Finally – my very own race card!
Among the tale the genes tell: A few anatomically modern humans mated with Neanderthals, likely in North Africa or the Middle East as modern humans initially were moving out of Africa, the researchers say.
The team came to that conclusion after comparing the Neanderthal genome with those of five humans today: one each from Europe, Asia, and Papua New Guinea, and two from different regions of sub-Saharan Africa. They found that from 1 to 4 percent of the DNA in the genomes of people from Eurasia and the southwestern Pacific were inherited from Neanderthals. Neanderthal-derived genes failed to show up in the African genomes.
The results overturn what Dr. Pääbo calls the “hard out-of-Africa hypothesis” in which a small group of anatomically modern humans migrates from Africa “and replaced everyone else in the world without any admixture.” It’s entirely possible that African genomes also contain some other form of what Pääbo dubs “caveman biology” from more archaic hominins. “We just don’t know that yet,” he says.
But surely that tiny bit of Neandertal DNA is so low as to be irrelevant?
In the human brain, there is a set of three genes that generate more than 3,000 different genetic messages and these messages control how your neurons are wired together, he said. “That enables you to think and learn and all the wonderful things we like to do as humans.”
Before you comment, my dear leftie friends, let me remind you that in “knuckledragger”, the “k” is silent.
Alas, as knowledge unfolds.
The concept of personal identity and such gains some light.. As DNA has bcome more accepted…
Anyone recall the concept of Hard Wiring ?
The principal that ones brain comes with certain
attributes at birth ? Among others needed for survival.
To the point, anybody read The Bell Curve
of late ? Not very PC.
We are all just flat out and without choice
born different from each other.
There will always be inequality, get over it..
The intermixing as described could only work if Cro-Magnon and Modern human females were impregnated by male Neanderthals.
Sluts!
Threads like this are what maintain the interest of all us silent ones.
Keep up the good work!
Out of curiosity, how many of the people commenting have read the actual paper? I read it today and it was mindblowing. It’s available at the Science website for free download. Usually I ignore most of the Science email alerts but todays was a must-read.
I hadn’t realized that DNA sequencing technology had advanced this far. It was a mere 10 years ago that the human genome was first sequenced and I vividly remember clearing off enough space on my hard drive so I could download this, then humungous file — a download that took close to a day. I spent several days just scrolling through the base sequences marveling at what had been done
What the authors of this paper have done is the equivalent of what Michael Crichton wrote about in Jurrasic park — all that remains to be done is to actually generate the neanderthal DNA in chromosome size packets, add the necessary histones, spindle apparatus proteins, etc and inject it into a human egg whose nucleus has been destroyed. Implant said egg in a volunteer uterus, wait 9 months and out comes a baby neanderthal; Rosemary’s pleistocene baby in the view of some people.
My molecular biology days were 35 years ago and then I could just fantasize about stuff like this. The DNA used for sequencing was taken from ~200 mg of bone marrow powder, amplified with PCR and sequenced using automatic sequencers. 80-90% of the DNA was bacterial in origin and this had to be removed from the analysis. All DNA present had been degraded into sections about 200 base-pairs long. For those who think this is no big deal, think of it as taking the contents of a small library, slicing up all the books into chunks containing an average of 200 letters each, pour in a couple of truckloads of similarly processed national enquirers, stir well, and then reassemble the library books from the mess of small paper chunks. This is analagous to what the people who wrote this paper accomplished.
For me to be able to comment on a technical level on the techniques used to establish homology between European and Neanderthal genomes would probably take me a solid 3-6 months of catching up on molecular biology. For someone without the requisite background it must just be incoherent ramblings. This is where the trust factor in science becomes very important and why AGW “science” is the most potentially destructive event in the history of the scientific method. In contrast to the AGW hiding of data, molecular biologists post their results for anyone to download and play with.
Where I differ with molecular biologists is in their assumptions that knowing the genetic makeup of an individual tells one everything one needs to know about the individual — there’s nothing in the schematic diagram of the pentium processor that predicts the existence of the internet or facebook (an analogy which should be self-evident I hope).
We still know SFA about how the brain wires itself up and how it rewires itself. In my lifetime as a neuroscience researcher I’ve seen multiple dogmas toppled under the weight of overwhelming contrary evidence; when I first started in this area it was a known absolute truth that neurons don’t divide — you had the number you were born with and this dropped off with aging depending on how well you treated your brain. Then, it was found that neurons in the hippocampus divide routinely and that people who are depressed have no neuronal division in the hippocampus and new neuron production is restored with antidepressants. Glial cells were thought to be mere supportive cells of neurons and now it seems they carry on a vast amount of computation albeit at a much slower rate than neurons do. The one I liked the best was “of the 10 billion neurons in the brain, 100 billion of them are cerebellar granule cells”. This constant turnover off cells explains why my vast grasp of organic chemistry 35 years ago has been replaced by medicine and I wish there was a way I could do a brain dump to store the state of my brain when it had achieved such a mastery of a subject.
DNA/RNA carry out incredibly complex computations on a cellular level and most “junk” DNA turns out to be involved in computations that we still don’t understand but are very rapidly learning. It won’t be long before we’ll be able to modify humans although this likely will take place outside of N. America given the hostility of governments here towards human embryonic experimentation.
I just hope that that molecular biology progress is fast enough so I can get anti-aging treatments before my current body gets too old. It’s still a tossup whether in the near future it will be easier to achieve immortality by downloading oneself into a sufficiently massive computer or repairing all of the accumulated molecular damage in ones body. Greg Bear has written a couple of excellent books pertaining to the neanderthal genetics theme in Darwin’s radio and Darwin’s Children — both highly recommended and Greg Bear does as good a job at researching the underlying science as Michael Crichton (may he rest in peace) did.
Phantom, genetics explains 40-80% of inheritance of IQ although the numbers are in considerable dispute. One just has to look at population IQ’s to see this in action. I won’t go any further on this topic since this area has been covered here many times before and ET’s views on this area are also well known.
ET
“Thinking is an individual action; while knowledge is a group-based action.”
This is wrong in multiple ways:
– knowledge is not an action, it’s a collection of facts & their relationships
– knowledge is not group based, it resides within individuals or in documents created by individuals
And IQ is mostly inherited, but can, to some small extent, perhaps be sharpened/dulled by the environment. (So there!)
@loki, when you said: “all that remains to be done is to actually generate the neanderthal DNA in chromosome size packets, add the necessary histones, spindle apparatus proteins, etc and inject it into a human egg whose nucleus has been destroyed. Implant said egg in a volunteer uterus, wait 9 months and out comes a baby neanderthal.”
I thought of Rosie ODonnell. I don’t know why, I just did.
langman, that’s a horrid image to take to bed with me! I’m sure there’s ample space in that womb but I shudder to think of the type of warped-neanderthal mind one would produce if Rosie O’Donnell was its mother for the first few years of life.
(heads for freezer to pour himself a stiff shot of ice cold Jaegermeister).
This must be a weird dichotomy for Kate. She wants to imply that brown people are genetically predispositioned to backward thinking, but that then detracts from her other assertions that these people willfully behave in undesirable manners due to a failed culture. So what is it, culture or genetics? Does one fuel the other? Please elaborate on your thesis Kate. It’s time to move beyond insinuations and take a stance.
Rob; you are as dense as a Neantertals brow. Cheers;
Rob; you are as dense as a Neantertals brow. Cheers;
Jeez, probably enough evidence now for most of us rural types to get on the schedules in Dalton’s Endangered Species Act.
I mean, it’s not like we’d be the first “extirpated” species to get “protection” under the Act.
how did they ever interbreed without Facebook, Twitter or E-Harmony? Obviously alcohol was invented before cave man dating.
johan – knowledge is most certainly an action. First, one has to define ‘knowledge’. It is ‘that data which has meaning’.
If these meanings ‘rest’ and are not used, even by discussion, then the meanings dissipate and are lost to the community. So one can have the knowledge of which plants are poisonous but if this information is not used it is lost to the community.
That’s what happens to languages that are no longer used, or symbols that are no longer used such that their meaning is lost.
Knowledge does rest within the community. Yes, the individual stores this knowledge but only as a meaning. Meaning must be communicated or it ceases to be ‘meaningful’.
IQ is an individual not group phenomenon. There is nothing to inherit. Geniuses don’t have genius children. Instead, the range of IQ from 85-115 seems to be the standard everywhere; average 100.
Rather similar to saying that ‘arms are inherited’. On average, we have two of them. On average, the IQ is 100.
“Rather similar to saying that ‘arms are inherited’. On average, we have two of them. On average, the IQ is 100.”
Good grief – you didn’t really mean that?
yes, I did mean that.
Admittedly the physiological attributes of our species are less variable than the cognitive. But, we get those two arms that are long, short, muscular, left or right handed. All these attributes within a ‘reasonable range’.
Same with cognitive abilities. The key difference with cognition, which is the logical ability, is that the ‘stuff’ or information about which we cognate is symbolic, i.e., learned and therefore, we can do a lot more with this ability than lift weights. We can figure out how to build a robot that will do that for us.
But the ‘reasonable range’ of this ability-to-be-logical is that 85-115 range. For everyone.
Setting aside a myriad of other flaws (left or right handed????) with your analogy, we do not “on average” have two arms.
Significant numbers of humans have just one arm, or none at all. Even with the tiny handful who may have been born with three, it’s safe to say the average number of arms in humans is somewhat less than two.
It reminds me of my grade 2 teacher. Miss Fournier had two arms, but each ended in a single finger. So did her mother’s. Probably just coincidence.
But that said, you should probably go up and read Loki at 2:21am.
Loki great post.
I was wondering what you thought of Steven Pinker’s book “How the Mind Works”, assuming you have read it?
kate – I’m talking about the statistical average not the deviations from the norm. I don’t think that the average number of arms in homo species is anything other than: two.
Your grade 2 teacher’s arms were of course genetically determined. There’s a beautiful young woman in my area with no arms. These deviations from the norm say nothing about the average in the entire population.
I respect, always, loki’s posts and concur with loki’s analogy of the extraordinary task of ‘mixing up the books’ and reassembling; this is achievable only by the ‘logical format processes’ of the computer.
I’m also very aware of the vital importance of what has been incorrectly called ‘junk DNA/RNA’, i.e., introns. There’ve actually been semiotic papers written about these transformative processes.
I maintain that our cognitive abilities are not group-based but relevant to our species of homo sapiens and that the statistical norm varies from 85 to 115. Deviations from the norm of course occur but I don’t see that they are group-based.
What IS relevant to a population is their knowledge. Their societal beliefs and behaviour can vary from the primitive (as in Islamism) to the scientific. Since this knowledge base is stored in the communal ‘mind’ then it is passed on from generation to generation.
However, my view is that there is no population group cognitively smarter or dumber than another; remember, there’s a majority in America and Canada and Europe who elected or wanted to elect, Barack Obama. How’s that for ‘smarts’?
ET – “diavitions from the norm of course occur but I don’t see that they are group-based” I’ve said it before, I’m not a major fan of IQ tests. Nevertheless, many populations simply don’t ring in with an average IQ in the 85-115 range. One can debate why this might be, but it is the case.
“…deviations…”
the mode of arm number is 2
the mean is somewhat less than two
the median is somewhat less than two.
the number of arms more than two occuring far less than one arm or zero arms.
“Deviations from the norm of course occur but I don’t see that they are group-based.”
Someone needs to get out and travel more.
loki – excellent post, great analogy!
My life experience is vastly different than ET’s or LOKI’s….raised a farmer…then profesional soldier….hence my processing of these IQ versus intelligence concepts….and a tendency to oversimplify.
My concept is that humans ressemble computers….processor, programing and data-base.
The human processor is largely gentically established but sometimes impaired by environment(injury, drugs), The programming and data-base is derived from environment (experience and formal education/training).
The problem with establishing IQ, is that the IQ tests, of necessity, are biased by culture…much like polls are biased by the questions.
For example, it is a real trick to establish the IQ of a cultural/racial group such as the bushman—see “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”…which illustrates the comedy and tradgedy, that occurs, when circumstances merge several cultures/traditions….Bushman, urban, rural, Cuban and revolutionary Bantu.
Much like powerful computers with questionable programming and invalid data….are inferior to obsolete systems with good programming and an extensive data base……there are people like that.
Then there is the confusion of cunning versus intelligence.
Before attempting to decide how someone thinks…first establish that they actually do think.
Arn’t species, by definition, unable to mate and produce an offspring capable of reproduction? Wouldn’t this just mean that Neanderthals and H. Sapiends are of the same species and different sub-species?
loki: “there’s nothing in the schematic diagram of the pentium processor that predicts … ”
Sure, I get the analogy. On the other hand, to stretch the analogy, if I were to look at a processor with long pipeline lengths with the ability to do linked triads … I might say that it wasn’t designed to do facebook.
Whew, I’ve been gardening; quite the task. ~ ET
But it sure beats hunting and gathering eh?
tyler
I assume you mean “able to mate“
and yes that is part of the definition of species
making neanderthals and humans subspecies. but that shouldnt be unexpected as there was a common ancestor somewhere in Africa
” I’m talking about the statistical average not the deviations from the norm.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Exactly tyler…
Neanderthals and humans are the same thing…just different brands.
It’s like suggesting that a Cocker Spaniel is of a different species than a Springer Spaniel.
Dumb.
Exactly tyler…
Neanderthals and humans are the same thing…just different brands.
It’s like suggesting that a Cocker Spaniel is of a different species than a Springer Spaniel.
Dumb.
black mamba – could we have some scientific evidence that ‘many populations simply don’t ring in with an average IQ in the 85-115 range’.
cal2 – heh. Nice.
Knight 99 – I’ve travelled a great deal. Kindly provide the first two premises which are missing from your ‘argument’. All you’ve provided is your conclusion.
Tyler – yes, you are correct.
Sasquatch – the human cognitive capacity is not identical with the knowledge base of the population. ALL members of the species homo sapiens think; they ALL have the same cognitive capacity. What differs is their stock of knowledge and this is not genetic but learned…and you don’t get rid of this stock very easily..as we can see with Islamists.
Daniel Ream – what ‘word’ do I keep using? And what do you think I mean by it?
glasnost- heh. Actually, hunting and gathering is quite similar to gardening. They both require an intimate knowledge of natural life or..as I so often do..you botch up the whole thing and put in plants that hate their location and snub you by dying. Or won’t produce fruit and vegetables, or stunt them. You have to know which type likes which sun, which soil, which water, and which ones like to be side by side and so on.
You have to know which pests and insects and grubs are doing what..and decide that the reason the coral bells are dying is not because someone is sloshing their drinks over it but because a grub is eating the roots. And without machine tools, just spade and clippers …it’s rather similar to H&G.
And I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love doing it.
rroe, when I say the word “speculate” is means I can’t -prove- what I’m saying (because I’m not a molecular geneticist) but I would bet money on it.
It may interest you to know that all this Neanderthal gene sequence came from three (3) bones dug up out of one cave. Therefore at this time, anything other than speculation and proposing ideas is premature.
http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2010/05/for-national-iq-fans-out-there-genetics.html
But I’d still bet money that “national IQ” etc. is a statistical game with no predictive power at all. Yes you can do the calculation, but no it doesn’t tell you anything useful.
Like the old saw about ice cream sales being highly correlated with violent crime. Ice cream doesn’t cause crime, and crime doesn’t cause ice cream.
Leaving all of the above aside, how long before I can order my pet mastodon or woolly mammoth? The potential for bringing back extinct monster animals is just so cool I can hardly stand it. I’ve got three acres and a pond, I bet a couple of mastodons would look good walking around out here. We could sell mastodon wool, mastodon milk, mastodon steaks, and even mastodon poo for fertilizer.
That’d be a money maker, I bet your average mastodon puts out a ton of poo.
Dire-wolf guard dogs, anyone?
homo sapiens “ALL have the same cognitive capacity”
Not true. A lot of brain wiring takes place during gestation and in the earliest days after birth when a baby sleeps almost constantly. There is great variation in how that occurs from person to person. A myriad of factors affect it including pure happenstance. It can be just as simple as luck of the draw.
…how long before I can order my pet mastodon or woolly mammoth… I bet your average mastodon puts out a ton of poo…
The only problem, you’d get endless arguments about their genetic backgrounds and whether one can measure the “average” poo output by population
bob c – for heaven’s sake; I specifically said that I was referring to the species not the individual! Do you seriously think that I’m including such gestational affects as eg, fetal alcohol and other such factors?
The point is, the species is ONE species and has the same cognitive capacity – with that normative range between 85-115 and the same deviations from the norm.
And since our species is both individualistic and group-functioning, this means that the knowledge base is specific to a collective. The knowledge bases differ. We can and should evaluate these knowledge bases and reject multiculturalism which equates them. They are not equal. For example, the Islamic knowledge base is not comparable to the Western knowledge base and, in its capacity to look after its population’s well-being, is inferior.
But this has nothing to do with cognitive ability; it has everything to do with that knowledge base – and it can take at least three generations to change such a base.
ET said: “The knowledge bases differ. We can and should evaluate these knowledge bases and reject multiculturalism which equates them. They are not equal.”
Oh, well said. Do you need guards when you have office hours, to keep the shrieking Lefties out? If so, I volunteer for a shift or two.
Would it be safe to say that any genetic effects on neurology that differed between populations would be utterly lost in the noise of differing knowledge bases? Not to mention different child rearing practices (knowledge base again) and different nutrition during pregnancy and infancy, and etc.?
Because so far as I am concerned, even if for the sake of argument one would countenance such a thing as a “national IQ” it is still a -very- long step from there to genetic predispositions for IQ.
glasnost, that’s a pretty poopy argument. ~:D
phantom – yes, any genetic effects on neurology – and I don’t claim that there are any specific to a nation or ethnicity that affect cognitive ability, would be lost in the knowledge base. Also the different child rearing, different nutrition, all of which are based in the knowledge content of the group…affects adult cognition.
ET:
Sincere apologies if I inadvertantly mischaracterized what you were saying. I was responding narrowly to a comment you made to sasquatch. Let me take another tack and see if I can better express myself.
I’m sure you recall back in the 70s when feminists insisted that there was no difference between males and females that couldn’t be explained by differences in socialization. Raise boys and girls the same way and the differences would quickly disappear it was said.
What we now know after several more decades of research is that males and females, for example, perform math calculations in different hemispheres of the brain. That isn’t something that occurs after birth, but rather right in the womb. It’s in the brain wiring as dictated by differences in our DNA that took thousands of years to evolve and won’t be changed in a short generation or two.
Now if differences in brain structure can exist between genders based on different activities each engaged in over long periods of time, which they obviously do, why would it be impossible for differences to exist between different groups of people who also engaged in different activities over long periods of time.
That is not to say such differences DO exist between different groups. Our still sketchy knowledge of the subject doesn’t allow us to make such a claim. On the other hand though, that same sketchiness does not allow us to definatively rule it out either.
bob c – I agree that there are differences in cognitive and emotional behaviour between men and women. [I’m not a feminist].
But I don’t think that these differences were caused by, as you suggest: “different activities each engaged in over long periods of time”.. This sounds as if you are suggesting that After Birth, the girls for some reason did one type of activity and the boys did another type of activity, and these different types of post-birth activity then became genetically determined and even affected the cognitive nature. I don’t think there is any evidence for this.
I think the gender differences are basic and not acquired or dissipated.
I’m not, by the way, going to suggest that informational additions to the genetic pool derived from experiences in ‘real life’ can’t happen. We know, from analysis of birds, molluscs etc that such can happen; however, we don’t know whether these changes are part of that deep basic and general genetic pool or part of the ‘variational and adaptive pool’.
However, as I’ve said before, societies, understood as populations living as a collective, engage in behaviour and beliefs that are conceptual rather than genetic. This behaviour and these beliefs are not genetically determined; they are strictly social and can be changed.
Humans try many tactics to prevent conceptual change; they’ll insist that their beliefs come from ‘god’ and to think differently will cause the sky to fall. They’ll use authority, force, peer pressure..and this shows that we do have the ability to change our beliefs…and so, must try to prevent ourselves from doing so!
Populations have different sets of beliefs and as I said, they certainly are not equal. But these beliefs are not due to any genetic causality but to centuries of a lifestyle and the collective resistance to change. As noted so many times, it took the west over 400 hundred vicious and adversarial years to move out of the mindset of the feudal period (collectivism) into a modern mindset of individual freedom.
ET;
Honestly, this is pure coincidence. I happened to go to HotAir.com after my post here and found a link to this article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1274952/Men-ARE-brainy-women-says-scientist-Professor-Richard-Lynn.html?ITO=1490
It explains in a far better way than I ever could how the differences of male female roles resulted in differences between males and females.
It’s just one guys opinion but he does have an impressive bio. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts should you read it.
bob c – thanks for the link. I think it’s an excellent article and I agree with it. I agree that men and women, on a statistical average, have different brains and mental abilities. I also agree that the attempts to make the genders equal in all roles (as scientists, mathematicians, military, etc etc) is invalid.
But note carefully, the author is NOT saying that activities after birth caused the genetic nature of the brain to change. No, instead, it’s that the more successful hunters were eligible mates and fathered more children.
ET;
I’m sure you know that the body is capable of pretty amazing short term adaptive change. While the brain comes wired a certain way, in people who have had strokes, the body attempts to rewire itself to allow signals to get around those portions of the brain that have been damaged.
It is most likely that at some point after the division of labour in humans came to be, that the brains of some males rewired themselves to allow for better calculation and therefore more accurate spear throwing. In turn, those males who were more successful in terms of getting food, had more opportunities to mate, and passed that adaptive ability to its offspring.
The point is that while it started as a non permanent short term adaptive change, after repeating the behaviour for thousands of years, it is now hard wired into all males. We come that way on delivery.
None of this seems controversial to me. Males and females doing different activities for long periods of time lead to different brain wiring in each that is at this point in time now rooted in our DNA.
The question to me seems to be, if those types of changes could come to be between males and females because of different circumstances, why would it be impossible to happen to different groups of humans, each living in different parts of the world, having to deal with radically different climate and weather, different kinds of dangerous predators, etc, etc, etc.
To me, the controversial thought is not the possibility of different brain development between different racial and ethnic groups, it is the notion that there can be no difference at all. It defies logic.
In my misspent youth in the ’60’s I believe I bred with a Neanderthal once or twice. Does that make me a bad person?
Jeez, I was just trying to get laid!
Rob at May 8, 2010 4:43 AM, the first appearance of the word “brown” is in your rant. Get a life.
Judging by the comments on this thread, I would say SDAers have relatively higher IQs than most. Perhaps there’s something to be said about the stimulus that occurs when dragging our knuckles. 😉
My favourite subject at university was paleontology, particularly human evolution. Not much use in the real world, but fascinating, nonetheless.
This is a very serious scientific study of major importance. It appears to definitively establish at least two things that had only been speculated; first, that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis really did interbreed, and second, that contemporary Europeans and Asians (but not Africans) carry significant Neanderthal genetic heritage. Some widely accepted theories now appear discredited.
More speculatively, some seemingly-far-out theories, for example the Neanderthal theory of autism, may have to be taken more seriously.
Phantom
You say, “It may interest you to know that all this Neanderthal gene sequence came from three (3) bones dug up out of one cave. Therefore at this time, anything other than speculation and proposing ideas is premature.”
It doesn’t matter if there were 3 or 3,000 Neanderthal bones. The conclusion is that there is none of the DNA sequence in African populations and there is a small amount in rest of the world populations. There is something different in the DNA of African and non African human populations and that difference is found in Neanderthal bones. If that DNA sequence triggers anything, it follows that there should be some differences between African and non African humans.
You also say, “But I’d still bet money that “national IQ” etc. is a statistical game with no predictive power at all. Yes you can do the calculation, but no, it doesn’t tell you anything useful.”
But here you are missing the obvious. The predictive power is that the population as a whole will have a different IQ. It won’t tell you anything about an individual within that population.
ET
You say, “black mamba – could we have some scientific evidence that ‘many populations simply don’t ring in with an average IQ in the 85-115 range’.”
There is plenty of evidence of different IQ’s between populations. I will refer you to IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Dr. Richard Lynn and The Bell Curve by Hernstein and Murray. There is much criticism of these books, but it sounds an awful lot like that coming from you, which seems to be based on the fear of a resurgence of eugenics and where that might lead.
These IQ differences between populations affect the population’s ability to develop and transmit knowledge. (They are not the sole contributor – culture is also a major contributor.) If you allow for that, what you say makes sense.
And if you allow that the human population is continually acquiring knowledge – some sub populations will have made tremendous strides, but they still have a lot of catching up to do and their ability to do that is affected by the average IQ (sum of their individual IQs divided by the population.)