Octopus and Human Brains Share the Same 'Jumping Genes' (scitechdaily.com) 49
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SciTechDaily: An exceptional organism with an extremely complex brain and cognitive abilities makes the octopus very unique among invertebrates. So much so that it resembles vertebrates more than invertebrates in several aspects. The neural and cognitive complexity of these animals could originate from a molecular analogy with the human brain, as discovered by a research paper that was recently published in BMC Biology and coordinated by Remo Sanges from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) of Trieste and by Graziano Fiorito from Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn of Naples. This research shows that the same 'jumping genes' are active both in the human brain and in the brain of two species, Octopus vulgaris, the common octopus, and Octopus bimaculoides, the Californian octopus. A discovery that could help us understand the secret of the intelligence of these remarkable organisms.
Sequencing the human genome revealed as early as 2001 that over 45% of it is composed of sequences called transposons, so-called 'jumping genes' that, through molecular copy-and-paste or cut-and-paste mechanisms, can 'move' from one point to another of an individual's genome, shuffling or duplicating. In most cases, these mobile elements remain silent: they have no visible effects and have lost their ability to move. Some are inactive because they have, over generations, accumulated mutations; others are intact, but blocked by cellular defense mechanisms. From an evolutionary point of view even these fragments and broken copies of transposons can still be useful, as 'raw matter' that evolution can sculpt.
Among these mobile elements, the most relevant are those belonging to the so-called LINE (Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements) family, found in a hundred copies in the human genome and still potentially active. It has been traditionally though that LINEs' activity was just a vestige of the past, a remnant of the evolutionary processes that involved these mobile elements, but in recent years new evidence emerged showing that their activity is finely regulated in the brain. There are many scientists who believe that LINE transposons are associated with cognitive abilities such as learning and memory: they are particularly active in the hippocampus, the most important structure of our brain for the neural control of learning processes. The octopus' genome, like ours, is rich in 'jumping genes', most of which are inactive. Focusing on the transposons still capable of copy-and-paste, the researchers identified an element of the LINE family in parts of the brain crucial for the cognitive abilities of these animals. The discovery, the result of the collaboration between Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, was made possible thanks to next-generation sequencing techniques, which were used to analyze the molecular composition of the genes active in the nervous system of the octopus.
Sequencing the human genome revealed as early as 2001 that over 45% of it is composed of sequences called transposons, so-called 'jumping genes' that, through molecular copy-and-paste or cut-and-paste mechanisms, can 'move' from one point to another of an individual's genome, shuffling or duplicating. In most cases, these mobile elements remain silent: they have no visible effects and have lost their ability to move. Some are inactive because they have, over generations, accumulated mutations; others are intact, but blocked by cellular defense mechanisms. From an evolutionary point of view even these fragments and broken copies of transposons can still be useful, as 'raw matter' that evolution can sculpt.
Among these mobile elements, the most relevant are those belonging to the so-called LINE (Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements) family, found in a hundred copies in the human genome and still potentially active. It has been traditionally though that LINEs' activity was just a vestige of the past, a remnant of the evolutionary processes that involved these mobile elements, but in recent years new evidence emerged showing that their activity is finely regulated in the brain. There are many scientists who believe that LINE transposons are associated with cognitive abilities such as learning and memory: they are particularly active in the hippocampus, the most important structure of our brain for the neural control of learning processes. The octopus' genome, like ours, is rich in 'jumping genes', most of which are inactive. Focusing on the transposons still capable of copy-and-paste, the researchers identified an element of the LINE family in parts of the brain crucial for the cognitive abilities of these animals. The discovery, the result of the collaboration between Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, was made possible thanks to next-generation sequencing techniques, which were used to analyze the molecular composition of the genes active in the nervous system of the octopus.
Octopus? Humans? Intelligence. Madness. (Score:4, Informative)
Stars are wrong: LINE transposons generate novel intelligence behavior in squid and humans.
Stars are right: The ancient one rises from his deathlike sleep and rises from the ocean to retake posession of the earth, driving all who behold him to madness.
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what?
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Stars are wrong: LINE transposons generate novel intelligence behavior in squid and humans.
Stars are right: The ancient one rises from his deathlike sleep and rises from the ocean to retake posession of the earth, driving all who behold him to madness.
I'm not quite sure which I would prefer from these alternatives.
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Octopussy (Score:1)
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Re: Octopussy (Score:1)
Re:Explain intelligence? Naa... (Score:4, Insightful)
The current state-of-the-art is that we basically know general intelligence cannot be done by physical systems.
Says the physical system posting about it on slashdot.
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General intelligence is a farce.
We humans are the main example of intelligence but we are overall extremely specific intelligences with some general capabilities. Our general intelligence capabilities are extremely limited. If you don't think so, try to solve global warming and compute the square root of 123456789 in your head. That will put you in your place.
And i think the second part of your sentence is pure bullshit. You cannot, in principle, state that general intelligence cannot be done by a physical
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If you have a source for this tripe i'm interested to see it.
No, you are not. Quite obviously. You want to stick to your misconceptions. I will not waste my time on you.
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No, you are not.
I very much am. It's sad that you seem to think you know better what i'm interested in.
You want to stick to your misconceptions.
That's a lot of assuming you're doing while not providing any sources.
Maybe you should start with defining 'general intelligence', then maybe show that humans are general intelligences. And maybe then we can start thinking about what to expect from a computer that is to show the same behavior.
I will not waste my time on you.
That's what all people that ran out of arguments say...
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FWIW, I think it's been proven that actual "general intelligence" is impossible given at strong definition of what that means. So the definition of precisely what he's talking about when he claims "general intelligence" is spot on. Certainly there are weaker forms that could be appropriately given that name.
A sort of analogy might be made to the "Turing Test". Many people would fail an actual "Turing Test" and no computer could come close to passing it, but there are weak re-definitions of it that ... we
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General intelligence is a farce.
a fact clearly demonstrated by the post you comment to being "generally" modded "informative" ...
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If he asks me to do it in my head despite that being a pointless exercise, I can call him a clod.
LOL, point taken
Well, maybe the name 'general intelligence' is badly chosen.
What i have against this classification is that it is incredibly human-focused. We expect this assumed GAI to perform according to human standards, but human brains are highly specific. Even words like 'conceptualizing' is heavily skewed towards anthropocentrism, because we have no idea if it is necessary to consciously conceptualize problems in an abstract space before a solution can be formulated.
It comes down to most people actua
Re:Explain intelligence? Naa... (Score:5, Insightful)
We are very far removed from explaining intelligence.
Yes...
The current state-of-the-art is that we basically know general intelligence cannot be done by physical systems.
Since when? Brains are physical systems.
Even a tiny thing found at extreme conditions (gravity, speed, energy, etc.) can topple the whole thing and change everything
I strongly disagree. And I'm not the only one [hermiene.net].
Newtonian mechanics hasn't been "toppled" and completely changed. Everything in civil and mechanical engineering is built using Newtonian mechanics just fine to this day. About the only thing ever built that required general relativity are GNSS (GPS, etc). Most electronics is done with pretty basic things that are a simplification of Maxwell's equations. Quantum mechanics certainly makes it into some things, such as chip design and so on, but do any of them use QED, let alone electroweak theory or QCD?
In fact the majority of navigation is done using the flat-earth approximation because Euclidean geometry is easy and intuitive and most of us rarely travel far enough day to day that the curvature of the Earth becomes a significant factor.
So, no, tiny things at extreme conditions don't topple the whole thing and change everything. Existing physics comes out as the limit of the new equations. Because the old physics had excellent predictive power and that does not magically vanish.
Re:Explain intelligence? Naa... (Score:4, Insightful)
Citation needed. Seriously. You make claims without proof.
You don't get a free pass for simply making your completely unsourced claim first. What evidence do you have that there is something nonphysical about brains?
Your reasoning is little removed from "we don't know therefore aliens".
Tiny things scaled up massively can result in huge effects.
That doesn't need new physics. You can model the double pendulum with Newtonian mechanics and you find that if you do that, tiny changes in the starting conditions will grow exponentially over time. And this is what happens leading to chaotic behaviour. Quantum mechanics will tell you you cannot perfectly measure the starting conditions even in theory, but you don't need quantum mechanics to see the chaotic behaviour.
We cannot predict the long term behaviour of a double pendulum. A theory unifying gravity and QCD is not going to change that. Mere complexity alone leads to things we can't predict. New physics is not required.
try doing GPS with classical mechanics. Turns out to be impossible.
Gosh, thankyou for repeating the example I gave to you right back to me. That's super useful.
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Citation needed. Seriously. You make claims without proof.
You don't get a free pass for simply making your completely unsourced claim first. What evidence do you have that there is something nonphysical about brains?
You made a claim. You provide evidence. Oh, right, you cannot. Here is a hint: In the absence of evidence a question in Science is _open_, and not "I select whatever I want" as you seem to be thinking. Also note that I never said anything about "non-physical". I said "not covered by known Physics" and that is fundamentally different.
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Also note that I never said anything about "non-physical". I said "not covered by known Physics"
No you said this:
The current state-of-the-art is that we basically know general intelligence cannot be done by physical systems.
So you might think you said not known physics, but you actually said non physical.
You made a claim. You provide evidence.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of aliens. You're going basically "we don't understand therefore aliens". With the exception of neutrino oscillation, despite a l
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OK. But we do know that relativity, quantum mechanics, or both are "broken", because they make different predictions about what will happen. It's true that those predictions are about places/conditions where we can't look, but they exist anyway. (Of course, the idea that this has anything to do with how intelligence works is .. well, I can't think of any evidence for that.)
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OK. But we do know that relativity, quantum mechanics, or both are "broken",
No, we don't know they are "broken", we know they are incomplete.
because they make different predictions about what will happen.
Say what? Relativistic quantum mechanics is definitely a thing, and it's made a huge number of entirely correct predictions. What do you have in mind?
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Nope. I merely point out that a) known Physics is incomplete and b) nobody knows how a brain works and c) brains are _known_ to work on an extreme complexity level found nowhere else in nature or current technology and there is a lot of randomization in there. These are sound scientific claims and represent the state-of-the-art. That the physicalist quasi-religious sect does not want to go along with that changes nothing. The religiously deranged like to claim they have Science on their side when that is ba
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But didn't you know: absence of evidence is evidence of aliens.
I mean I'm not saying the brain is aliens... but it's aliens.
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Nope. That is "the question is open". "God of the gaps" is pretty stupid IMO and has some quite fundamental flaws. It is not accident it is commonly regarded as a fallacy by people with a clue. Essentially just some religious scientists trying to bridge the gap between Science and their irrational religious beliefs and basically compromising their scientific integrity that way.
Seriously, I insist that the question is open. I have absolutely no idea why so many people to then conclude there is something I wa
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To say that currently physics is incomplete is to understate the problems. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics yield contradictory predictions. (The predictions are about rather extreme conditions, but they exist.)
To say that it has anything to do with how the brain works appears totally unwarranted. (I.e. I'll need to see evidence of why one should believe that there's a connection.)
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To say that it has anything to do with how the brain works appears totally unwarranted.
Which just means you have not looked into what is known about how the brain works. Well, the little bit that is known. Fix that and then come again.
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Generally agree, but quantum gravity is just a jobs program. Gravity itself can be explained as a torsion field effect of time without it being a real force.
The equations work just fine due to symmetries.
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Thanks.
Well, the equations are pretty irrelevant by themselves or rather they are only a first step. What is relevant is how things actually work. Anybody following current Physics research knows we are nowhere near to a complete, accurate and verified (!) picture. Yet people like to make claims by elimination (which requires a complete and perfectly accurate model) and that is just stupid.
Comparison with other animals? (Score:2)
"very unique" (Score:2)
"unique" doesn't take modifiers. It means "there is only one".
A thing is unique or it is not. Take a 5th-grade English class.
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"unique" doesn't take modifiers.
What about "almost unique" and "truly unique"? The modifier "almost" implies it's not actually but close to being unique while "truly" implies that it is not an exaggeration. I agree that "very" is improper use but I also realize that English is more than just a living language, it's the linguistic bowl of slop that we keep throwing more words, languages, and grammars into.
Re: "very unique" (Score:2)
Good points. I probably should've said something like "amplifiers".
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I might be better to point out that "unique" is an absolute and compare "very unique" to being similar to writing "more first".
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Tell that to the creators of Diablo II.
Intriguing (Score:2)
What is definitely known is that no two cells in the human brain share the same genome. I have contended, for some time, that this has to be relevant and must be, in some way, related to how it processes signals and how it connects up to other cells. However, it's one thing for an armchair observer to allege that XYZ must serve some purpose and that mechanisms don't tend to be retained unless they serve some purpose. It's quite another for researchers to now say that this is plausible because it's seen in
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Because researchers, from different institutes, on three separate occasions have reported this in peer-reviewed papers. Anything verified to that degree has a high degree of certainty. If it's independent of the observer and methodology, it has a high degree of confidence.
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IIUC, no two cells in the body share exactly the same genome. Copying errors are unavoidable. If you want to show that this is significant, you need additional evidence. Evidence that can't be explained by epi-genetic modifiers.
This LN-1 transposon may prove to be such an example. There's evidence that it's closely regulated, and more active in the hippocampus than elsewhere in the brain. If that holds up, it will need explanation.
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These sum up, with varying levels of reliability, what is known. And what is known is that the differences vastly exceed anything seen in the rest of the body.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020... [ox.ac.uk]
https://www.newyorker.com/tech... [newyorker.com]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.o... [semanticscholar.org]
https://rep.bioscientifica.com... [bioscientifica.com]
https://theconversation.com/br... [theconversation.com]
https://mobilednajourna [biomedcentral.com]
I knew it! (Score:2)
You seriously want me to think that those genes just so happened to show up in both of us by coincidence?
Clearly, this raises the question: was the hominid-octopus sex consensual or is there more truth to the hentai tentical-rape videos than people care to admit?! ;)
Jumping genes almost certainly not significant (Score:2)
When a gene jumps, it's effects - if any - change. They can't be activated at the same time because the placement affects activation.
If the gene can enhance the species in a particular location, then either evolution will lock it in place, or that enhancement will be rare and therefore unimportant.
If the gene can impair the species in a particular location than it gets declared a mutation and tends to be bred out of the species. Basically this is ends up being a rare genetic disorder.
There is almost no li
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It's not that simple. Yes, your points are valid...but the genes aren't jumping all the time. They move around during cell divisions, and then stay in place. If they enter the gene-line they will often stay in place over evolutionary time. This allows them to become important. It also allows them to alter into inactive forms, and then mutate again into newly significant forms. (We may have gotten color vision that way...though I'm not sure the duplicated gene was a transposon.) They can also carry ac