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

Science 31 August 2012:
Vol. 337 no. 6098 p. 1041
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1225640

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

http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201718109

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

Chemistry World 22 August 2012

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/08/automatic-chemist

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

Science 7 September 2012:
Vol. 337 no. 6099 pp. 1212-1215
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1218919

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

Science 7 September 2012:
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.

See it on Scoop.it, via Talks