Bees Reveal Nature-Nurture Secrets 84
NoFear writes "The nature-nurture debate is a 'giant step' closer to being resolved after scientists studying bees documented how environmental inputs can modify our genetic hardware. The researchers uncovered extensive molecular differences in the brains of worker bees and queen bees which develop along very different paths when put on different diets. The research was led by Professor Ryszard Maleszka of The Australian National University's College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, working with colleagues from the German Cancer Institute in Heidelberg, Germany and will be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology."
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There is no nature-nurture debate.
Of course there is, just not among scientists (and certainly not among geneticists who are aware of heritability).
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I always thought the nature-nurture debate is a bit stupid. Seems to be part of the trend to find The Cause of everything. When you do cancer research you try to find what is the cause of cancer: Is it bad genes, environmental toxins or unhealthy lifestyle. It sometimes seems that scientists (esp. in the life-sciences) forget that it can be a combinations of the above together with the special magic ingredient called "Luck" (or bad luck).
The same is with the nature-nurture debate. They seem to ignore the mo
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You do understand I was talking in general terms? I'm sure I missed many more factors, but the basic idea still stands: It's more than one factor taking all the blame and luck/chance/statistics has a major part in it, in addition to the calculatable factors.
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I take a dice and throw it in the air. Even if I give you the starting terms and the exact forces used to throw the cube, you still cannot, with 100% absolute certainty, tell me what number it will land on. Even with everything known, there are things we cannot calculate.
I remember an example from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, "The Black Swan". If you hit a ball on a pool table, it is very easy to predict the outcome of the first collision. At about the 5th collision (IIRC, I don't have the book at hand), t
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I take a dice and throw it in the air. Even if I give you the starting terms and the exact forces used to throw the cube, you still cannot, with 100% absolute certainty, tell me what number it will land on. Even with everything known, there are things we cannot calculate.
I'm pretty sure if we had a marker on the cube and a hi-speed camera plus a rather fast image processing computer, we could give you an answer before the dice had landed. Also it wouldn't be too hard to create a robot arm to throw the dice
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Just because quantum physics is most obvious at sub-atomic levels does not mean it has no effect on the macroscopic world. Some cancers are potentially caused by nothing more then a gamma ray impacting a molecular structure in a cell in just the right not to cause it to start misbehaving. These gamma rays, being a result of a fusion reaction in the sun, are spawned with a random trajectory at a random time (quantum physics at work in the fusion reaction) and if it just happens to hit said molecule in you
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If you re-read my pool table example, you would understand that even with a completely accurate robot arm, repeated throws of a dice would give you different results, because the operator/a nearby car/the moon/Alpha Centauri just moved a bit during the time between throws.
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If you had enough data you could absolutely determine what side a dice will land on, the fact that determining those factors is outside the realm of any current technology we have and that no human being would be able to throw accurately enough to take advantage of them doesn't mean it couldn't be done. If you could calculate all the force which act, you could predict the result. The prediction isn't meaningful, but you could still do it.
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As I told someone else in this thread, to absolutely and 100% accurately predict the fall of a dice, you have to take into account every atom in the universe (see my example of the pool table). I find it hard to believe you would someday have a computer able to calculate that (and with only 640KB! :) ). Just look at the three-body problem. We still can't solve the gravitational relationships between 3 objects.
Even if possible, you should probably take into account also any minuscule force exerted by Quantum
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to absolutely and 100% accurately predict the fall of a dice, you have to take into account every atom in the universe (see my example of the pool table).
I don't buy either example. At some reasonable range, probably measured in centimeters(or at most, meters), the external effects are so minute that they have no real effect on the motion of the dice, or the billiard ball. The fact that the billiard ball is cited from a popular book does not make it a credible statement. It is possible that the billiard ball example might be accurate in an idealized situation of perfectly elastic collisions and no friction, but that is hardly real life.
--
JimFive
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It absolutely is calculatable, given enough data and research.
I believe that quantum mechanics would disagree with that statement.
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You won't die of cancer if you stick to this anti-cancer diet for the rest of your life.
Side effects? You won't live very long either
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DOOOOOOOooooooooooomed...
Re:Bees (Score:5, Insightful)
It sometimes seems that scientists (esp. in the life-sciences) forget that it can be a combinations of the above together with the special magic ingredient called "Luck" (or bad luck).
Don't mistake the simplifications of journalists for a lack of understanding on the part of scientists. *Everyone* working on cancer knows that it is a multifactorial disease process.
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Agreed, but somehow during all my studies I never saw one doctor that included "Luck" as one of the causes of cancer. It seems they are afraid to include it. They prefer to believe in a false world where everything is potentially predictable. I believe that even in a thousand years, after finding all the causes of cancer, we would still have a significant portion (20%, 40%, 50%?) that will be subscribed to chance.
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Luck is what people who don't believe in the supernatural call forces that they do not fully comprehend.
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Maybe. For me Luck is what I can otherwise call Randomness. Since even with the best calculation that we may have in the future, there will still be an element of randomness, there will always be room for "Luck". I can call it uncertainty, if you prefer it that way.
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Right, we know through various studies that you are mainly shaped by your environment, not your genetics.
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we know through various studies that you are mainly shaped by your environment, not your genetics.
It depends on the trait, see information on the aforementioned heritability [stanford.edu].
If you refer to "shaped" as in physical appearance excluding clothing, hair dye, and other accessories, then there are a number of physical traits (considered distinguishing in western culture) that have a substantial or very high heritability, e.g. eye colour, height, hair colour, skin colour. The accessories, or external "shapes" that we put onto ourselves, have extremely low heritability. But even then it's still not always zero,
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Agreed... it's a false dichotomy.
Resolving this debate is as easy as describing the sound of one hand clapping or finding a coin with only one side.
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The sound of one hand clapping sounds similar to two hands clapping, but less loud due to less force. A coin with one side would be a mobius strip as currency.
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People may not like to hear it, but the parent comment succinctly embodies the motivations for all nature-nurture studies and indeed a significant chunk of genetic/biology studies seen in the popular press.
People can be bigoted and racist if they want; but we are free to object when they try to call their opinions science.
Great to see... (Score:1, Interesting)
...that a possibly major scientific paper is published in an open access journal. This trend seems ever more powerful, to the benefit of all, except the usual vultures (Elzevier, Springer, Wiley...).
Beads?!? (Score:1)
Behavior of a program: code or input? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Organisms are not programs. DNA is not data. Biology is not a branch of computer science.
In bygone times, people would compare animals and indeed human beings to clocks or steam engines. Comparing them to computers is just a flawed and just as misleading. However, it is more fashionable, so I doubt people will stop doing it anytime soon.
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Re:Behavior of a program: code or input? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Programs are dynamic and I don't see an issue with stating that organisms are programs, because programs are simply a set of operations and parameters based on a language.
The real problem is we don't understand the compiler (biology) for the DNA (code) as well as we should. So the medical sciences are a lot like reverse engineering a program with a lot higher difficulty. But one could absolutely say that if we did understand how it all worked that it could be programmed in a code.
The thing with biology is, you can't separate the compiler and the code. DNA defines the machinery that defines what that DNA means. Function of proteins is largely determined by the environment, which is determined by how those same proteins work. Etc.
To decode DNA into computer code would require simulating cellular machinery at quantum mechanical level (because exact folding and functioning of proteins depends on very subtle interactions between electron "clouds" of individual atoms in molecules particip
Re:Behavior of a program: code or input? (Score:5, Insightful)
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DNA is in fact data, and does encode behaviour, in the same way that a stream of bits can encode data or actions. The difference is that DNA is base-four and is interpreted through molecular machinery in ways that are far more complicated than any human-designed instruction set or data format..
There is another difference: The computers are not build by the data they contain. I can get on board if the analogy is comparing humans to the software.
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Organisms are not programs. DNA is not data. Biology is not a branch of computer science.
In bygone times, people would compare animals and indeed human beings to clocks or steam engines. Comparing them to computers is just a flawed and just as misleading. However, it is more fashionable, so I doubt people will stop doing it anytime soon.
I disagree. Biological systems, mechanical systems, electronic systems, etc. all have something in common: potential energy is used to produce output. Energy -> system -> output. Each series of systems certainly have different complexity levels, but making such comparisons is entirely valid.
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Biology is distinct from computer science in terms of how we presently study them, yes. But they are both based on the same fundamental truths of the universe we exist in. (Some of which we do not know or fully understand yet.) Discovering these truths allows us to model biological systems and computer systems in much the same way.
DNA sequences are most certainly data. They describe how an organism builds itself, and to
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The "program" analogy is actually pretty good as far as analogies go - certainly far better than "clocks" or "steam engines", although the appropriateness of the analogy really depends on the context and purpose.
The genome of an organism (it's hereditary information) is encoded into its DNA - this would be the "program". DNA is composed of genes, sequences of genetic information that encode specific traits - analogous to statements or commands. Genes are composed of codons - analogous to words or bytes.
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In bygone times, people would compare animals and indeed human beings to clocks or steam engines. Comparing them to computers is just a flawed and just as misleading.
Absolutely! Everyone here knows they're much more like cars. The brain, obviously, is the steering wheel, as it controls the direction of the car. Or is the brain the ECU? Either way, the engine is the heart of the car. And the lungs are the carburetors.
Hey, when are we going to get our direct-injection circulatory systems?
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I think the original question (to give it fair credit) is "which is a better predictor of behavior?" Are criminals only criminals because nobody was there to hug them as they were growing up--will outreach programs solve the problem after a few generations? Is criminality something that a person is born with--is the blood of a criminal something that is passed down, and should they be persecuted for it? What about nobility? Is that in the blood, or can anyone, no matter how low their birth, be the next
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And... (Score:2, Funny)
what debate? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The "debate" isn't concerned with whether or not nature or nurture affects us - as you say, the answer is of course. The debate is about two things - how much of a role each one plays and how the two roles interact. We get that your diet as an infant can affect how you grow up, but the better question is how that diet actually elicits a change and response in your genetics or general physiology.
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I agree with you on the nature/nurture issue itself, but I think you wrong about this being a settled issue in the societies at large. The quiet is due to people not caring.
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The quiet is due to people not caring.
I think they care a great deal, the same way they care about medical research. Immigration policies, adoption and eating habits are all examples of big subjects closely related to the nature/nurture issue.
debate on detail (Score:2)
yeah, bur creationist, young earthist and other crazy crackpot theorists need this kind of hyperbol. How otherwise are they going to pretend that " [hard science xyz] is a theory in crisis as proved by major debate therefore we have to teach content of bronze-age book as a viable alternative" ?
I think the whole nature-nurture debate is hogwash (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Matt Ridley:
The discovery of how genes actually influence human behaviour, and how human behaviour influences genes, is about to recast the debate entirely. No longer is it nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture. Genes are designed to take their cues from nurture
Goodbye, nature vs nurture [newscientist.com]
Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands. It is not that the behaviour of an organism is for the most part determined by it genes, or either that is is determined by it nurture.
Nurture will give direction, Nature will limit the abilities.
How much you'll train a dog, it will never be able to play chess. How much you'll train a toddler, it will never be able to have capabilities to follow a scent trail like a bloodhound.
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I play chess with my dog all the time. He's the only one I can beat!
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[...]
How much you'll train a dog, it will never be able to play chess. How much you'll train a toddler, it will never be able to have capabilities to follow a scent trail like a bloodhound.
No one is debating absurdities like that though. The question is more like, was Manson destined to be a serial killer or was that a social effect? Or phrased more dangerously, if I add some environmental inputs, can I make sure no one is gay ever again?
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Or you take the third approach: it was inevitable that Manson became what he is. We humans are composed of non-thinking, non-sentient base elements (mainly hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and other trace metals). As such, our bodies are bound by the physical laws of this universe. Change the position of one quark at the beginning of the universe and our solar system may not even exist today (let alone Charles Manson).
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Nurture will give direction, Nature will limit the abilities.
I think you may be confusing nurture with training. In any case, nurture can certainly be limiting (as in eating habits effect on athletic performance) and nature can give directions (the giraffe will eat from tall trees).
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Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands.
It's been obvious for decades now that "nature vs nurture" is a stupid way to decompose the various influences on human behaviour, but journalists and idiots (but I repeat myself) will continue to ask the "burning" question "nature vs nurture?" for at least a couple of decades more.
Even so, /. in 2025 will probably carry stories with headlines:
"Nature or Nurture: Which explains the failure of Linux on the desktop?"
"Engineers look to unexpected places for variable geometry low-speed wing design: birds!"
"Co
We're going to solve nature vs nurture! (Score:2, Funny)
For BEES!
That will be totally applicable to humans.
Once we learn to fly.
And turn yellow with black stripes.
And grow bee fuzz.
And grow another pair of limbs...
Where's the news in this? (Score:1)
I remember reading an article years ago mentioning that queen bees become queens because their were fed a special diet not because they are genetically different. In fact they said it while explaining how if a queen bee dies the workers simply pick a worker larva at random and feed it royal jelly and it becomes a new queen bee. The article spoke of it even then as a well accepted fact, not some breaking news.
So this can't be the news. From reading the article I gather the researchers discovered the actual c
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The triune brain (Score:2)
There is an interesting book, called "A general theory of love", it describes a model - the triune brain*, which stipulates that the brain is made from 3 different regions (reptilian, limbic, neocortex) and explains how they interact with each other.
The authors provide a lot of examples which illustrate that in the case of mammals, nurture plays a very important role. Children who do not play, or who don't hang out with other humans grow up to be solitary, lacking social skills, their lives are shorter, the
What about the making of drones? (Score:1)
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Nurture not only makes a queen out of the common female lava (that would have become a female worker) but also the drones that are MALE. So, as suggested, the DNA of a female worker and the DNA of a queen may be the same but royal jelly 'triggers' the DNA to make a bigger queen; then what about making the drone? The DNA of a female, be it worker or queen, can't possibly be the same as a male, the drone, can it?
Haploid drones, contributing genes to the queens of other hives, also contribute to the code/data pool because they are the members of the hive which sample the local environment most often. Queens are exposed to the environment on one maiden flight during which they mate with drones which run the environmental gauntlet all Spring and Summer until the hive shuts down for Winter. In other words, drones have a huge metaphorical thumb on the evolutionary scales compared to every other member of the hive, inc
Not really nature/nurture. (Score:2)
Finally Solved! (Score:1)