The 2:00pm announcement from NASA today is they have found the first life Form that uses arsenic as a genetic building block. This will change much in science. Science fiction has said such things were possible for many, many years, but this is the first evidence of it.
The Science Daily article Life Built With Toxic Chemical: First Known Microbe on Earth Able to Thrive and Reproduce Using Arsenic has the info.
I came upon this really interesting article in Science Daily titled “Pregnant Mother’s Diet Impacts Infant’s Sense of Smell, Alters Brain Development“. It says that a baby’s sense of smell is affected by what foods the mother eats while pregnant. This makes a lot of evolutionary sense. If the mother is consuming certain foods then it must be good for the baby to have a predilection to consume and have desires for this food as well. This is an effective way of helping to ensure that the baby will want eat the food that is available in its future food sphere. However, this horrendously backfires when the mother is an alcoholic or has a horrible diet to begin with allowing the potential to pass a desire in the baby for a similar life style. =(
If you are currently pregnant please keep this finding in mind…. think of the children.
The Mosuo are mentioned prominently in the book Sex at Dawn which I wrote about earlier. The Mosuo, who are found on the Chinese/Tibetan border, are one of the few remaining egalitarian and matriarchal societies. What is so fascinating about them is, partly that they are a matriarchal society where the mothers ares the center of the family, but also that a mothers family raises the children and the father does not necessarily have to have any direct involvement with his children. The children’s mother and her brothers etc take care of raising the children. Here it truly does take a tribe to raise a child.
They do not marry as we, westerners understand the term. They have something called Walking Marriage. At night if a woman wants the man to come in to spend the night then she leaves the door open for him, and in the morning he must be gone. Women may have however many partners as she deems appropriate, but these liaisons are usually based on love and not necessarily on libido.
Frontline World: Rough Cut has a 20 minute video titled ‘The Women’s Kingdom’ detailing the Mosuo culture. It is fascinating. Please take a moment to watch it.
“Intelligent Design = Calvin Ball”
I ran into this article titled “Does Language Shape the Way You Think?” that talks about how the vocabulary of your native tongue can affect how you conceptualize and relate to the world around you. I have heard of this before in reading about linguistics, but since I found an article on it I thought I would post it for everyone. It is fascinating stuff.
I recently finished the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. It is an excellent and life altering book. It really ties together a lot of what I have read about evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology. If you have not read this book, or even if you have never read an evolutionary psychology book at all, read it. It may change the way that you see the world, and I mean that in a good way. It covers topics such as monogamy, swinging, infidelity, and polyamory in it. It truly covers the wide spectrum of human sexuality. Wow is all I can say.
If you do not know what polyamory is I have written a primer on polyamory for those who are curious.
I am currently reading the new book ” Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” which is a book on Evolutionary Psychology, which for me, is a really fascinating topic. I think I have the table copied over correctly. It is a great book so far.
This table occurs in Chapter 3 and I found it really, really interesting and I thought I would share it with you. I found it especially interesting since chips and bonobos are our closest genetic relatives, differing by about 1.6%. It is amazing how diverse the primates’ mating patterns are.
Table 1: Social Organization Among Apes
Bonobo
Egalitarian and peaceful, bonobo communities are maintained primarily through social bonding between females, although females bond with males as well. Male status derives from the mother. Bonds between son and mother are lifelong. Multimale-multifemale mating.
Chimpanzee
The bonds between males are strongest and lead to constantly shifting male coalitions. Females move through overlapping ranges within territory patrolled by males, but don’t form strong bonds with other females or any particular male. Multimale-multifemale mating
Gibbon
Gibbons establish nuclear family units; each couple maintains a territory from which other pairs are excluded. Mating is monogamous. mating.
Gorilla
Generally, a single dominant male (the so-called ·Silverback”) occupies a range for his family unit composed of several females and young. Adolescent males are forced out of the group as they reach sexual maturity. Strongest social bonds are between the male and adult females. Polygynous mating.
Human
By far the most diverse social species among the primates, there is plentiful evidence of all types of socio-sexual bonding, cooperation, and competition among contemporary humans. Multimale-multifemale
Orangutan
Orangutans are solitary and show little bonding of any kind. Male orangutans do not tolerate each other’s presence. An adult male establishes a large territory where several females live. Each has her own range. Mating is dispersed, infrequent and often violent.
This post is brought to you by the letter “L” for linguistics. I have come to think about his because of my reading about linguistics. In linguistics it is thought that humanity’s languages all stemmed from a single language called Proto-Indo-European, and then as the tribes broke up and migrated to other regions cutting themselves off geographically and culturally from their original tribe, culture, and language their language eventually evolved into the language families that we see today like the romance, slavic, germanic, etc; and then those individual language families evolved into the individual languages that we see today.
The key point here is isolation brings about a different evolutionary path, albeit, in this case, a linguistic one.
As early homosapiens separated from their tribes and developed unique cultural and linguistic traits they also traveled to areas where the climates and therefore food sources were different, and as thousands of years passed I believe that our bodies developed a physiology more tuned to processing the foods that were apart of the normal diet for that region, and potentially lost the genes that allowed efficient and/or health processing of other foods which were not staples of their current dietary intake.
People who lived in inland areas where they are used to drinking cows milk and eating wheat products will have the genes to efficiently make use of eating those products. People who lived by the sea would develop genes to more efficiently eat seafood, sea weed and other sea products while potentially losing the genes for wheat and milk. You can come up with many situational examples like this from region to region as to what is common and what is not.
With all of this being said what I am really going to postulate here is that I bet that if we trace where our geographical genetic lineage is based we can have a better idea as to what foods we will most likely be able to take advantage of. Genetic testing can help us to eat better and be healthier by knowing what foods we may be tuned to take advantage of.
Perhaps an easier solution would be to come up with some baseline nutritional food source that has all of the USRD recommendations and then take blood test, urine and fecal tests, etc to find out how we process nutrients and how much our body’s we really need in a day. By knowing how much is removed from the body and so on we can see how much we, individually, really need each day.
We can also do similar tests for specific products like wheat, dairy, etc and see how we respond and process them to determine if our body will process it efficiently and safely.
Here is a very interesting article in the New York Times article titled “Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force“
Here is a 5 page Psychology Today article titled Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature that follows very closely what I have read in the book about Evolutionary Psychology titled Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. Evolutionary Psychology is very interesting as always.
Thorium, which was abandoned in favor of Uranium due to its production of nuclear grade Plutonium, is now working to be the Green Nuclear Fuel of Choice.
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
Long live our new Thorium overlords.
In 2008 I listed some Notes to the Obama Administration and in part of that was having research between different organizations or researchers being more publicly and/or centrally located so that work is not repeated and researchers can more closely work together and share insights to allow more rapid scientific advancement. This Facebook for scientists gets millions in funding is a huge stepping stone towards that goal. Very good to hear.
I have just posted a new article for the Milwaukee Examiner titled “Science as a method of faith affirmation or spirituality.“
I have published my first article for the Milwaukee Examiner titled “Do we have options in the religion verses science debate?“.
Michael Shermer and Dinesh D’Souza go toe-to-toe on some of the greatest issues related to science and religion: is there evidence for God’s existence, what is the proper relationship between science and religion, and has religion been a force for good or evil in the world?: Is Religion a Force for Good or Evil in the World?
I have not had a chance to watch it all yet, but I am really looking forward to listen to their debate.