Our morality is rooted in evolution

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Michael

Duh.

MONKEYS and apes have a sense of morality and the rudimentary ability to tell right from wrong, according to new research.

In a series of studies scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathise when a fellow animal is ill or in difficulties. They even appear to have consciences and the ability to remember obligations.

The research implies that morality is not a uniquely human quality and suggests it arose through evolution. That could mean the strength of our consciences is partly determined by our genes.

This isn’t exactly news, though I suppose the studies are recent. As expected, they go to confirm that “evolution could not have evolved” is a patently stupid statement made without basis. It’s a favorite of creationists and is just a variation on the God of the Gaps argument – “It’s soooo complicated! I can’t explain it and I’ve insolated myself from all forms of science because it is SATAN so I don’t know about any evidence, so it couldn’t have evolved! It just couldn’t have! LA LA LA LA!”

Anyway, off the creationists and on the science:

The animals were asked to perform a set of simple tasks and then rewarded with food or affection. The rewards were varied, seemingly at random. De Waal found the animals had an acute sense of fairness and objected strongly when others were rewarded more than themselves for the same task, often sulking and refusing to take part any further.

Another study looked at altruism in chimps – and found they were often willing to help others even when there was no obvious reward. “Chimpanzees spontaneously help both humans and each other in carefully controlled tests,” said de Waal.

Other researchers, said de Waal, have found the same qualities in capuchin monkeys, which also show “spontaneous prosocial tendencies”, meaning they are keen to share food and other gifts with other monkeys, for the pleasure of giving.

“Everything else being equal, they prefer to reward a companion together with themselves rather than just themselves,” he said. “The research suggests that giving is self-rewarding for monkeys.”

Filed under: Creationism, Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Happy Darwin Day

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Michael

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The discover of the principles of the most important theory yet formulated, Darwin also wrote his landmark book, On the Origin of Species, 150 years ago this year (though not this day).

As more people are likely to note, it is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Certainly a man of high significance, his contributions to humanity have been greatly smaller than those of the aforementioned great scientist. Evolutionary theory is the backbone of life itself. It goes to explain far more important things than Lincoln’s actions affected mankind.

I am tentative in the qualifiers and apologies within these statements because it is abundantly clear Darwin trumps in greatness most men, at least insofar as contributions to his fellow species are concerned. However, this post isn’t intended to tarnish the image of Lincoln. Rather, we recognize Lincoln as one of the great men in history, one of the great contributors. In contrasting and comparing the man with Darwin, the intention is to illuminate the significance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Lincoln was great. I hope we agree. Darwin was greater.

Let’s not forget, however, that Darwin is great for his discovery, but greater still is the discovery itself. It explains so much.

Earth

Filed under: Evolution, News | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Great fossil find

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Michael

Maiacetus inuus is a a four-legged creature ancestral to modern whales that was recently discovered. Two adult fossils were found in in Pakistan dating close to 50 million years old. One of these fossils are carrying a fetus. The interesting thing is that the fetus was faced head first. This likely means it was born on land, not water – it does an oxygen breathing animal no good to be born head first in water if it needs to get to some air quickly. Modern whales are borned tail first. This conveniently prevents drowning before they are fully born.

This ancestral whale was far smaller than its modern day lineage. It weighed roughly 600-850 lbs and came in near 9 feet long. This makes sense if the animal was to give birth on land (dragging one’s self is more consistent with laying eggs).

Here’s kind of a crappy idea of what it looked like.

meh

Filed under: Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Jerry Coyne

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Michael

Jerry Coyne has a very succinct article regarding the inability of science and religion to work together in any viable manner. He primarily focuses his points against two prominent evolutionary theists, Ken Miller and Karl Giberson. Both men are good scientists, but make great stretches to fulfill their desire to marry their science and religion.

The article can be found here. (I would normally give a direct link, but RichardDawkins.net organizes the article far better.)

Filed under: Creationism, Evolution | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Charles Darwin and slavery

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Michael

There’s a new book due out about why abolitionism played an influence in the work of Charles Darwin. It’s written by historians of science Adrian Desmond and James Moorehave.

We are not trying to explain away all of Darwin’s work as being due to his passion for emancipation, but our argument is that his passion for racial unity is what drove him to touch this untouchable and treacherous subject

This sounds like it could be a fairly interesting idea Desmond and Moorehave have here. While it isn’t necessary to show that evolution is not about eugenics and other nonsense as presented by dishonest creationists (sorry about the reduncancy) through something like this, the truth is important.

Darwin, of course, did hold many of the prejudices of his day. But if this book is right, it appears he was of a more modern mindset than previously thought.

In other news, some reporters can be dumb.

The historians wanted sexual selection was responsible for differences in appearance between races of both animals and humans.

In the theory of sexual selection traits seen as desirable but which give no competitive advantage to a species are passed down through generations.

Aside from the first sentence being, um, not a sentence, sexual selection doesn’t seem terribly relevant here. Skin color is first driven by natural selection, and then sexual selection may play a role. That explains the darker skin tones seen in societies living nearer the equator than those living in the colder climate of Europe and other similar latitudes. It isn’t that all people who see snow annually tend to get horniest when seeing light skin tones or that all people who are exposed to the sun year-long get hot and bothered over dark skin tones.

But it doesn’t end there.

‘Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was driven by passion to end slavery’

This is the headline to the story and was probably written by the editor. I’m not sure from where it comes. Perhaps the quote of Desmond as posted above? At any rate, Darwin’s theory was driven by passion for evidence. Perhaps his desire to go into depth on certain details (human evolution, for example) was inspired by his anti-slavery stance, but the theory was not predicated on destroying any particular social institution. It was based upon evidence.

Anyway, the book comes out February 9th.

Filed under: Evolution, News | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Drawing connections for an audience

Posted on January 16, 2009 by Michael

It’s usually the protocol of the creationists to draw erroneous conection in order to grab their audience. It comes as a bit of a surprise that a science article would do something similar.

Ptomacanthus anglicus was a very early jawed fish that lived in the Devonian period some 410 million years ago. It represents a type of fossil fish known as an “acanthodian” which is characterized by a somewhat shark-like appearance and sharp spines along the leading edges of all fins (except for the tail fin). This group of early jawed fishes may reveal a great deal about the origin of jawed vertebrates (a story that ultimately includes our own origins). However, their relationships to modern jawed vertebrates (and thus their evolutionary significance) are poorly understood, owing partly to the fact that we know very little about their internal head skeleton.

“To date, we have detailed data from one genus Acanthodes, which occurred very late in acanthodian history”, Martin Brazeau says.

“I present details on the morphology of the braincase of Ptomacanthus, which is more than 100 million years older than Acanthodes. It is a radically different morphology from Acanthodes, which has several important implications for the relationships of acanthodians. The braincase of Acanthodes appears to most closely resemble that of early bony vertebrates, the lineage that ultimately includes humans and other land-living vertebrates). For this reason, the acanthodians were thought to share a closer ancestor with bony vertebrates than with sharks. However, the braincase of Ptomacanthus more closely resembles that of early shark-like fishes, and shares very few features in common with Acanthodes and the bony vertebrates.”

“As a consequence, the results indicate that Ptomacanthus was either a very early relative of sharks, or close to the common ancestry of all modern jawed vertebrates.”

This isn’t quite the same as what creationists do, but it’s about as unnecessary. Whereas creationists draw connections between Darwin and Hitler and other patently silly things, this article is drawing a connection between a 410 million year old fossil and a species which has existed, at least anatomically, for about 100,000 years. Of course, as the article says, discovering the lineage of jawed vertebrates will inform us of our own specific history, and that’s true. But this is a fact that should be mentioned in passing (it doesn’t hurt to at least inform the reader of where this fossil stands on the evolutionary tree). So while reading the above quote would make you think this is what happened, clicking the above link will show you that the article title is “New Piece in the Jigsaw Puzzle of Human Origins”. That’s a bit misleading, no? Most articles concerning human evolution focus within the past 100,000 years. It is exceptionally rare for one to go beyond 5-7 million years ago, the period when we last shared ancestors with the other great apes.

It would appear this article is wrangling for attention rather than meaning. It reflects an overly human-centric view of life – if not in the writers, then certainly in the casual reader who prefers knowing his own history and his own history alone over the more grand history of life of Earth.

Filed under: Evolution, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Ancestral environments and reverse evolution

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Michael

There’s been a long debate regarding whether evolution can be reversed or not. The general trend has been that it can not. The idea goes that once one evolutionary pathway has been crossed, it cannot be retraced back to its origins. It turns out that is not entirely true.

Says [researcher] Henrique, ‘In 2001 we showed that evolution is reversible in as far as phenotypes are concerned, but even then, only to a point. Indeed, not all the characteristics evolved back to the ancestral state. Furthermore, some characteristics reverse-evolved rapidly, while others took longer. Reverse evolution seems to stop when the populations of flies achieve adaptation to the ancestral environment, which may not coincide with the ancestral state.

What the researchers did was subject fruit flies to various selection pressure for multiple decades, i.e., they changed their environment over and over. The ‘end’ result was fruit flies that were markedly different in their traits as compared to the original specimens. That’s evolution. Children should understand that. What happened next was the researchers mimicked the original environment of the fruit flies from decades gone by. In response, the fruit flies adapted to those environments, possessing many of the same allele frequencies they originally had. What I find particularly interesting is that they did not evolve exactly the same, but they still evolved in a way that was similar to the original phenotypes. This helps to explain why sharks and horseshoe crabs remain so similar for so long: the gene pool of the population centers around certain allele frequencies because, well, they work. Change may happen – in fact, it certainly does – but ancestral pheno- and genotypes can evolve to such similar future counterparts as to make little difference in show, even though we know there to actually be differences, at least in contigency. It’s a bit like how two people of very different backgrounds and even different alleles can come to have the similar tones to their skin. Their evolutionary contigency, or histories, are different, but the result is virtually the same.

Another point of note here is that evolution can produce similar things, but it will almost never produce the exact same thing. The history of life, if rerun, would be much, much different in all likelihood. When exolife is discovered, we’ll have indirect confirmation of this. Until then, it should be important for people to realize that nothing in biology is inevitable – including humans.

Filed under: Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Artificial molecules

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Michael

Origins research is beginning to really heat up (hilarious pun intended). One team of researchers is working with RNA (but then again, who isn’t?)

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life – self-replication – could shed light on the origin of all living things.

If that wasn’t enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.

“Obviously what we’re trying to do is make a biology,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team’s molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function.

By building a molecule that can self-replicate, Joyce’s team has shown a pretty solid principle of how scientists believe life began: begin with something simple which makes copies of itself, then…

Not content with achieving one hallmark of life in the lab, Joyce and Lincoln sought to evolve their molecule by natural selection. They did this by mutating sequences of the RNA building blocks, so that 288 possible ribozymes could be built by mixing and matching different pairs of shorter RNAs.

What came out bore an eerie resemblance to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest: a few sequences proved winners, most losers. The victors emerged because they could replicate fastest while surrounded by competition, Joyce says.

As Joyce notes, this isn’t truly life. It’s a very promising experiment, however, and that’s where the excitement lay. By inducing mutations, evolution began to take place. It’s so simple a child can understand it.

Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The confusion over Steve Jones

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Michael

Steve Jones has, according to media reports, made the claim that human evolution has stopped, or is at least slowing down in the West. At times we see conflicting statements from Jones himself over this.

I really just know about snails, and the beauty of evolution is that it gives biology a structure, so the rules that apply to snails or to fruit flies to some extent apply to ourselves. Obviously there’s much more that applies to us. But if you ask the simple Darwinian question about natural selection, inherited differences in the ability to pass on genes (which is only part of the evolutionary argument) it’s pretty clear to me that at least for the time being and at least in the developed world, natural selection has stopped or at least slowed down.

First, snail evolution is quite beautiful. Second, we see here that Jones is referring to natural selection, not evolution. Some sort of argument can be made that there is much less selection pressure on humans in Western nations than there was in the past. Of course, that wouldn’t be a very satisfying argument since natural selection is still ‘weeding out’ people with certain diseases and predispositions. It’s just that some of them, depending upon their economic situation as well as their particular affliction, happen to have reduced overall selection pressure on their alleles. But even then, there are people with diseases which will kill them before they get a chance to reproduce.

At any rate, this whole argument becomes rather moot because Jones also goes on to specifically speak of evolution rather than just one of its mechanisms. In fact, his talk is titled “Human Evolution is over”. He is wrong. Even if we were to ignore all the problems involved with making an argument that natural selection is over in humans (in the West), the evolution-is-over argument still does not fly because evolution is not simply selection. Genetic drift and mutation are two other major mechanisms. While he seems to ignore drift, Jones does, however, argue that there are fewer mutations in the population. His argument goes like this.

Men are fathering children at far younger ages than they did in the past. Given the fact that mutations accumulate in a person over time, these young men have fewer mutations than older men. Thus, subsequent generations are inheriting fewer and fewer mutations.

Okay, the first question which comes to mind is “So what?” The mutation rate of younger fathers is still, by far, substantial enough to maintain the continuing of human evolution. There is no shortage of mutations in each and every person at birth. Jones probably was born with around 100 mutations. You, too.

The second thing which comes to mind is to wonder why Jones would first make this age-mutation argument, but then go on to argue this.

Similarly, child survival rates, abysmal in antiquity, have dramatically improved in much of the world, cutting natural selection pressures.

In other words, more people live to reproductive age. This means there are more people reproducing, which means more mutations. His argument is dreadfully weak.

One wonders why such a quality scientist would make such a poor proposition.

Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Defensive Protein Killed Ancient Primate Retroviruses, Research Suggests

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Michael

ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2008) — Retroviruses are the worst sort of guest. Over eons, these molecular parasites have insinuated themselves into their hosts’ DNA and caused a ruckus. The poor hosts can’t even be rid of the intruders by killing them, because they stubbornly remain after death.

As much as eight percent of the human genome is littered with a “fossil record” of extinct retroviruses that we have inherited from our ancestors — human and otherwise — who were the original victims of the viruses. That record allows scientists to study what may have killed these ancient viruses, providing clues for fighting those that plague us today, like HIV.

Now researchers from Rockefeller University have revived two groups of long-dead primate retroviruses to study whether defensive proteins that have rapidly evolved in humans and other primate species could kill them. They found that one protein, called TRIM5α, was disappointingly useless. But by scrutinizing the remnants of the extinct viruses found in the reference genomes of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, investigators discovered unmistakable signs that a different protein — APOBEC3 — was likely the exterminator. The research was published in PLoS Pathogens.

“It’s a little like finding a fossilized skeleton with a spear through its head. You can be fairly sure of how that individual died,” says Paul Bieniasz, an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. “In this case, we can even do tests to show that the spear wasn’t put there after the individual died. The DNA evidence is clear on that point.”

The investigators reanimated parts of retroviruses that had worked their way into the DNA of old-world primates within the past few million years. They know the rough timeline because the viruses are not found in humans, who diverged from chimps about six million years ago. The goal is to explain why these ancient viruses did not cross over into humans as HIV has and to identify what in humans has defended against them.

Working with pieces of the extinct retroviruses preserved in primate DNA, the researchers compelled a related modern retrovirus, found in mice, to produce the same proteins as its ancient relatives. Bieniasz, postdoctoral fellow David Perez-Caballero and graduate fellow Steven Soll found that one defensive protein — TRIM5α — did not stop the hybrid viruses from infecting other cells, contrary to another lab’s recent findings. Analyzing many of the DNA “fossils” of the retroviruses, however, the researchers found unique mutations that would have caused the viruses to stop reproducing, mutations that are caused by APOBEC3. They showed that the mutations responsible for inactivating the retroviruses varied in both a virus- and species-dependent manner.

So far, the Bieniasz lab has established that APOBEC3 is involved in fighting the retroviruses but not that it singularly killed all of them, or that it is necessarily responsible for preventing the viruses from crossing into humans, who have APOBEC3 proteins of their own.

That’s what the researchers would like to show next, but it doesn’t come easy. “When you’re dealing with something that happened millions of years ago, it’s tough to demonstrate an extinction event in the laboratory,” Soll says.

From ScienceDaily.net

Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »