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.
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“
I really, really, really want to sign up for the Personal Genome Project. This makes me want to squeal with delight….. I need help. I know. =)