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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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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?
I think so, Brain, but how are we going to get the monkeys to wear plastic underpants?
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
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.
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?
It's a feature!
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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..."
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;
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.
It's still down for me.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
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?
Eh, it's not necessarily that surprising. Perhaps most civilizations destroy themselves quickly. If humans will last for 10 million years, it's highly improbable that you and I would happen to be in the first ~0.05% of human history, with significantly lower odds if our population explodes with colonies on other planets during that time. The only evidence we have for the longevity of humanity is not encouraging.
Of course, neither is it at all conclusive. I only bring up this argument to illustrate the wild uncertainty in our knowledge of both ourselves and the universe, and to illustrate the arrogance of humans' silly sci-fi-esque concept of alien civilizations. There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens. Honestly, if you want to believe in intelligent design, go for it, just don't let it affect your opinion on social matters and we'll get along fine.
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.
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.
Tell me, have they started travelling around in little things that look like whisky glasses and started developing planet-sized supercomputers?
... human error :)
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
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.
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.
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.
People tend to forget that evolution happens at the population level, not at the individual level. Otherwise, social species would never have evolved.
Great, now I've got this stuck in my head.
They're laboratory mice,
Their genes have been spliced,
They're dinky,
They're Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain,
Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain...
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
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.
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.
No shit. Every single stage of evolution was that.
The awesome part of this is that they might have discovered which mutation caused it.
Of course it is. Also, the probability that we happen to be exactly in the X% of the human history we actualy are is zero. That doesn't bring any information about the longevity of our species.
Rethinking email
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.
Narf!
I guess we'll have to think about it...
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"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.
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
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.
I'm picturing lab mice (e.g. Pinky and the Brain).
If humans will last for 10 million years, it's highly improbable that you and I would happen to be in the first ~0.05% of human history, with significantly lower odds if our population explodes with colonies on other planets during that time.
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that you're a representative sample with no selection bias. Moreover, if that's our destiny then there's still got to be someone who lives before that time; why not us?
Of course, neither is it at all conclusive.
I admire your talent for understatement. It's not just an inconclusive argument, it's specious BS.
There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens.
What we actually know is very simple: it's a very big universe so it would be downright spooky if there's no other intelligent life out there at all though they could be a long way away, and nobody appears to be trying to talk to us in a way that we can detect with current technology. That leaves a lot of room for speculation, some of which is more informed than other parts (e.g., we might be starting to get close to an approximate count on the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy; I'd guess that will be nailed down fairly well within the next few decades).
Of course, if there really is no other intelligent life anywhere in the universe, then we're living inside a stageshow put on for the benefit of Earth. I've read a number of sci-fi stories where this was a premise, and they were usually deeply paranoid...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
We already know what happens when you do that.
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.
Oddly enough we seem to agree. I find your post annoying and your reading comprehension poor; here's why.
Annoying: I admitted the weakness of my reasoning yet you still felt the need to sarcastically deconstruct it. I would hope your main objection--selection bias--is completely obvious to anyone, so I didn't feel the need to bring it up. There are other objections to my argument, like how it displays broken behavior in the limit as civilization lifespan goes to infinity and the impossibility of properly weighting lifespan lengths for computation of the relevant expected value. I meant not "at all conclusive" literally: one cannot draw real-life conclusions from it. I went on to say that I only brought it up to illustrate other points. A specious argument can still have value, not in proving its conclusion, but in other ways.
I also find the phrases "specious BS", "downright spooky", and "deeply paranoid" annoying since they hide content--in each case it would have been more informative to expand them to actual sentences. I'm particularly curious what you meant by "deeply paranoid", since I haven't read any sci-fi with the premise you mention.
Poor reading comprehension: I was discussing the "(im)probability of contact with aliens", so the question is not whether there is "other intelligent life anywhere in the universe" (as the bulk of your post discusses), but whether other life will contact us. Some estimates of the Drake equation give on the order of 1 civilization we're capable of communicating with in our galaxy, so maybe there's just nobody out there for us to talk to right now. Other estimates vary wildly and there are serious objections to the Drake equation, but the uncertainty is the key thing. We actually seem to agree there--"There's simply not enough information to draw conclusions either way about the (im)probability of contact with aliens". There is probably enough information to say with reasonable confidence that some other intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe, but that's not what I was talking about.
As I said, "Of course, neither is it at all conclusive. I only bring up this argument to illustrate [other points]".
Also, the probability that we happen to be exactly in the X% of the human history we actualy are is zero. That doesn't bring any information about the longevity of our species.
While true, this is unhelpful. The same can be said of the position of a baseball as it flies out of a stadium, even though given a reading of a clock on the in-flight baseball one could compute with some confidence the probability distribution of which % of the flight the baseball was actually in when the reading took place. The speciousness of my original argument lies elsewhere.
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.