A Creation Story for Humanity
Edward O.
Wilson is not afraid to ask big questions—questions that religions, the
creative arts, and philosophy have wrestled with for centuries. What is it that
makes humans what they are? How did our human condition develop? How did nature
give rise to something so unusual as ourselves—a species that feels empathy and
guilt, cares for the old and sick, and tries to intellectually understand
itself and its origins—with our languages, religions, arts, and cultures? With
The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson endeavors to uncover the creation story of
humanity. (...) Wilson suggests visualizing the evolution of a
species as a journey through a maze presented by the environment, a maze that
can itself change with time. (...) Wilson argues that a multilevel
selection perspective offers the best approach to understanding the human
condition.
A Creation Story for
Humanity
Rudolf Griss
Rudolf Griss
On the evolutionary origins of the egalitarian syndrome
The
evolutionary emergence of the egalitarian syndrome is one of the most
intriguing unsolved puzzles related to the origins of modern humans. Standard
explanations and models for cooperation and altruism—reciprocity, kin and group
selection, and punishment—are not directly applicable to the emergence of
egalitarian behavior in hierarchically organized groups that characterized the
social life of our ancestors. Here I study an evolutionary model of
group-living individuals competing for resources and reproductive success. In
the model, the differences in fighting abilities lead to the emergence of
hierarchies where stronger individuals take away resources from weaker individuals
and, as a result, have higher reproductive success. (...)
On the evolutionary origins
of the egalitarian syndrome
Sergey Gavrilets
Sergey Gavrilets
The automatic chemist
Bartosz
Grzybowski of Northwestern University in Illinois, US – who has already
established himself as one of our most inventive chemists – has unveiled a
‘chemo-informatic’ scheme, Chematica, that can stake a reasonable claim to
being paradigm-changing. Grzybowski and his colleagues have spent years
assembling the transformations that link chemical species into a vast network
that codifies and organises the known pathways through chemical space. The
nodes of the network – molecules, elements and chemical reactions – are linked
together by connecting reactants to products via the nexus of a known reaction.
The full network contains around 7 million compound nodes and about the same
number of reaction nodes. Grzybowski calls it a ‘collective chemical brain’.
The automatic chemist
Philip Ball
Philip Ball
Chemistry World 22
August 2012
Criticality Is an Emergent Property of Genetic Networks that Exhibit
Evolvability
Dynamically
critical systems are those which operate at the border of a phase transition
between two behavioral regimes often present in complex systems: order and
disorder. Critical systems exhibit remarkable properties such as fast
information processing, collective response to perturbations or the ability to
integrate a wide range of external stimuli without saturation. Recent evidence
indicates that the genetic networks of living cells are dynamically critical.
This has far reaching consequences, for it is at criticality that living
organisms can tolerate a wide range of external fluctuations without changing
the functionality of their phenotypes. Therefore, it is necessary to know how
genetic criticality emerged through evolution. Here we show that dynamical
criticality naturally emerges from the delicate balance between two fundamental
forces of natural selection that make organisms evolve: (i) the existing
phenotypes must be resilient to random mutations, and (ii) new phenotypes must
emerge for the organisms to adapt to new environmental challenges. The joint
effect of these two forces, which are essential for evolvability, is sufficient
in our computational models to generate populations of genetic networks
operating at criticality. Thus, natural selection acting as a tinkerer of
evolvable systems naturally generates critical dynamics.
Criticality
Is an Emergent Property of Genetic Networks that Exhibit Evolvability
Christian Torres-Sosa, Sui Huang,
Maximino Aldana
PLoS Comput Biol 8(9): e1002669. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002669
Predatory Fish Select for Coordinated Collective Motion in Virtual Prey
Movement in
animal groups is highly varied and ranges from seemingly disordered motion in
swarms to coordinated aligned motion in flocks and schools. These social
interactions are often thought to reduce risk from predators, despite a lack of
direct evidence. We investigated risk-related selection for collective motion
by allowing real predators (bluegill sunfish) to hunt mobile virtual prey. By
fusing simulated and real animal behavior, we isolated predator effects while
controlling for confounding factors. Prey with a tendency to be attracted
toward, and to align direction of travel with, near neighbors tended to form
mobile coordinated groups and were rarely attacked. These results demonstrate
that collective motion could evolve as a response to predation, without prey
being able to detect and respond to predators.
Predatory Fish Select for
Coordinated Collective Motion in Virtual Prey
C. C. Ioannou, V. Guttal, I. D. Couzin
C. C. Ioannou, V. Guttal, I. D. Couzin
ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA
This week, 30
research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online
by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered
with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE),
has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically
speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify
landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with
myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence
stretches of our chromosomes.
ENCODE Project Writes
Eulogy for Junk DNA
Elizabeth Pennisi
Elizabeth Pennisi
Science 7 September 2012:
Vol. 337 no. 6099 pp. 1159-1161
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.337.6099.1159
Vol. 337 no. 6099 pp. 1159-1161
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.337.6099.1159
How Culture Drove Human Evolution
The main
questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about
how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the
capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for
ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool
starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the
next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so
complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a
really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea
called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in
the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural
information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability
to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of
information.
