potential mutation mechanisms ( subtraction, substitution,
I think the real take-away from this is that there is more evidence for varying levels of intelligence being a function of varying levels of a set of genes, rather than intelligence being a function of having that set of genes at all or not.
In other words, all animals that have this baseline set of genes would (if their environment selected for intelligence over spending resources on physical fitness for survival) eventually have the capability to be intelligent.
This would be in contrast to say, the assumption that human intelligence is very special and due to a magical insertion/deletion mechanism creating a new gene entirely.
We already know what happens when you do that.
Oh god, they're created super intelligent rodentia! We're doomed!
why scientists assume this has to be a mistake rather than by design? Oh that's right. We are all mere beasts who therefore don't have any moral absolutes and who all share the same DNA because we supposedly all came from the same puddle of amino acids that came to life from a lightning strike (or was it a meteorite from outer space infected by the remnants of a supernova?) billions of years ago. Of course, there is no proof of any of that complicated web of ifs, maybes, must haves, probablys, etc. Evolutionists apparently never heard of Occam's Razor. I wonder who has more faith: the scientist who has to convince himself that all those improbabilities and guesses must have happened since he exists to even consider the possibility (despite no evidence actually directly linking any of these findings) or the Creationsist who believes that God designed and created everything and everyone (based on a book written by Man and whose content was handed down by God) and therefore rendered evolution unneeded? Which is the simpler theory? And which is chosen simply to avoid acknowledging a God exists despite being more complicated and unsubstantiated?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
someone help me out here:
so in order for this gene to be passed on, the host needs to mate with another who doesn't have the gene.
The gene needs to be dominant enough that the offspring also contain it. The gene then only spreads through that one bloodline, thus taking quite some time to propogate....but in time we might see a reasonable population carrying this new gene.
However, I have a problem.
At some point, the apes split into 2 lines, a line that lead to modern apes, and a line that lead to humans (and others)...and so on.
For this to happen, there must have been some reason why apes would not mate with apes who had this new gene, otherwise we'd still only have 1 family, not 2.
Yet we know there are 2 distinct families here, and there are no hybrids, no in-betweens, etc. So the lineage must have split quite dramatically.
It cannot have been the mutation causing apes to not mate with the new apes, because otherwise the new ape carrying the gene would not have mated, and the gene would've died out.
in other words, how do we have long distinct branches all over the evolution tree, and not more and more branches at every step of the way? how do we have distinct branches at all?
if a gene mutation was so disruptive that it was the start of a new species, how would that new animal breed with anything? and if it did breed, why wouldn't there be many many hybrid creatures? and if there were enough hybrid creatures, the permeation of the new gene would eventually take over the entire population anyway, and you'd be left with 1 species again, not 2.
Anyone shed some light on this? the explanations I've found online are far too simplistic and jump from a simple definition of mutations to "and then fast-forward to today and here we are" - as if that was enough to fill in the (many) gaps.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
It was Ancient Aliens who genetically designed humans :-p
As coincidences start to pile-up (planet in the right position relatively to the sun, a perfect moon orbiting the planet ...) one may wonder if all this hocus-pocus of life has a greater meaning other than we expect ...
Popular press versions of biological research are often ripe with anthropocentrism, and this is no exception. Evolution by natural selection acts on 'copying mistakes' all the time, whether adding, deleting, or mistaking a single letter, word, sentence, or paragraph (to extend the crappy metaphor). The underlying research reports that a gene duplication event, the sort of thing that has been well characterized for many years, has occurred in a gene that modifies the number of projections that a neuron has. The amazing thing is the connection between the gene and the trait, not the mutation arose by a copying mistake. One could argue that all mutations are copying mistakes.