Key Brain Regulatory Gene Shows Evolution In Humans

BioresearchOnline ^ | 12/13/05 | Duke University

[Dichroic]

Durham, NC - Researchers have discovered the first brain regulatory gene that shows clear evidence of evolution from lower primates to humans. They said the evolution of humans might well have depended in part on hyperactivation of the gene, called prodynorphin (PDYN), that plays critical roles in regulating perception, behavior and memory.

They reported that, compared to lower primates, humans possess a distinctive variant in a regulatory segment of the prodynorphin gene, which is a precursor molecule for a range of regulatory proteins called "neuropeptides." This variant increases the amount of prodynorphin produced in the brain.

While the researchers do not understand the physiological implications of the activated PDYN gene in humans, they said their finding offers an important and intriguing piece of a puzzle of the mechanism by which humans evolved from lower primates

[bobdsmith]

I think he was talking about race rather than species

[Pharmboy]

From here about halfway down the page:

Me: Gould has said the same many times. He and Lewontin were hard lefties.

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD LEWONTIN

edited transcript

Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, is one of the world's most eminent authorities on human diversity. He has written many celebrated books on evolution and human variation books including Human Diversity, Not in Our Genes and most recently, The Triple Helix.

Does racial difference exist on a genetic level?

Peoples who have occupied major geographical areas for much of the recent evolution of humans look different from one another. Sub-Saharan Africans have dark skin and people who live in East Asia tend to have a light tan skin and an eye color and eye shape and hair that is different than Europeans. So there is this kind of genetic - it is genetic - differentiation of some features of the body between people who live in Central Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America.

And those features, which are geographically determined, were used to erect notions of different races. There's the African race, the Black race, the Yellow race, the Red race, the Brown race, and the White race. And it's mostly skin color plus hair shape and eye shape and so on. That's the everyday observation, that "they" all look alike - and we all look different.

The real question is not whether those differences in skin color and hair form are genetic, because they are. We know that because the children of black slaves brought to North America were the same color as their parents were. The question is what else does that tell us about biological differences? How much difference in other genes beside the genes that are relevant to skin color is there between these major geographical groups?

If we want to use the notion of race in a sensible, biological way, we could only do that if there really were a lot of genetic difference between those groups aside from the superficial differences that we can see. And that's an important issue which we now understand. We understand it because over the years a lot of data were gathered by anthropologists and geneticists looking at blood group genes and protein genes and other kinds of genes from all over the world. Anthropologists just went around taking blood out of everybody.

I must say, if I were a South American Indian, I wouldn't have let them take my blood, but they did. And one of the consequences of that is by the early 1970s, we had a huge amount of information about the different genetic forms all over the world for a large number of genes that had no relevance to those outward manifestations like skin color, but had to do with blood type and proteins.

And when you brought all that together, it became pretty clear that there really were minor differences in the frequencies of the different gene forms between the major geographical so-called races.

Since the 20th century, it's been recognized that there's what's called polymorphism of blood type. There are type As and type Bs and type Os and Rh-positive and Rh-negative and so on in every group in the world. But the assumption was that people in Africa would have a very different relative frequency of A and B and O than people would in North America or in Europe and in Asia.

And what all these studies showed was that that wasn't true. That you couldn't really tell the difference between an African population and a European population and an Asian population by looking at the frequency, the relative proportions of the different blood types. They were essentially the same in all these groups.

That isn't true for every blood type. There are occasional types which are strongly differentiated between populations. There's one blood type called the Duffy blood type and that's very different between Asians, Africans, and Europeans. But that's an exception rather than a rule.

For almost every gene we know, either everybody in the world has the same form of the gene, in which case all human beings are the same, or if there's variation, the frequencies of the different variants are the same relatively speaking, close to the same, in Africans, Asians, North Americans, Austro-Asians, and so on. And only about - well, I estimated 7% of all of human genetic variation could be ascribed to differences between groups, between major races. Anyway, about 75% of all the genes [come in only one form and] are identical in everybody. So there's very little differentiation.

[VadeRetro]

What Lewontin said is still true and not contradicted by anything in the lead article. What are you claiming in calling him and Gould liars?

There is an underlying basis of commonality among human populations regardless of race. You might as well say there are short people and tall people everywhere. In fact, humans don't have much genetic diversity compared with most animal species. Recent genetic bottlenecks, the last perhaps 70,000 years ago corresponding to a particularly large volcanic event.

We have isolated genetic differences that correlate with details of ethnicity, but most of them are minor in scope and effect. This does not mean we still don't all have backbones.

Again, what are you claiming? What was a lie? What is discredited? What is contradicted by the article?

[VadeRetro]

You know, if you read the lead article carefully instead of looking for isolated "gotcha" soundbites, it is very much affirming Lewontin's view of genetics. Changes to a few regulatory genes produce drastic effects, leaving much of the genome conserved in working order. Much more of the story is in the regulatory genes than in the proteins themselves.

Neither Lewontin nor Gould discovered this stuff. They may have acted as popularizers and may have used the material to scoff at racism, but that should be OK. The scientific basis is well established by now. This article is just another bit of evidence for a picture that's been building for decades. And we wouldn't want anyone to think the theory of evolution is racist.

[Junior]

The CrevoSci Archive Just one of the many services of Darwin Central "The Conspiracy that Cares"

• PatrickHenry's famous List-O-Links
• Webster's On-Line Dictionary:  Creationist

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CrevoSci threads for the past week:

1. 2005-12-14 Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't
2. 2005-12-14 Education panel stalls curriculum vote for creationism appeal [S. Carolina, another Kansas?]
3. 2005-12-14 Key Brain Regulatory Gene Shows Evolution In Humans
4. 2005-12-13 Orthodox Jews in S. Florida join debate on evolution vs. intelligent design
5. 2005-12-13 Study Sheds Light On Early Migration (Americas)
6. 2005-12-13 The Problem with God: Interview with Richard Dawkins
7. 2005-12-12 C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) (Did The Author Of 'Narnia' Believe In Theistic Evolution, Etc?
8. 2005-12-12 Future of Conservatism: Darwin or Design? [Human Events goes with ID]
9. 2005-12-12 National Poll Is Being Done About Requiring Kids To Study INtelligent Design In Public Schools
10. 2005-12-12 Smart Bats Have Smaller Testicles
11. 2005-12-11 Obama says Republicans practice 'Social Darwinism'
12. 2005-12-10 Professor says was forced out over comment (Mirecki of Kansas)
13. 2005-12-09 Dog's Genome Could Provide Clues to Disorders in Humans
14. 2005-12-09 Giant Asian Ape and Humans Coexisted, Might Have Interacted
15. 2005-12-09 Movement Of Earth's North Magnetic Pole Accelerating Rapidly [No Doubt Bush's Fault!]
16. 2005-12-09 Theory of intelligent design making its way into Broward textbooks (Florida)
17. 2005-12-09 Whales, ostrich evolved in India
18. 2005-12-08 Ancient drought 'changed history'
19. 2005-12-08 Anti-creationism prof (KansasU) quits department chair
20. 2005-12-08 Dog genome sequence and analysis published in 'Nature'
21. 2005-12-08 Funny Cartoon!
22. 2005-12-08 God, Science [evolution], and the Kooky Kansans Who Love them Both
23. 2005-12-08 Huge New Virus Defies Classification
24. 2005-12-08 Man's best friend shares most genes with humans
25. 2005-12-08 Prof. Critical of Creationism Resigns Post
26. 2005-12-08 Similar stem cells in insect and human gut (Fruit flies are 'tiny distant cousins'?)
27. 2005-12-08 Students Denounce Reported Assault on Prof. Who Mocked Christian Fundamentalists
28. 2005-12-08 WHAT HAPPENED TO PAUL MIRECKI? (Phony Hate Crime Alert)

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CrevoSci Thread Count, 2005 YTD:  1256

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On This Date in CrevoSci History

1. 2004-12-14 ACLU Files Suit in Pa. Over Evolution
2. 2004-12-14 Species come and go – and so do we
3. 2002-12-14 Scientists exposed as sloppy reporters
4. 2001-12-14 Mars Odyssey Detects Signs of Water
5. 1999-12-14 Creation Ex Nihilo 22(1)
6. 1999-12-14 Macro-Evolution versus Moses(Several Parts)

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Longest CrevoSci Thread Ever

• 2002-12-11 Evolution Disclaimer Supported (6,915 replies)

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Lost CrevoSci Battlefields (Pulled or Locked Threads)

1. 2005-11-15 'Perception' gene tracked humanity's evolution, scientists say
2. 2004-04-27 Stop Teaching Our Kids this Evolution Claptrap!
3. 2003-10-29 The Mystery of the Missing Links (Intelligent Design vs. Evolution)
4. 2003-10-27 Physics Nobelist Takes Stand on Evolution
5. 2003-10-23 Gene Found for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
6. 2003-10-21 Artificial Proteins Assembled from Scratch
7. 2003-09-23 Solar System Formation Questions
8. 2003-09-17 Agreement of the Willing - Free Republic Science Threads
9. 2003-07-18 Unlikely Group May Revive Darwin Debate [Evolution v. Creationism]
10. 2003-07-02 Unlocking the Mystery of 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life'
11. 2003-06-26 Darwin Faces a New Rival
12. 2003-06-06 Amazing Creatures
13. 2002-09-13 Oldest Known Penis Is 100 Million Years Old
14. 2002-04-10 (Creationists) CRSC Correction
15. 2001-11-10 Alabama to continue biology textbook warning sticker
16. 2001-11-06 Warming makes mosquito evolve, University of Oregon scientists find
17. 2001-08-28 The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [6th Revision]
18. 2001-08-26 A Scientific Account of the Origin of Life on Earth [Thread I]
19. 2001-01-13 A Christian Understanding of Intelligent Design
20. 2000-11-15 Evolutionism Receives Another Hard Blow
21. 2000-10-10 Another Lost Generation?
22. 2000-08-30 Evil-Ution
23. 1999-11-14 Creationism's Success Past 5 Years: (Gallup: 1 in 10 hold secular evolutionist perspective)

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CrevoSci Warrior Freepdays for the month of December:

1999-12-03 Aquinasfan 2002-12-06 Archangelsk 2004-12-29 b_sharp 2000-12-10 bdeaner 2000-12-29 BedRock 2004-12-03 bobdsmith 1998-12-20 cantfindagoodscreenname 2004-12-15 Catholic54321 2004-12-14 Chiapet 1998-12-24 dead 1999-12-17 dennisw 2004-12-18 dervish 2005-12-04 Dichroic 2000-12-13 Dr. I. C. Spots 2001-12-13 e_engineer 2000-12-26 Fester Chugabrew 1998-12-23 Frapster

2002-12-20 furball4paws 2003-12-21 gspz 1997-12-08 Gumlegs 2003-12-05 Guydude 2002-12-01 HalfFull 2002-12-18 Happy2BMe 2000-12-01 I_Publius 2004-12-27 indcons 1998-12-07 JAWs 2002-12-10 john_baldacci_is_a_commie 2000-12-13 johnandrhonda 1997-12-05 Ken H 1999-12-25 kjam22 2004-12-30 leight 1997-12-09 longshadow 1999-12-29 Mensch

2002-12-07 Milltownmalbay 2004-12-03 mlc9852 2002-12-06 new cruelty 2001-12-25 nickcarraway 1999-12-04 pepsionice 2003-12-02 PetroniusMaximus 1997-12-08 Pfesser 1999-12-17 Publius6961 2002-12-13 qam1 2000-12-09 rcocean 2000-12-02 rdb3 1999-12-24 RightWhale 2000-12-01 rwfromkansas 1997-12-06 saquin 2002-12-08 Sentis 1999-12-08 shrinkermd

2001-12-04 SpiderMBA 2004-12-17 Stark_GOP 2001-12-19 Steve Eisenberg 2000-12-08 Stultis 2000-12-08 Sub-Driver 2000-12-06 Sunana 2001-12-27 Tailgunner Joe 2002-12-10 tbird5 2004-12-06 Thatcherite 2000-12-09 Theodore R. 1998-12-10 TheOtherOne 1999-12-07 Tolerance Sucks Rocks 1998-12-14 VadeRetro 2000-12-29 Virginia-American 1998-12-22 VOA 1997-12-18 Waco

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In Memoriam
Fallen CrevoSci Warriors:

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Bring back Modernman and SeaLion!

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[Pharmboy]

"Gotcha" soundbites? Please...This was a huge part of their anti-genetic, left-wing driven, Lysenkoist agenda. As a matter of fact, back in the 80s I debated Gould about just this subject and said to him then that I thought the most variation would be found in the regualtory genes. I was right and he was wrong.

I do not have much patience for people who subvert science for their personal political agendas no matter where they come from on the political spectrum.

[b_sharp]

Well pung, me lad.

[spinestein]

[Since when did speculation start being passed off for science?]


Speculation is but one ingredient of science.

It is followed by questioning, hypothesizing, experimenting and analyzing.

[spinestein]

[This was a huge part of their anti-genetic, left-wing driven, Lysenkoist agenda.]



Are you refering to S.J. Gould as an anti-genetic Lysenkoist?

If so, all I can say is "Wow".

[Pharmboy]

Indeed, he was absolutely guilty of the same nonsense as Lysenko! For example, because of his lefty agendas, he fought tooth and nail to decouple genetic influence on human intelligence, a preposterous position for anyone familiar with biology and anthropology to even the slightest degree. He even wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man which used a straw man (19th Century "science") to taint the whole study of intelligence.

[VadeRetro]

As a matter of fact, back in the 80s I debated Gould about just this subject and said to him then that I thought the most variation would be found in the regualtory genes. I was right and he was wrong.

Should I have heard of you? You seem much too ignorant and prone to wild misspeaking to be debating Gould about anything.

[spinestein]

Of all the writings of Gould that I've read, including "The Mismeasure of Man", I've never seen anything which could be interpreted as Lysenkoism or as a decoupling of genetic influence on human intelligence.

What I have seen is his criticism of the idea of a strictly deterministic source for human intelligence and of the idea that individual people could be lumped together by race as a scientifically valid way to estimate their intelligence.

I've spent some time over the past few hours finding and reading articles critical of Gould and his writing and one thing seems most prominent: they all criticize his leftist bias and hence his motivations, saying his desire to bring about social change makes him a poor scientist and invalidates his work.

This very well credentialed critic seems to illustrate this best and even compares Gould to Lysenko (which is absurd, like comparing an unpopular president like Jimmy Carter to Hitler).

http://www.cpsimoes.net/artigos/art_davis.html

Many well known popularizers of science bring a social and political bias with them (Sagan, Attenborough, Leakey, Goodall, and especially Einstein.) and that makes them popular targets for ad hominem attacks. When a scientist steps away from his lab coat and starts making statements about social or political issues it's only fair for them to expect people to attack their opinions, but a scientific opinion and an opinion about politics should be made separately and I think Gould does a more respectable job of both than his critics do.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"(which is absurd, like comparing an unpopular president like Jimmy Carter to Hitler)."

The proper analogue for Carter is Neville Chamberlain. Is there a dictator he HASN'T appeased?

[spinestein]

I agree. That would be an accurate comparison.

[F16Fighter]

[Researchers] said the evolution of humans might well have depended in part on hyperactivation of the gene, called prodynorphin (PDYN)....

"Might well...might well...."

More delusions of grandeur from the evo-philes that some way they may play "God" with enough crayons and coloring books.

[Pharmboy]

Well, as ignorant as I am and as rude as you are, I was right and Gould was wrong...about a lot (as I suspect you are too). Pity.

[Pharmboy]

Perhaps I should have been more clear: Gould (and anyone else) may speak to any political beliefs they want to. My problem is when scientists misrepresent science in the service of their agendas, and with Gould it was Marxism (as it is with Lewontin).

What aggregate data shows us about abilities of groups does nothing to predict an individual's performance whatever group s/he belongs to. That is a truism. Another truism is that the totality of evidence shows that genetics plays a significant part in the determination of many behavioral traits, including what we call general intelligence (eg., monozygotic twins reared apart, intelligence tests consistent from an early age, consistency of group intelligence tests), and this is what Gould fought against. When I met him and debated him in the 1980s, he acknowledged a small genetic component to intelligence, but felt that environment was the key. This--to me--is Lysenkoism updated and a bit compromised, but Lysenkoism nonetheless. He was a "scientist" who placed ideology above science, and a self-appointed spokesman for science, to me, an unforgivable combination.

He was a polemicist who, through half-truths and misrepresentations attempted to give credence to his collectivist mentality. May he RIP.

[VadeRetro]

When I met him and debated him in the 1980s, he acknowledged a small genetic component to intelligence, but felt that environment was the key. This--to me--is Lysenkoism updated and a bit compromised, but Lysenkoism nonetheless.

The nature-nurture debate is about how much of who we are comes from genetics and how much from environment. Lysenkoism, a form of Lamarckism, is a belief that "nurture" characteristics are passed to offspring. That is, "nurture" in one generation becomes "nature."

Didn't know that?

I suspect that if you debated Gould, you claimed he dented your fender.

[Pharmboy]

You're not only rude, you're an IDIOT.

Lysenkoism was a campaign against genetics and geneticists which happened in the Soviet Union from the middle of the 1930s to the middle of the 1960s, centered around the figure of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. In a broader context, Lysenkoism is often invoked to imply the overt subversion of science by political forces.

Who CARES what theories Lysenko invoked to put his idiocy forth? It is about the environment as key, and the minimization of genetics. The same goes for Gould, and, evidently, you.

[ThinkDifferent]

Anytime someone says "might," it is equally true that it might NOT.

The Earth might continue to orbit the sun for the next year.