You, too can have a life-sized blue whale in your browser window. Once it loads, grab your mouse and scroll around. You can move about using the red rectangle in the navigation window too.

It's about as close as you're ever likely to get to appreciating how really huge they are.

"Pleasure, like pain, is thought of as being a sort of simple, absolute, innate, basic thing, but as far as I can see, pleasure is a piece of machinery for turning off various parts of the brain.

"It's like sleep. I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn."

...

"However, it has a bug, which is, if you gain control of it, you'll keep doing it. If you can control your pleasure center, then you can turn off your brain. That's a very serious bug, and it causes addiction."

- Marvin Minsky, AI researcher, Jan 07 issue of Discover.

It's widely understood that there are many different species of monkeys and apes. And most Americans (at least of my generation - I'm not sure what schools are teaching now) are aware that there have been various species of humans in the past. There's a tendency to think that the development of humanity was a neat, orderly progression, but it didn't work that way.

Stephen Jay Gould introduced the idea of "punctuated equilibrium", which is to say that evolutionary change is relatively calm until something comes along to stir things up. A common culprit is climate change, and the occasional meteorite can radically change the game.

I recently picked up a book by William Calvin called The Ascent of Mind, which builds a case that human evolution took off 2.5 million years ago due to a severe ice age. We know about the ice age through studies of rock and soil layers dating back to that time, and an examination of fossil skulls before and since show sharp growth in brain capacity at the 2.5 million year point.

Calvin published his book in 1991.

Today I came across this:



As you can see, it shows the various forms humans have developed in the past, where they are on the timeline, and the spike in cranial capacity after 2.5 million years. You can also see that some species didn't make it. Actually, NONE of them made it to the present time, except ours.

There's a lot of debate about why. Perhaps some previous species were more susceptible to a particular disease, or couldn't compete with other competing human species, couldn't adapt to climate changes, or simply had a run of very bad luck. Millions of years ago, hominins didn't number anywhere near like we do now; a entire species could be concentrated in a relatively small part of the African Rift Valley. It wouldn't take a huge event to wipe them out.

Today humanity numbers over six billion strong. We may owe a lot to an ice age that bred a meaner, tougher, smarter ancient ancestor.

Carl Zimmer recently wrote an essay explaining a new paper released by one of the grand old men of genetic biology, Carl Woese.

Carl and his research team are making the case that early genetic development was a rough and sloppy business, and that the genetic structure as we know it today once existed side by side with a multitude of other genetic schemes. The DNA and RNA world we know, with four nucleotides and twenty amino acids, may have emerged through competition with other genetic paradigms.

Carl Zimmer sees analogies with the current open-source software movement, whereby widely available open source code is shared and re-used for a variety of applications. So it may have been in early genetics - genes were shared among single-celled organisms, and some genetic systems were more successful than others.

Another way to look at it is that early life may have begun with a Babylon of genetic languages, which eventually diffused into a single one - the DNA and RNA that make up the universal genetic language we see now.

It's a fascinating concept, and Zimmer thinks Woese's research is consistent with available evidence.

One commenter sees yet another analogy:

I always think of the open source movement as being akin to the Protestant Reformation. Before Martin Luther translated the bible into German, the only people who could read it were people who could read Latin. So the ordinary people had to rely on the priest to interpret the bible for them. This gave the priest much more power.

The depth of these issues can be shown by what happened to William Tyndale when he copied Luther and created the first proper English bible. Tyndale was burnt at the stake for this. The reason being, by translating the bible into English he was seen as empowering the common folk.

The question sums up a problem that has always puzzled game theorists. From the article:

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It’s a truth borne out in biology and economics: Selfishness pays. Viruses can steal enzymes to reproduce. Tax evaders can take advantage of public services to survive and thrive. And, according to game theory, the cheats win out over the altruists every time.

Yet cooperation is a hallmark of human society, allowing for the creation of everything from the local grange to the United Nations. Cooperation can also be found in the animal world. Lions hunt in packs. Ants and bees create colonies. So how could cooperation evolve in a cheater’s world?

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Three researchers at Brown University think they've hit on the answer. I've always been interested in this question, and their theory sounds entirely plausible and can probably be tested.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060629230929.htm

I have just one quibble with the piece, and it's their use of the term altruism. I've never believed that altruism = unselfishness.

Altruism is another survival strategy, based on the cooperation model. It is ultimately selfish (in the sense of looking out for one's own interest, not in the sense of taking unfair advantage of others) in that the person practicing altruism aims to encourage broader cooperation, and benefit from that cooperation.

That's a perfectly valid and sensible strategy, and this article examines how it works.

Here's a toast to PZ Myers' blog, Pharyngula. He's a professor of biology in Minnesota, and recently posted a link to this multimedia timeline of evolution. Just grab that red arrow with the mouse and move it along. I've been checking in with PZ's blog for a few years now, and he just keeps getting better.

Jen & I attacked the apartment yesterday with the vacuum and steam cleaner. We took the joint apart, parked it outside in the breezeway, cleaned up and put everything back together. Not quite as extensive as moving, but close. It was a long day, but worthwhile. Between that and the new air filter in the A/C, the place smells a lot sweeter and cleaner.

An excellent evolutionary timeline that provides a great sense of scale for the development of life. Just scroll down the page a bit to see it. Then start scrolling right...and scrolling...and scrolling...

http://andabien.com/html/words/evolution-px.htm

This is scary shit. I can't put it any more starkly than that. A technology writer approached a California biotech firm and posed the question - just how hard is it, really, to synthesize a bioweapon?

The answer?

It's way, WAY too easy.

The writer himself walks through the steps on how it could be done. He creates - from scratch - florescent genes and inserts them in yeast. Using the same steps, he could - he doesn't, but he could - create a smallpox virus.



This is a DNA synthesizer. See those four colored labels? Those are the nucleotides - A, G, C, T - for creating DNA from scratch. The whole box is about the size of an office printer.

It's enough to make your hair stand on end.


- K

Well...kinda-sorta. It's like this...

The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, but complex (multi-celled) life didn't appear until about 500 million years ago.

That is, for nearly 90% of earth's existence, single-celled life was the only game in town. I've always wondered - why did it take so long for multi-celled life to emerge?

Scientific American has some tantalizing new research that may explain why.

To sum it up...

We already know that part of the reason is oxygen. Prior to 500 million years ago, there wasn't a lot of it. What did exist was slowly being generated by the single-celled critters.

But it appears that maybe there was another factor - clay, the stuff of kitty litter. Turns out, clay was being created by chemical weathering, the interaction of single-celled life and rock. That's right - bacteria munching on rock.

(Rock eating bacteria is still around. They eat v e r y s l o w l y - requires lots of chewing, I suppose).

Again, it takes a long time - literally hundreds of millions of years, maybe a few billion - for enough clay to pile up for it to influence the atmosphere.

The thinking is, as the clay accumulated, it trapped organic carbon. As carbon declined, oxygen rose - eventually to where a tipping point was created about 500 million years ago - enough to sustain multi-celled life.

You could say it simply took a long time for the earth to reach a point where something more than algae and bacteria could breathe. Clay was the key.

It's not definitive, but the evidence described in the article is compelling. Maybe the gods really did have clay feet!

- K

In the course of my work at a psychiatric care center, I've often observed how deeply rooted the manipulation of other people is in human nature. It's part of who we are, if not our best side.

Turns out that's even more true than I imagined. Science journalist and author Carl Zimmer comments on a new study that clarifies the relationships between deception, social intelligence, and brain size.

It's long been noticed that social mammals have the largest brains. This study makes a convincing case that social interaction actually drives brain expansion and intelligence overall. It notes that homoid brain sizes have expanded in sync with the increasing tendency for people to gather in large groups.

It makes sense, it passes the common sense smell test. Dealing with people is demanding. Identifying, attributing (good or bad, friend or foe, trustworthy or unreliable?) remembering those attributes, competing, cooperating.

Neural density and intelligence may very closely correlate with human density.

This could explain why large urban areas mostly vote Democratic ;)

Check it out - Zimmer is a pleasure to read. His style is much like Jared Diamond.

http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/004685.html

Swiped from JWZ:


Richard Wrangham: The Evolution of Cooking

"We always tend to think that humans have just had a continuous surge in brain size over the last two million years, but actually over the last thirty thousand years brain size has decreased by 10 to 15 percent. [...] This gracility is exactly the same pattern we see in the evolution of dogs from wolves, or bonobos from chimpanzees, or domesticated foxes from wild foxes. In all these cases an increasing gracility of the bone is an incidental effect.

I think that we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50 thousand years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. [...] I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves."

RICHARD WRANGHAM is a professor of biology and anthropology at Harvard University who studies chimpanzees, and their behavior, in Uganda. His main interest is in the question of human evolution from a behavioral perspective. He is the author, with Dale Peterson, of Demonic Males: Apes, and the Origins Of Human Violence.