The Coevolution of Lice & Their Hosts 179
eldavojohn writes "It might be an uncomfortable subject but parasites are an interesting subject when it comes to evolution. Ever wonder if pocket gophers have lice? Well, they do. And most interesting of all is the evolution of these lice mirroring the evolution of gophers. To study the genes of lice may shed just as much light on evolutionary trees as studying the genes of the actual host the lice has evolved to. The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera. There were similarities between our pubic lice and the lice found on gorillas. Scientists came to the conclusion, which they published today in BMC Biology, is just as striking as their earlier one about head lice. But it is hardly the same. We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."
Gorilla / Human lovin'? (Score:3, Informative)
Did anyone else read that line and think that this was article could have some link to the Monkey's Uncle [slashdot.org] (proto chimp/proto human interbreeding) story from a while ago on slashdot?
Afraid not, TFA states:Anyway, best article linked from
I'm going to wonder whether there were savanna gorillas or deep Forest hominids all night now
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Not only do they say we descended from apes, but we also got their crabs.
I can see them freaking out on this
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This speculation makes more sense than a hominid might have laid down and slept where a gorilla slept?
For an internal assimilation such as AIDS I understand, but what's so hard to figure out about this?
rd
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From my window I'm staring while my coffee grows cold
Look over there! (Where?)
There's a lady that I used to know
She's married now, or engaged, or something, so I am told
Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me,
There's something going wrong around here
It's amazing how accurate Joe Jackson can be.
Re:Gorilla / Human lovin'? (Score:4, Funny)
Wait a sec... (Score:2)
Well, isn't that what evolution is? Maybe humans and gorillas share a common ancestor. (Well, DUH!)
I can imagine one of two scenarios:
1. Humans evolved from the same primates as gorillas, and the lice just stuck with us the whole time.
2. Some human had sex with a gorilla.
I just want to know why the christians want to believe number 2 over number 1.
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There ain't no missing link
They're never, ever going to find the missing link
There's no missing link
We're not something you can figure out with an equation
We are the genetic mutation
Aliens came and fucked the monkey
They fucked the monkey
Aliens came and fucked the monkey
They fucked the monkey
Darwin tried explaining it
Darwin did the best he could
Evolution-- pretty theory
But how could Darwin know, that
Aliens came and fucked the monkey
They fucked the monkey
Aliens came and fucked th
Re:Gorilla / Human lovin'? (Score:4, Informative)
It's an excellent article, but the summary makes no sense, which at least encouraged me to read the article to figure out what the hell they were talking about. For example, from the summary:
The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera.
1) What is "unsettling" about this? Anyone? No prior deeply held beliefs have been overturned. No profound conceptual schemes have been shaken to their very foundations. Parasites are known to be highly specialized. This fact has been published repeatedly for decades, always with great emphasis on how apparently hard it is to believe. After a couple of decades of being routinely reminded that individual species of ticks and fleas and lice are hyper-specialized, do you think we might ask that people stop presenting this fact as something astonishingly new?
2) The statement is contradicted by the article. What the article says is that head lice and pubic lice in humans are so different morphologically that "early taxonimists" assigned them to different genera. The article implies but does not say explicitly that this early assignment was not in fact justified.
In any case, this is an absolutely fascinating, albeit tentative and partial, reconstruction of the hominid evolutionary tree from parasite DNA, and I'm sure that as more data from different parasites becomes available we will be in for some real surprises. Internal parasites that are less likely to be passed between species should provide a record that is clearer than the lice record, where despite the relative paucity of inter-species transfers the record has clearly been muddied several times.
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There was a point where our human/chimp ancestors were covered with hair like modern chimps. On humans, the hair more or less receded to just our heads and nether regions. At this point, the existing hair-parasites should have started their independent evolutionary
hmmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Look, I don't know what these scientists have been doing with the gorillas in this study, but this seems like evidence of *something*.
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You laugh, but lice do provide a benefit: their irritation encourages mutual grooming, which is a primary source of the social bonding that every tribe needs.
Not humans... a human. (Score:4, Funny)
Dude... (Score:2, Funny)
hair shape (Score:4, Interesting)
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African American hair is more elliptical than white children's hair and head lice find it difficult to hold onto elliptical hair
Re:hair shape (Score:4, Informative)
Re:hair shape (Score:4, Funny)
It looks like its an arms race then.
Re:hair shape (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what parasite-host relationships are. Evolution isn't so much a march in a straight line, but a vicious cycle of decimation-immunization-regression to naivete-back to decimation, ie, the Red Queen hypothesis. The really interesting thing is the degree to which parasites have affected evolution. A lot of secondary sex characteristics, because of their biological expense, are really good indicators of parasite resistance.
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I can't help it: "Just imagine a Beowolf cluster of these!!!"
haha
S-
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It sounds like these kids get a break for being a minority in this case. In the US where African ancestry puts you in the minority, there might not be a big enough survival advantage for the necessary mutation to dominate the louse population. Even though there are pockets of the US where African ancestry is in the majority, the mutation may not have taken hold yet. If true, this might indicate that it takes a while for lice to evolve this feature. To really answer that question though, we should do a
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Good point. A non-biased way would involve, perhaps, taking hair samples from all the students. You have to snip a lock too, not just a single hair. I remember how we measured the width of a hair in one of our high school science classes. It turns out that on a lot of people, there is a lot of variation in width, and perhaps there is variation in shape too but we didn't attempt to measure that.
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Dating the first clothing (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC, there are two types of lice or fleas. One kind lived on human skin and hair, and the other preferred clothing and blankets and lived only in artificial fabrics. The scientists were trying to see when the fabric-preferring bugs diverged from a common ancestor by examining the genetics. Really clever!
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"One kind lived on human skin and hair, and the other preferred clothing and blankets and lived only in artificial fabrics. "
That's why you should never buy that tacky polyester K-Mart sh*t. Get natural fabrics.
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Kinda reminds me of people who complain about fruit having "chemicals" in them.
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"All fabrics are artificial.. I don't think I've ever seen a blanket or a shirt tree."
You're confusing the thing with what its made of. While there aren't "blanket trees," there certainly ARE cotton plants, and wool occurs naturally as well - ask any sheep. So you can make blankets and clothing out of cotton, or wool, or any other naturally-occuring fibre - but you won't find any naturally-occuring polyester. And don't get me started on how many naugas you have to kill to get even one decent naugahide
naugas you have to kill to get even one (Score:2)
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"an artifact is something made by human hands."
And human hands never "made" cotton or wool - these occur naturally, and existed before there were humans. Polyester, on the other hand, is artificial.
Reread my original post - you're confusing the material with the things made of the material. Its quite clear that I'm talking about the material or substance from which clothing is made. Fabrics can be made from cotton or wool or other naturally-occuring objects, or from polyester, which didn't exist until
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Hey, its all good :-) Its just that when I say you're confusing the substance (cotton or wool) with the things being made from it, its the same situation we run into all the time in programming, where people mistake the name of the thing (for example, the name of a variable) for the thing itself (or worse, a reference as being the thing).
People who confuse the two have a really hard time when you start assigning functions to variables.
Back on-topic - coding is like having lice - you really get an itch
Re:Dating the first clothing (Score:4, Interesting)
My thoughts: The widespread use of DDT is a known event that had wide ranging affects on the environment. Are there evident evolutionary effects on insects?
Does anyone study what the common cold looks like after many attempts to inoculate us against it?
I wonder if there are defined evolutionary differences in any species after the plagues?
Interestingly, we apparently don't even know if the food we eat today has the same nutritional value of the food that humans were eating 100 years ago.
Very interesting.
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IANAS, but I would hazard the answer to this is "yes," but that the results are inconclusive. The whole problem with the common cold, what makes it so difficult to inoculate against, is that it routinely "looks like" so many different things that we can't come up with a vaccine that will "recognize" them all.
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Actually, I read an interesting article a while back that descendants of the black plague have a mutation that gives them some immunity to HIV.
Here is a random article from Google [pbs.org]
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Seriously... in the study of ancient clothing... was it really that important for a woman to cover up her upper parts?? On the other hand (hehe), was this just something we devised later on?
Sounds stupid, but,
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Seriously though, INA-Anthorpologist but I would have thought that prototype clothing was made from animal skins? Early Europeans are known to have used whale skins to make portable huts and what little is left of tribal cultures today still wear animal skins or plated leaves.
TFA - Another thing to take into consideration is that tribal people h
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That paper, with its abstract available from PubMed [nih.gov], was from Mark Stoneking's group and I believe they said in interviews that they intended to pursue studying the difference between head lice and pubic lice to figure out when we lost our fur. So maybe this result tells us why there was no follow-up paper: The data could not be used to address that issu
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RTFA. There are three types: Head, pubic, clothing.
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These other researchers must have been pretty clueless then. Or you didn't actually read that either.
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- head lice and body lice have entirely different grasping systems. Non-interchangeable.
- lice can't survive IIRC more than a few hours away from a host. So their lifespan is intimately connected with their host(s)
- lice are species specific
Human body lice therefore are unlikely to have evolved their grasping mechanism (useless with body hair or wearing animal skins/furs) until shortly after textiles would have become common clothing for humans. So it doesn't give us precisely when humans
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Pants Were Optional, 100,000 Years Ago [slashdot.org]
Posted by timothy on Tue Aug 19, '03 08:48 PM
from the lousy-research-methods dept.
RobertB-DC writes
"German scientists have used differences in the DNA of lice to determine when humans started wearing clothes. It seems lice are highly specialized -- head lice lay their eggs only on hair, while body lice hide theirs in the folds of clothing. Using the differences in the two species'
Kinda speculative (Score:1)
"Ever wonder if pocket gophers have lice?" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:"Ever wonder if pocket gophers have lice?" (Score:4, Insightful)
What the fuck is a pocket gopher?
Re:"Ever wonder if pocket gophers have lice?" (Score:4, Funny)
Pocket gophers. (Score:1)
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"Is that a gopher in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"
I don't see the link ! (Score:1)
So many responses, so little time... (Score:5, Funny)
#10. Speak for yourself, professor.
#9. "coyote-ugly", move over...
#8. Shhh... Hear that? I think Dave Attell's head just exploded.
#7. Why is the waiting room empty? All I said was we...
#6. "Scratch-a while you can, monkey-boy!"
#5. Next on Springer...
#4. Time to bring the crab-infested brass monkeys in off the back porch, Radar.
#3. Yes, you heard me right, I need to get into those crabs' genes.
#2. Let's say we ask Jocelyn Elders to weigh in on this one.
and #1... Well I'll be a monkey's uncle, and a mighty itchy one at that.
(N.B., I know gorillas are apes not monkeys, so save the posting effort, it's just a freaking joke...)
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Personally, I think phylogenetic taxonomy makes a hell of a lot more sense -- but we all learned alpha taxonomy in school, and that's very clearly what all those well meaning people are using.
Spouting off about how everybody has it all wrong without p
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Timing when we lost our hair (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion this is one of the most interesting aspects of this research - being able to date when we started becoming hairless. It's always been a puzzle why we are relatively hairless compared to the other great apes, and I would guess that being able to put some time constraints on it is a step toward understanding how this happened.
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In my opinion this is one of the most interesting aspects of this research - being able to date when we started becoming hairless. It's always been a puzzle why we are relatively hairless compared to the other great apes, and I would guess that being able to put some time constraints on it is a step toward understanding how this happened.
And how about that head-hair, eh? In most straight-haired people, it grows to indeterminate length, until it gets cut or strangles its bearer. Where's the evolutionary advantage of that? What a weird design. I wonder if it's a product of culture working through evolution: the the need for hair grooming is part of the social pact, keeps us in the troupe. A deep syntax of the body?
Maybe head lice elicited the long, straight round hair in our genome. They certainly are specialized, can't survive anywhere el
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dzimmerm
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Granted, I was exaggerating. Only a few people manage hair longer than their body. Many millions, however, have hair past their butt. Terminal hair length is potentially very long.
It still seems even more absurd to me than extreme sexual signalling like the tail feathers of Birds of Paradise.
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Chicks with nice hair (listen to them talk amongst themselves sometime you might learn something) have proven they can be healthy enough for the 3 year marathon of having a kid. So the hair makes men want to screw them, and makes other women aware men want to screw the nice hair ones.
Why do you think the butch dykes cut their hair like Rosie ODonell? To remove the "I am a good breeder"
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Chicks with nice hair (listen to them talk amongst themselves sometime you might learn something)
Ah, you presumptuous, arrogant, snide little whippersnapper! Since it's humourous flamebait, I'll let it slide this time.
You're paraphrasing the dominant theories. I'm not unaware of them, and I don't disagree with them, but I don't trust them entirely either. The runaway sexual selection this idea relies on doesn't adress all ethnicities (e.g. the !Kung keep short hair, and it's wiry enough that they can just break it off), and there's the possibility that it signifies youth in an exaggerated manner (ne
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How about: coz enough people thought it looked nice AND the minuses aren't significant enough to select against it.
Evolution isn't about optimums - it's all about good enough. As long as it reproduces it doesn't matter how silly it looks or behaves or whatever.
You see tons of ridiculous creatures teetering at the edge of survival all the time, especially in places where energy and other resources are abundant.
And even in places where resources are not as abundant
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...head hair is good for preventing sun burn on our heads.
I'm bald, you insensitive clod!
Sorry, couldn't resist. Anyway, my question about evolutionary advantage was mostly rhetorical. I was trying to make the point that our natural selection is directed by culture and technology (another one is the shape of our jaw: cooking has made it weak and smaller), and I wonder if in fact the lice themselves haven't had more evolutionary effect than we suspect on the kind of hair we grow on our heads (i.e. less elliptical, longer).
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Thanks for the theories, with undoubtedly some truth to some of them. Still, I don't see why hair grows so long, and suspect it's more than just the sexual signals it sends, and caused by more than runaway sexual selection.
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Think of a woman with long hair. When she is wadding through a river trying to catch fish, she has her hands free while the baby is hanging onto her hair. Instead of leaving the baby by the riverside where it could get eaten.
So, you're suggesting that [citation lost but we trust you] once we lost our somatic hair, the hair on our head grew to compensate so the babies can cling to it.
Maybe, but I have children of my own. Unless head-hair pain thresholds have changed considerably, the concept of a woman letting an infant swing from her hair while she works is, well, worthy of Monty Python, and I had a good LOL at your theory. Tell me your address, I'll come over and demonstrate why it's unlikely!
On a more serious note, the qu
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As gobbo points out, having an infant clinging to your head while you went about your business would be a cumbersome arrangement t
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Clothing and hair loss are not really related. Clothing and moving to to temperate and arctic climates are probably much more related.
dzimmerm
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I think horses can usually outrun humans even for long distances. See also: Man versus Horse Marathon [wikipedia.org]
Not sure about that (Score:3, Interesting)
So I guess both the parent and grandparent messages are correct.
Except it's probably wrong (Score:2)
Someone jump in and tell me how this could possibly happen. We lost our body hair, but not our crotch, underarm or head hair. So the lice we were carrying before losing that hair...
A. Hated our pubic reagions and head.
B. were unable to adapt to
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Seems tigers get a bit put off by the mane when fighting lions - can't see the neck. That said, lions tend to do lots more cat vs cat fighting than tigers.
lice story after brain game controller... (Score:3, Funny)
We can see it right here on /. (Score:2, Insightful)
Rather than read a second-hand account... (Score:5, Informative)
Conclusion:
It was that Jane Goodall tramp! (Score:2)
http://www.lessonsforhope.org/images/cartoon_lars
oh noes, help Jodie (Score:2)
Help Jodie Foster get RID of them!
At least now..... (Score:2)
Great, just great (Score:2)
WHAT??? (Score:2)
Hey, mister, speak for yourself!!!
Flied lice (Score:3, Funny)
What do you mean "our pubic lice"?
This is Slashdot, most of us haven't had the opportunity to get public lice, you insensitive clod!
I got a question (Score:2)
Where does Paris Hilton get hers?
Based on some of her sex vids, I gotta say maybe from the same source, since many of her boyfriends appear to be gorillas - or at least dumber than gorillas.
Maybe even dumber than her, since they're screwing her.
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We can test this. Have gay sex with a dirty ape while gambling, drinking, and cussing and see if you get struck by lighting and hurricanes more often then those having Brady-Bunch-Mormon-style relationships.
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how were our ancestors to know that (Score:2)
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Umm, you do realize that that's the bog-standard definition of a species, don't you?
Of course it is. (Score:2)
Remember the examples from Greek mythology that involved inter-species breeding? There was a time when people thought the stories literal truth.
However, I was merely trying to make a crude joke about our ancestors and bestiality. Looks like the joke wasn't crude enough.
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I wish Richard Dawkins was made required reading for all the misguided lambs every Saturday night before churchday.
Hand in there my friend, there is still hope. You can be saved.
Re:another incorect assumption (Score:4, Funny)
That was the only thing you said that made sense
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