Gene MYH16: A Tasty New Jawbreaker

kid_wonder writes "Jeremy Roenick take heart! Glass Joe take heart! Scientists discovered that humans owe their big brains to a single genetic mutation that weakened our jaw muscles about 2.4 million years ago. So I guess now we can call all those dopey muscle bound guys 'apes' with a clear conscience."

Actually, no.

[Romothecus]

RTFA. Virtually every scientist who read their work was of the opinion that the explanation "mutation to smaller jaw means bigger brain" is incredibly simplistic and that the real explanation is probably far more complex. The change in jaw morphology is probably only one of many contributing factors.

Silly protozoa!

[Jerf]

Silly protozoa, if only you had known that this one gene would be responsible for super intelligence, you could have mutated billions of years ago and beats humans to the punch!

What? You say you're missing thousands of other necessary genes and you can't assign responsibility for such large changes on one single change? However will I then write misleading science stories, and even more misleading Slashdot article intros?

That's not bad commentary, for a protozoa. Pity the article author isn't that smart.

Re:"Discovered"?

[joebok]

By way of example, one of the axioms is that parallel lines never meet. We don't actually know if that's true, but it's pretty close. If we do turn out to live in a curved universe, we'll have to throw away some bits of maths.

You are correct that math and logic require basic unproven assertions that "nothing is provably 'true' on its own merits". But math is not about truth. No piece of math will ever have to be thrown away!

Geomoetries in which the parallel postulate you mention are different than the Euclidean are just as consistent and logical as those with different ones. They can even be useful:

If, given a line and a point not on that line, you have exactly one line through that point which is parallel to the first, you are dealing with a Euclidean plain. Architects and Engineers love this one. Alternately, if there is more than one line through that point parallel to the first, then we are in a hyperbolic space. Physicists and Astronomers tend to like this one, but whether the universe is Euclidean or hyperbolic it does not in any way invalidate these geometric notions. In fact, if you take the axiom where there are NO parallel lines you are in a "spherical" geometry which is really handy for navigation.