Tag Archives: evolution

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Maybe Neanderthals could speak after all

skullsAnthropologists have long disagreed on the timing of the emergence of language in our hominid ancestors, and the results of recent research may reignite that debate. CT scans of a 530,000-year-old Homo heidelbergensis skull show that its ear canals are sensitive at 2kHz to 4kHz – the same crucial information-rich frequency range that we modern humans are attuned to – suggesting a much earlier emergence of language than commonly accepted. [via SlashDot] [image by Orin Optiglot; no, they’re not Neanderthal skulls]

Of course, like a great deal of anthropological speculation, it’s educated guesswork:

The results don’t necessarily show that the ancient humans could speak, Quam says. “We’re saying that the ear changed for some reason and that those changes facilitated the possibility of language development…”

Researchers have long tried to determine whether Neandertals could speak by reconstructing their vocal tracts, Quam says. But soft tissue makes up most of the voice box, so few traces remain in the fossil record. The ear is a better candidate because the bony structure reveals more about hearing capacity.

Couple this with the recent discovery that Neanderthals also had a gene which governs the development of language and is only found in modern humans, and we start to get a picture of our distant ancestors that differs considerably from the grunting caveman stereotype.

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Evolution observed in laboratory bacteria

Image of E Coli in the labFor the first time, a major evolutionary change has been observed in laboratory conditions, giving even greater weighting to evolutionary theory. The bacteria used, a strain of E. Coli, was first introduced into the Michigan State University lab twenty years ago by evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski. Some 44,000 generations later, the bacteria are still reproducing.

Somewhere around the 31,500th generation, the E. Coli developed a trait not present in the original strain: they began to be able to metabolise citrate, the inability of which is one of the main ways scientists distinguish E. Coli from other bacteria. Importantly, the paper says that evolution occurs as a sum of the previous steps of mutation and that as this history varies between groups of creatures, evolution is a random and unpredictable act.

“It’s the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it’s outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting,” says Lenski.

One of the main criticisms of evolutionary theory has been that it is a theory that hasn’t been observed in the real world. Creationists are going to have a hard time explaining this result away, one suspects.

[via Daily Kos, image by scaliber001]

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Environmentalism as religion

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A late but strong candidate for controversial discussion-point of the month appeared yesterday in the form of visionary physicist Freeman Dyson’s article for the New York Review of Books, in which he detours into a discussion of global warming skepticism.

There’s a lot of interesting points in there, and the replies and rebuttals are coming thick and fast, but what I wanted to focus on was Dyson’s portrayal of environmentalism as a secular religion, because it turned up in my feed reader at almost exactly the same time as another article which claims software-based research suggests religion is an inevitable consequence of evolution.

If that’s the case, one wonders if religion is merely a developmental phase that we’ll eventually grow out of? One thing’s for certain – Creationists probably won’t appreciate the irony of being told their faith is a by-product of a process they don’t believe in.

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Humans are evolving faster than ever

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Evolution fairground sign Thanks to the magic of the wire services, this story is all over the web like a rash – you can read the abstract of the paper that’s caused the hoo-haa on the blog of John Hawks, one its authors.

But the nutshell quote is this one:

“The massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations, and every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”

As an early commenter points out on the inevitable MetaFilter thread, faster evolution doesn’t mean we’re improving as a species, because evolution selects for ‘reproductive fitness’ rather than any quality that we might describe as being ‘better’ from a rational point of view.

But it’s an interesting story nonetheless; I’d always thought evolution was a glacially slow process. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the implications are … not to mention the spin that the ‘Young Earth’ folk will try to put on it. [Image by KevinDooley]

[tags]human, evolution, anthropology, biology[/tags]