Humans' Big Brains Linked To a Small Stretch of DNA 95
A new study (abstract) described in the L.A. Times suggests that "just 10 differences on one particular strand of human DNA lying near a brain-development gene could have been instrumental in the explosive growth in the human neocortex."
The DNA region, containing just 1,200 base pairs, is not a gene. But it lies near one that is known to affect early development of the human neocortex, according to the study, published online Thursday in Current Biology. Researchers showed that the region, known as HARE5, acts as an enhancer of the gene FZD8. Embryos of mice altered with human HARE5 developed significantly larger brains and more neurons compared with embryos carrying the chimp version, according to the study.
Look around you (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Look around you (Score:4, Funny)
But then I couldn't work out if it thought it mostly Flamebait, Troll, Redundant, Insightful, Interesting, Informative or Funny.
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As your understanding of the genome increases, I wonder if sooner or later, someone is going to try gene therapy to hit HARE5 to try to boost it more?
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Re:Look around you (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and this isn't Twitter. You don't need to say '@GloomE' - we can tell from the fact that you replied to his post that you replied to his post.
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If you make the brain bigger without an increase in skull size bad things can happen....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold%E2%80%93Chiari_malformation
Personally, I think the emotional problems associated with 3+ standard deviation above-average IQ have failed to create an evolutionary incentive for women's pelvis size to have any need to allow for larger heads. The inevitable existential crisis is enough of a ceiling on intellect without any sort of volumetric constraint.
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A more interesting approach would be to delay the age at which the head stops growing, though that would also need extra skeletal scaffolding to carry the larger head around, improvements to the cardiopulmonary system to keep it supplied with blood, and so on. Basically, the human brain is about as big as you can get it with small incremental changes to a hominid
...and those small incremental changes are ongoing to make us larger overall, setbacks due to inadequate nutrition aside. A larger human can support a larger brain...
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I think the genes responsible for 'bigger' and 'more' generally don't take up more space, much less than 'restructure to do the same in a brain half the size'. Probably we've taken a very wasteful approach to getting smarter in terms of er, brain real estate.
Re: Look around you (Score:3)
This proposal, of course, works from the assumption that you can get marginal gains in intelligence from marginal increases is brain mass, which I'm pretty sure hasn't been established empirically.
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The current size of the human head is limited by the pelvic size of women
This is incorrect, the reason human babies aren't more developed at birth is because the energy required to continue development is larger than the energy the mother's body can produce. Unfortunately, my google-fu seems to be faulty; I can't find the BBC documentary where this was shown...
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The current size of the human head is limited by the pelvic size of women
"I like big butts and I cannot lie." It's not just a preference, it's an evolutionary advantage!
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Say... (Score:2, Funny)
Algernon? Is that you?
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Don't discount knowledge acquired in the School of Hard Knocks.
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In the end it's about judging people on their merits, not their background or some rubber-stamped credentials.
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The experiment ended one morning when the HARES mouse cage was found empty, with a note neatly printed in Comic Sans:
As socially enlightened rodents we have decided to quit this stupid study and accept Salon's offer of a columnist position, which we will fill cooperatively.
Yours in solidarity,
-Algie
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what do you want to do tonight? the same thing we do every night, try to take over the world!
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Re: Look around you (Score:2)
While I slightly disagree with his comment, I think it just needs to be phrased differently. When we say "smart" we may mean depth of knowledge in one or more subjects, or able to grasp new things quickly, but there is a much greater diversity in useful intellect. My father is not what most people would call "smart", he's not great at learning new things, has a below average grasp of math, doesn't read or enrich his mind, etc. yet he can look at a problem in the real world and find a solution to it in a
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or me, "dumb" is just a label that closed-minded people apply to other people, so they can feel superior. Which seems to be fundamental to the human psyche : we need to be better than other people. It's our base drive to compete. I think this might also explain greed : possessing more resources is one way to be better than the rest.
My opinion: dumb people are those that have no idea how ignorant they are about a great many things. I don't think that opinion is new at all :-)
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I'm assuming you weren't intentionally copying the premise of Idiocracy [imdb.com].
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This is perfectly illustrated and explained in the first 5 minutes of the movie "Idiocracy"
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Thats where their evolutionary "currency" was spent
The currency is the food needed to grow the tissue and support it. Evolution itself doesn't cost anything.
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Still, many things can happen in parallel. A tiger could have evolved to have bigger muscles, and a bigger brain at the same time.
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Aye,
Some dogs can understand over 200 words. And dolphin which are predatory creatures are very intelligent and are close to the weight of tigers (200kg vs 225kg for largest).
The long term bacterial experiment also shows that many mutations occur constantly which have no immediate effect. As long as they are not detrimental, they get carried along. For example- humans average 67 mutations compared to their parents.
Combinations of these benign "noise" mutations separated by thousands of generations in t
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Currency is a pretty appropriate word to use since a mutation which produces an adaptation which might be useful in that it permits success in a new niche might decrease success in the present one. Time to go...
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Maybe, but I bet it doesn't know what a newton [wikipedia.org] is.
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Don't feed the trolls. Especially the cray-cray trolls.
The culprit: Noah Lamechsson (Score:2)
What the hell? Cats make their own vitamin C. Explain that!
In some variants of I.D. genetics, a mutation can only subtract functionality, not add. So some I.D. advocates would claim that humans were created perfect, with the ability to synthesize ascorbic acid, before such a deleterious mutation became fixed in the population during a massive bottleneck in the 24th century BCE. So if Noah Lamechsson had a defective allele for the vitamin C gene, all of humanity ended up with this defect. Other I.D. advocates would counter this with a claim that humans were designed [eurekalert.org]
Re:I.D. (Score:5, Insightful)
But if it was evolution alone, other species would have it too
You assume that bigger brains offer a net benefit to other species. The problem is that large brains consume a large amount of energy. If the extra intelligence doesn't help to acquire extra food, the bigger brain is not a asset. Also, acquiring food is only part of the equation. Animals must also be able to actually eat and digest it. An animal like a cow already spends every waking moment on eating and digesting. Even if bigger brain could help it find more grass, there's still not enough time to actually process enough of it.
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Intelligence can do far more than gather food more effectively. Less intelligent critters are plenty good at that as well. Early proto-humans probably had some other advantages, such as the ability to adapt to changing conditions, or to create tools useful for weapons or defense, all thanks to bigger brains. Intelligence is really the ultimate utility trait, because it allows for better adaptation that might cause other animals to simply die out. Look at how successfully early humans survived all over t
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Intelligence can do far more than gather food more effectively. Less intelligent critters are plenty good at that as well
The point is that they need to "pay" for their bigger brain by eating more food. And for a creature with a small body, it means a a lot more food. So, it doesn't matter what nice things intelligence can do for a creature, if it can't afford the energy for it.
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Well, yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you regarding that. I'm aware that it's an extremely expensive organ in terms of nutrient consumption. I was just pointing out that intelligence offers more benefits than increased food gathering capabilities.
Interestingly, you talk about the need eat a lot of food. Our human brain actually allows us a richer diet by giving us the intelligence to cook our food. That makes it easier for us to digest meat, which in turn makes us more efficient predators. I've r
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Yes, there's a theory that humans cooking their food was a big enabler for their bigger brains, because the cooking process makes it a lot easier to digest the food and absorb more of the nutrients in a short time. But the ability to cook the food depends on a lot more than being intelligent. You also need the body that allows manipulation of tools so you can carry the fire wood, start a fire and control it, and carry the food to the fire. That's something that our bipedal humanoid ancestors could do well,
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Being able to put on other animals' skins and dance around is probably a big part of it. Getting fire figured out will have been a trial-and-error-prone process.
Tools without thumbs (Score:2)
You also need the body that allows manipulation of tools so you can carry the fire wood, start a fire and control it, and carry the food to the fire. That's something that our bipedal humanoid ancestors could do well, but most other animals would not be able to pull off
Even without opposable thumbs, tools can stil be figured out. Watch this man chop wood without hands [youtube.com].
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Well, yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you regarding that. I'm aware that it's an extremely expensive organ in terms of nutrient consumption. I was just pointing out that intelligence offers more benefits than increased food gathering capabilities.
It's one metric. But it seems like a "humans are the apex of creation" outlook after a while.
Our intelligence is pretty impressive, but it is just one metric. Some species achieve remarkable success via massive overproduction, some through aggression (more on that) some through specialization.
And is success measured by weight, aplha predation, or intelligence? THere are even honorable mentions for highly adapted senses.
Humans have the intelligence, and the ability to do somkething about it, with our m
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I don't believe I declared that humans are the "apex of creation", nor even declared them to the most successful, depending on how you define that. I was just pointing out some advantages of our physiology that's led to our current evolutionary success - meaning we've survived so far as a species. Of course, past success does not guarantee future performance.
By other metrics, such as evolutionary diversity, I might choose ants or arachnids. Maybe simple shrimp species that haven't changed much in 200 mil
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Look at how successfully early humans survived all over the globe, in almost every climate
Yes along side thousands of other species that are even more widely dispersed and which have been at the game of survival thousands (in some cases billions) of times longer.
Re: I.D. (Score:2)
Re: I.D. (Score:2)
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What would a smart cow do differently?
Not double-post? :-)
Animals are better at communicating when it comes to predator/prey than humans are. They can detect us further away, and flee en masse, same as birds flocking. Or if you're a herd of elephants, just form a circle with heads out and say the equivalent of "do you really want a piece of this"? For most of our human's existence, we were scavengers, same as the vulture and the hyena, because we couldn't compete.
Any group of humans that got too large to be sustained in it's area would end
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Intelligence is a plus if the species is opportunistic and social. Like for instance raptors. Standing on rear legs opens opportunities - indicating that it increases chances for opportunistic strategies to outweigh the extra braincost.
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An animal like a cow already spends every waking moment on eating and digesting.
And farting. So many farts.
So, bigger brain also helps with obesity (Score:1)
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But if it was evolution alone, other species would have it too.
Evolutionary innovations don't work like that. There's a species that's first. It might not keep the monopoly for long, but humans haven't been around for long.
Re: Are you prepared? (Score:1)
What does this mean for lesser human beings, in a world where animals are slaughtered without so much as a care to allow them to turn around in gestation crates.
Well we already have zoos, chicken farms, etc. No reason a few humans wouldn't fit in there. ;-)
life imitates art (Score:3, Funny)
next time on Pinky & the Brain...
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what do you want to do tonight? the same thing we do every night -- try to take over the world!
mice, HGTTG (Score:5, Insightful)
If we learned anything from The Hitchhiker's Guide, it is that the mice are the supreme species on earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
What's the point of injecting inferior genes into their brains?
On a more serious note, it will probably be a long time before genetic science can safely determine the source of intelligence or any way to manipulate it. And a long time beyond that to overcome social and legal impediments to using the knowledge in any practical way. Expect to be just as dumb as you are for the rest of your life.
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_____________
reesistance is futile
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We also learned:
- That we should never trust marketing. GPP feature, anyone? Share and enjoy? [+5 Funny]
- That if life is to survive in a Universe this size the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion [+5 Insightful]
- That galactic banks are a figment of our imagination [+5 Informative]
- That with a degree in math and another in astrophysics it is either this or the unemployment agency on Monday morning [+5 Informative]
- That cricket is evil [+5 Funny]
- That isolationism is bad. "It has
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On a more serious note, it will probably be a long time before genetic science can safely determine the source of intelligence or any way to manipulate it.
Oh but it won't be so long once we genetically modify ourselves to be intelligent enough to understand those genetics.
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Of course your government, your religious leader and probably your boss don't want you to be any smarter. Other people will hate you too. Be stupid, be happy, that's my motto.
just 10 differences? (Score:2)
Then why doesn't someone make these 10 changes to a chimp egg and sperm and see what happens?
Re:just 10 differences? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why doesn't someone make these 10 changes to a chimp egg and sperm and see what happens?
Planet of apes : rise of the funky monkey (3D)
....
In cinemas this season
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What do we do with "him" (or "her")?
Keep it secret in a deep ocean underwater facility, destroy the weakest, breed the strongest, train them in the use of weapons and martial arts, indoctrinate them to act only on your command upon hearing a special code word. Infiltrate the final product around the globe in special sleeper cells.
Overtake the world... what are you doing tonight Pinky?
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Not sufficient (Score:3)
Apparently, this enlargement is not sufficient to prevent dup in /. [slashdot.org]
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It makes brains so big it takes two stories to cover them.
Re: Not sufficient (Score:1)
Not necessarily... you see, there's a relation between brain size, the occurrence of dupes, and how much they're read:
Reads = 2 ^ (X + 1)
With "Reads" being the number of permutations for "read the story" vs. "too many dupes, didn't read", and X being the number of [original story + dupes].
Any original story may be read by a /. reader, or not. Hence the power-of-2 in above equation. With original story + 2 dupes, you have 8 permutations: some who read the original story, not the 1st dupe, but then read t
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This should be modded "Dup +5", if only it existed ;)
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OMG, is this ethical? (Score:4, Interesting)
So they're breeding mice with the genes of a human brain? As Kramer said in that episode, there is a secret plan for pig men, or rather rat men.
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It worked for raccoons, so I'm optimistic about pigs and rats.