Did the 100s of smelling, tasting, feeling suckers on the 8 legs of an octopus do a similar thing for the octopus brain as the evolution of hands did to ours ?... and did the decentralised architecture of the octopus brain reduce the impact the 8 arm rich information stream had on evolving a complex central brain?
Or was it that without the single repeated architecture of the mammalian neocortex as general intelligence engine, gains made in complexity in those sensory streams were not as reusable toward the evolution of a more general intelligence ??
So there was this discussion on non-racialism at this book launch last night ...
and a member of the audience asked that typical question about the obvious genetic basis to race.
I was working up to try and answer there, but found it a bit hard to get my thoughts together in time. So below is working toward how I'd like to answer that in future. I'll correct/refine it with time, hopefully, and corrections and comments from you, the anonymous or not anonymous public, are as welcome as always.
Attempt One:
Once our very early, singular human population separated geographically (after what appears to be a series of survival bottlenecks), they evolved separate and particular traits according to the now well understood processes of natural selection and genetic drift.
Even while populations were largely separated, there was still sufficient movement and interaction to allow for genetic information to pass between populations. This, most importantly, would have included the successful spread of immune response adaptations and anti-parasite counter-measures vital to early population survival. [which is why all so called races have within their populations a spread of proteomic pathways for immune function that are common between races]
As populations interacted and genetic information spread, there are a few mechanisms by which certain traits persisted within local populations, despite the relatively thorough statistical mixing of other genetic traits. The mechanisms that ‘preserved’ local ‘race type traits’ include environment specific adaptations (like skin colour) that were continuously selected for within separated populations by survival pressure, and culture-specific sexual selection criteria - that proceeded along with cultural evolution. There are more mechanisms i think, but these two come to mind for now.
Via these mechanisms, an aggregation of certain traits (the sexual selection model accounts for why these are most often just externally visible) would accumulate within populations, while allowing the fortunate mixing of other vital genetic survival strategies without which local populations would most likely have fallen from parasite/pathogen load/stress.
This explains why, with the exception of this small percentage of ‘race type traits’, when looking at particular sequences, we often see more genetic diversity within races than between them — for example, there will be a particular immune system function that is expressed in different ways by several different protein pathways (lets call them A,B,C,D) and each race will have individuals carrying sequences for A,B,C,D. For the larger pathways, two individuals from different ‘races’ carrying the sequences necessary for A will often have more in common genetically with each other than with members of the same race carrying sequences for B, say.
[Immune function has been a big driver for evolution throughout the entire animal line, and so its not for nothing that it gets emphasised when discussing genetic variation.]
Even as our populations experienced civilisational shifts that allowed for more interaction between populations and more and more geographical displacement, patterns of mechanisms like the culture-specific sexual selection mentioned above - now intimately coupled with power, violence, etc. - still worked to keep certain traits prominent within local populations.
Anyway, I think that's the type of traits the dude from yesterday mentioned. That small percentage of genetic traits, often highly visible, that we based the myth of race on.
added later:
Of course, the other reason that immune system is so important when discussing us, is that in the very brief evolutionary time since we split up, nothing much else changed.
Sure some of us lightened our skins and straightened our hair, but these were almost insignificant changes when seen against our vast evolutionary history.
The most significant changes to humankind since our ‘forking’ is that the big brains that we evolved before we split led to us being super successful wherever we went - and that success was met in turn by a multitude of parasites rushing in to live off a newly found ecosystem - us.
So, most of our real evolution as humans, neglecting the very very minor surface tweaks, have been in complex immune system responses to those parasites since we became successful. That is why we are closer to members of other races that share our immune pathways than those of our race that don’t - immune system complexity makes up most of our evolution since we got here.
HTMemory and Sparse Distributed Networks. Lots of progress in understanding the neocortex - how intelligence works in the brain - and modelling that for a cortical approach to machine intelligence
The scientific method is our best hack so far for building knowledge around some seemingly built-in and hard human problems:
1. We trust authority. 2. There is social reward for compliant thinking. 3. There is social reward for innovative thinking. 4. There is social reward for being believed to be right. 5. There is internal reward in believing yourself to be right. 6. Repetition and exposure to ideas in our formative years exaggerate the value of those ideas. 7. We over-value our personal experience. The things we have experienced and have spent time thinking about influence our thinking. 8. Our beliefs influence our thinking - we over-value that which we already think to be true. 9. Our senses and intuitions restrict our thinking. 10. Profit, power and other reward affect our thinking and beliefs.
...
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself."
― Richard Feynman
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
― again, Richard Feynman
“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know."
― Robert M. Pirsig
As opposed to the popular view that science followed long after religion - early science might very well have been key in the formation of our first myths and religions.
Think of the early gods and myths as narrative containers that would have helped with the storage and transmission of important survival information about complex natural patterns from one generation to the next, before there were other forms of storage and transmission such as the written word.
For example: most early cultures had myths and god-stories of one form or the other that would have helped us remember changing star positions and how they predicted the changing seasons - essential for agriculture.
"We live in an emergent universe, in which the interaction between its parts, be they people or electrons, gives rise to emergent collective behaviors that are different from those of the parts separately and are generally unpredictable from knowledge only of those parts and their interaction. To understand this emergent universe, scientists are replacing the traditional reductionist approach, with its focus on using the individual components as basic building blocks, by an emergent perspective, in which the focus is on characterizing collective emergent behavior and the search for the collective organizing concepts and principles that bring it about"
if I say out loud, my mother's mother's mother's mother's.... and keep going non-stop for about a 1000 years - I'll eventually be speaking about amoebae
----------------------
at 3 mother's per second
--------------------------
it's a 1000 years to amoebae, and a 100 000 years to bacteria
--------------------------
Btw, if you too are doubting the scale of that 1000 year estimate, its not just an exaggeration. I'm using a conservative estimate of 10^11 (100000000000) generations between me and my amoebae ancestors - based on very small times between generations for the first 400 million years of animal life. A number so mind-bending in size, that it will take 1000 years to count to at 3 times a second
So I know most of you don't need to hear this (?) but even though alien life, in even just the observable universe alone, is a mathematical certainty, the chances of us sharing the same bit of space-time and therefore being able to meet any aliens, might very well be extremely (maybe even impossibly) low.
----
Especially if Einstein's cosmic speed limit holds - and there's no indication that it won't.
Jeff Hawkins again, this time in a googtechtalk. 1hr.
Like in his earlier videos and book, he gives the best explanation of
the neocortex i've heard so far --the neocortex is a hierarchical
temporal memory system, implemented asa sparse distributed representation.
That's anything between 10-100 billion earth-like planets in our Milky Way The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter.
That's big enough, so that even with 100 billion earth-like planets, and a reasonable percentage of them producing life, and a percentage of those producing intelligent life, and a percentage of those surviving for long enough to explore space ... It's still possible to never, ever, meet the neighbours! :(
A log-worthy RadioLab episode - Inheritance - Which includes a lovely explanation of epigenetics, explained through some beautifully told stories, as usual.
Listen, to find out how, for instance, mom's licking turns on a behaviour, via protein, via turned-on-gene ..
"Once a kid is born, their genetic fate is pretty much sealed. Or is it? This hour, we put nature and nurture on a collision course and discover how outside forces can find a way inside us, shaping not just our hearts and minds, but the basic biological blueprint that we pass on to future generations."
Don't get too annoyed when you hear the (possibly) pro corn-syrup scientists talking their science in this interview - it still comes out that even though fructose and sucrose are roughly the same in organic chemistry, we've evolved to getting the majority of our sugars via glucose/carbohydrates. So we hear how the ratio fructose:glucose is significant, that we drink and eat way too much fructose via corn-syrup's extreme place in our intake, and how that's not a good idea.
The following gets affirmed and boosted too. the carb/sugar content in a can of soda is about equivalent to a full meal, so unless you replace a meal with that soda, or do enough exercise to burn off an extra meal, drinking cokes and such are going to be pretty bad as a long term behaviour.
That being said, one of the points being made is that the science is contested - despite the smoking guns, we don't yet have a complete mapping of the complex pathways involved.
Check out this truly amazing representation of the molecular machinery at work within each of our cells.
..
One thing that helps understanding these processes is to remember that at these scales, molecules are knocking around at much more than a million times per second - so it isn't that the right molecules miraculously find and fix themselves exactly where they belong in order to perform these very complex tasks (as these depictions sort of suggest), but rather that they are perpetually colliding at incredible speeds, and that it is only the (relatively) rare collision that is successful enough to allow the process to move forward.
All these random accidents accumulate, with the basic rule that what can persist, does, and on larger timescales seemingly miraculous complexity emerges.
Still, judging by the glimpse we get from this video, it's no wonder that evolution (a process that works with that same basic rule from above) took longer with these inner workings of a cell (2.8 billion years) than all the further developments on the tree of life combined (1 billion years)
http://radio.seti.org/episodes/Aware_Am_I_ http://traffic.libsyn.com/arewealone/BiPiSci12-02-13.mp3
Above is SETI's Big Science podcast with an episode on us self-aware animals. Within is a fascinating bit on bonobos, our closest relatives, and their peaceful, matriarchal, and hyper-sexual society. The bonobo bit starts 16 minutes 30 seconds into the show but the whole show is worth the listen.
I'll try a bit of summary here.. Bonobos, instead of being male dominated with lots of violence in their societies like the chimpanzees, are matriarchal with little to no violence and aggression - they enjoy much more open relationships, with much less tension, much less fear of manipulation, and much greater cooperation. Chimps are excellent cooperators too, but their cooperation breaks down when emotions get in the way (like with us humans, emotion often constrains cooperation).
This reduced social tension and increased openness and trust is presumably linked to the bonobo's focus on play and their constant and indiscriminate sexual activity - between all members of the group with little regard for gender or age - sex as greeting and social bonding - sex for conflict resolution and sex for post conflict reconciliation.
Anyway, give it a listen - Vanessa Woods, the author of The Bonobo Handshake takes the comparison between our two closest cousins nicely further. The bonobo handshake, by the way, is when two females rub clitorises together with ever increasing frenzy until orgasm - this fosters great bonds between the females who cooperate to 'correct' any of the much larger males if they begin to exhibit chimp-like violence or aggression. Oh and males have their version of the handshake too.
"I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human
survival. It’s a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello,
and play rules the day.”
"Chimpanzees are well known for their aggression. Unfortunately,
we have made too much of an emphasis on this aspect in our narrative of
human evolution. Bonobos are the other side of the coin."
Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief. —Steven Novella
