Skip to main content

Home/ Androids Zombies Brains/ Group items tagged genetics

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Rudy Garns

ARE HUMAN BRAINS UNIQUE? By Michael Gazzaniga - 0 views

www.edge.org/...gazzaniga08_index.html

azb brains neuroscience

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    "Scientists compared the genetic sequences of ethnically and geographically diverse people from around the world and found that the genes which code for the nervous systems, had some sequence differences (known as polymorphisms) among individuals. By analyzing human and chimpanzee polymorphism patterns, genetic probabilities and various other genetic tools, and geographical distributions, they found evidence that some of these genes are experiencing ongoing positive selection in humans. They calculated that one genetic variant of microcephalin arose approximately 37,000 years ago, which coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans, and it increased in frequency too rapidly to be compatible with random genetic drift or population migration. This suggests that it underwent positive selection.[xxi] An ASPM variant arose about 5800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities and the first record of written language. It too is found in such high frequencies in the population, that it indicates strong positive selection."
Rudy Garns

Comparative Mammalian Brain Collections: Brain Evolution - 0 views

www.brainmuseum.org/...index.html

azb brain evolution

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    "Evidence of brain evolution can be seen in various fields of biology, such as paleontology, ethology, behavioral biology, cognitive psychology, molecular biology and genetics."
Rudy Garns

Baldwin effect - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Baldwin_effect

baldwin evolution

shared by Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Selected offspring would tend to have an increased capacity for learning new skills rather than being confined to genetically coded, relatively fixed abilities. In effect, it places emphasis on the fact that the sustained behavior of a species or group can shape the evolution of that species.
  • a feedback loop operates whereby a dairy culture increases the selective advantage from this genetic trait, while the average population genotype increases the collective rewards of a dairy culture.
  • Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08
     
    08.31.2008 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rudy Garns

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us (Bill Joy) - 0 views

www.wired.com/...joy.html

azb culture future technology

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
Rudy Garns

The Evolution of Language - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...the_evolution_of_language

language evolution AZB

shared by Rudy Garns on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 28 Jan 10
     
    Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years-an eye-blink of evolution.
Rudy Garns

Meat may be the reason humans outlive apes - 0 views

www.msnbc.msn.com/...technology_and_science-science

AZB human-evolution primates diet evolution

shared by Rudy Garns on 15 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • humans apparently evolved unique variants in a cholesterol-transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which regulates chronic inflammation as well as many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries.
  • Rudy Garns on 15 Jan 10
     
    Chimps and apes are genetically so similar to humans - and their human-like gestures do remind us how close we are on the family tree - that scientists have long been puzzled why they don't live as long as we do. Diet-related evolutionary changes may explain it.
Rudy Garns

William H. Calvinreview of T. W. Deacon's THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) - 0 views

williamcalvin.com/...1997DeaconBkRevNYT.htm

calvin deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08 - Cached
  • This pattern-hunger doesn't require even average intelligence, nor is it limited to speech. Deaf children can do the same four levels of pattern discovery by observing body movements -- but only if they are immersed in a fluent sign-language environment, and equally early in the first few years of life.
  • flexibility during life (learning and creativity) eventually helps to reward genetic variations leading in a similar functional direction. This form-follows-function principle has been known for a century but it's still poorly appreciated.
  • a slow convergence in copying errors toward written recipes with a combination of ingredients, amounts, times, temperatures, and assembly procedures that -- with some common-sense tweaking -- will satisfy "good taste."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The Baldwin effect allows unrecorded tweaking from flexible behavior to secondarily drag along relevant genes ("recipe items") in the long run; it's Darwinian but at one remove. Thus relevant gene combinations "fill in" behind the behavioral advance.
  • "The Baldwinian perspective suggests... that the first stone tools were manufactured by australopithecines, and that the transition to Homo was in part a consequence rather than the cause.... The large brains, stone tools, reduction in dentition, better opposability of thumb and fingers, and more complete bipedality found in post-australopithecine hominids are the physical echoes of a threshold already crossed [in behavior].... Another way to look at this is to say that many of the physical traits that distinguish modern human bodies and brains were ultimately caused by ideas shared down the generations."
  • But selection favoring language need not be via the success of language per se
  • the nonlanguage task of remembering who owes what to whom sets you up for understanding structured sentences. They carry over into linguistic argument structure (those word categories involving actors, recipients, beneficiaries, and so forth), which provide major clues to understanding a story-like sentence about who did what to whom.
  • Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08
     
    NYT
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog - 0 views

johnhawks.net/...deacon.html

azb deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08 - Cached
  • the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities.
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
  • when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
  • innate features of the brain
  • grammatical organization
  • symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
  • But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
  • What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
  • Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
  • Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08
     
    Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20▼ items per page