Mutant Gene Responsible for Speech? 645
An anonymous submitter writes: "A new study published in Nature reports that humans developed speech and language 200,000 years ago as a result of gene mutation. Washington Post story with more background. The mutation in the FOXP2 gene allowed humans greater control over their mouth and throat muscles, and gave them the ability to produce new sounds. It was apparently such an advantageous mutation that it quickly swept through the human population (10,000 - 20,000 years) almost entirely wiping out earlier versions. This development seems to also match up closely with the time period humans began developing culture. Researchers next want to try altering the gene in mice to see what happens, although they suspect there are many other genes involved. So, how long until I can get a talking dog?"
Um... I havn't taken a biology class lately (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that evolution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't we all what we are because of a series of accidental gene mutations?
Parrots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Such perfect timing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
geez, does there have to be the pseudo-requisit-stupid-boilerplate-take-down-the-
Tom
Re:Next they find the gene for understanding math (Score:4, Insightful)
Well they might.
If your assumption were true, it would be possible, with enough patience and care, to teach a chimp to talk and be just like us, so the chimp could go to school, get a job, and say, run slashdot. This is clearly not the case despite more and more findings that chimps have really advanced mental capabilities.
Of course we could not have gone from mischevious banana eaters to programmers just like that. Chimps have nearly all the abilities. But they are lacking some crucial genes. Even if those only are regulatory genes.
And those genes are to be found, logically, within the fraction of a 100th percent that separates us from them.
However the recently discovered genes don't account for speech. You can use sign language!
Being able to produce sounds is not enough, otherwise parrots, as clever as they may be, could also go to school and get a job.
So the gene(s) that have just been found are not the whole story. Plenty of genes are sure required for speech, including chimp legacy ones.
As far as culture is concerned, it's the other way round. You can't retain culture if you haven't got the intellectual mechanisms to understand / store / re-phrase. So we have culture because we have speech. No the other way round.
-T
PS. Sign me up for a talking dog too.
Genes do not sweep (Score:2, Insightful)
Genetic varation occurs because one group outcompetes another group for food or geography, or because two groups interbreed. It is possible, although unlikely given the way we primates reject strangeness, that the gene was interbred. It is much more likely that a long, _sloooooooooooooooow_ process of population replacement was responsible.
My bet is that in a few years, they'll recant the 10-20k year "sweep", and acknowledge that it was more like 50-100k years to swap out everyone on Earth.
Most geneticists don't really believe that... (Score:5, Insightful)
No halfway modern geneticist nowadays believes that there is a single gene responsible for more than the most simple of traits. And I had the impression that the Nature article linked from this story expresses that view quite clearly with statements like:
Finding one gene is like finding one part of a car. It looks useful, as though it's part of a larger mechanism. But we don't know what it does, what other parts it interacts with, or what the whole vehicle looks like. "It's an unbelievably complex system, and we've got one tiny glimpse," says Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
A very nice explanation on the limited usefulness of trying to assign "the" function for a particular gene was proposed in the book The "Collapse of Chaos : Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, a molecular biologist and a mathematician, respectively.
In general, it is easy to remove one part from a network of interacting parts, and observe the mechanism breaking down. Naively, these parts are then called the "key regulators" of this or that phenomenon, be it speech or whatever. Only lengthy experiments will then reveal the whole underlying mechanism maybe.
The stance that you attribute to geneticists, that they expect simplistic, monogenetic solutions to complex problems is actually more caused by the press (not only laymen's journals, btw), which always go for a snappy headline without "maybe" or "can be a part of a complex mechanism".
just my 2 centimorgans
genes, culture, elephants (Score:3, Insightful)
Another poster mentioned that parrots can articulate speech about as well as humans can, and yet there's no thriving parrot culture. One wonders about whales and elephants whose brains handily outmass our own; if given the faculty of speech, would they develop cultures? Do they already have cultures of which we are unaware because of communication methods we don't know about? Both whales and elephants use sound in complex ways to communicate over long distances, but we haven't yet deciphered the language of either.
It would be interesting to give elephants better manipulators, and see if they build anything interesting. It would also be interesting to invent an elephant-friendly weapon that gave them fairer odds against poachers.
Re:Um... I havn't taken a biology class lately (Score:3, Insightful)
If you gave specific examples of erroneous data or conclusions, I'd be interested. Instead, you decided to take the low road of intellectual elitism, and managed to be modded up for it.
Koko doesn't have language (Score:2, Insightful)
ethics of intelligent pets? (Score:2, Insightful)
How could it be acceptable to kill them for research, or hold them against their wills?
Speech != language (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even possible that complete languages existed before humans were able to speak. American Sign Language is an example of a language with its own complete, unique grammar and morphology, which does not make use of speech. (See Pinker's book again.) Its existence supports the hypothesis that the parts of the brain responsible for language can operate independently of the parts that co-ordinate speech. In summary, there is a lot more to language than co-ordinating the muscles of the mouth and throat.
Re:Speech just the missing ingredient (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't find the original SciAm article, but this looks like an interview with the same researcher. read this. [pbs.org]
Now, I believe this parrot is pretty old, and has been trained for years by Ms. Pepperberg. But Alex (the parrot) isn't just responding on cue, it is doing some abstract and symbolic thought.
Re:ethics of intelligent pets? (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyone else see the special on the History channel last night about canabalism? Yumyum.
Re:Rediculous claim and theory (Score:2, Insightful)
suppose the announcement had been... (Score:2, Insightful)
Suppose the announcement had been a gene had been discovered/identified that enabled humans to use toilets or similar facilities. Would you believe that?
Suppose the annoucement had been a gene for wearing clothes.
Suppose the claim was a gene for fashion.
You wouldn't believe that? No?
You'd say, no that's a social construction. It's not genetic, can't be. Different humans do it differently, and it's obviously related to their culture, not what they're born with.
But these are all things uniquely human. All humans do these things to one degree or another, and no members of other species do them. Gotta be in the genes, right? Gotta be a gene for each of 'me, no?
No.
Some things uniquely human, we learn as humans from other humans. Examples include clothing and speech. And if you believe otherwise, you're welcome to try getting those behaviors from a human without letting him learn them from other humans.