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Posts Tagged ‘evolution’

neo-Darwinist graffiti

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on October 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

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Getting to know my inner shark

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Am having a wonderful time reading, “Your Inner Fish” by Professor Neil Shubin – an exploration into the deep evolutionary roots of the human body.  Amazed to contemplate the embryonic structures known as the branchial arches, or gill arches – which we share with sharks! – and the role of the gcm2 gene that is [...]

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rs1799971 affirms common neural pathway for social and physical pain

Posted in Cingulate cortex, Insula, OPRM1, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia What hurts more – a broken toe or a broken heart?  Ask a parent and their forlorn 15 year-old who was not invited to the party that everyone is going to, and you might get different answers.  In some cases, the internal anguish of social exclusion or estrangement, may even – paradoxically [...]

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Human brain looks the other way while ancient genomes romp and play

Posted in Intronic or repetitive sequences, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image by Kevin Steele via Flickr For more than a decade, we’ve known that at least 95% of the human genome is junk – or junque – if you’re offended by the thought that “you” emerged from a single cell whose genome is mostly a vast pile of crap – or crappe – if you [...]

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What it Means to Be Human (World Science Festival)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on August 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia pointer to this 5-part video discussion from the 2009 World Science Festival. In part 1 @ 8:30mins Sir Paul Nurse makes the plug for the nexus of neuroscience-genomics-humanities.  In part 3 @0:20secs Renee Reijo Pera makes the case for basic developmental biology as a key, while @12:00mins Francis Collins makes the case [...]

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“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine” and other predictions of a polyvagal theory

Posted in Vagus, tagged , on May 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Recently, I’ve been reading Brian Boyd’s new book, On the Origin of Stories, – a lengthy work that relates human evolution to our creative processes.  This line of inquiry is closely related to an interest in genetics and brain function, since links between genetic variation and brain function can be used as [...]

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Ungroomed granddaughters protest epigenetic marks on BDNF

Posted in BDNF, tagged , , on May 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Among mammalian species, moms can have it rough. THEY do the foraging and the child rearing usually without the help of dad who may or may not be prancing about defending his territory or doing who knows what.  The biological systems that manage such a predicament for the female would, not surprisingly, [...]

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Genome prepares us for certain environmental cues: “I was expecting that!”

Posted in Visual cortex, tagged , , on March 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Image by cobalt123 via Flickr Is the human brain a blank slate? or a pre-programmed machine that is ready to take the S.A.T.s right out of the box? Obviously neither, or both as it were. Some have gingerly waded into the nature vs. nuture debate and suggested that the human brain comes pre-wired to receive [...]

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Evolutionary origins of brain size reflected in facebook friends

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on February 22, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Image by ChrisL_AK via Flickr How many “facebook friends” do you have?   Well, of course, this depends on many things – perhaps just a matter of how much time you spend “on” facebook.  We all know of a few super facebookers with +300 friends and super-duper profligate facebook whales with +1000 friends, but it turns [...]

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Happy 200th birthday Charles Darwin ! Here’s an inherited acquired characteristic for you

Posted in Hippocampus, tagged , , on February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Cover via Amazon Few may pause on February 12 to note the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since the publication of  “On the Origin of Species” (click here to download).  To some extent, this may be expected since much of the controversy  (creator vs. autonomous biochemical processes) seems [...]

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Gene expression divides coolest part of your brain into 4 parts

Posted in acetylcholine, Cingulate cortex, GABA, Glutamate, tagged , , , , , , on January 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

OK, there’s not really a “coolest” part of the brain, but, some areas are pretty darn weird & wild.  Consider the cingulate cortex (shown here).  Electrical stimulation of the pACC region in humans can produce overwhelming fear – even a feeling that death is imminent – while stimulation of white matter tracts adjacent to area [...]

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“sintinaptoo” is a nonword that makes it hard to read nonwords

Posted in CNTNAP2, FOXP2, Myelin, Superior temporal cortex, tagged , , , , on November 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image by lintmachine via Flickr Like “Joe the Plumber” (whose real name is Samuel), CNTNAP2 (whose real name is CASPR2) has achieved a bit of fame lately.  While recently appearing almost everywhere (here, here, here) except FOX News, CNTNAP2 (not Joe the Plumber) is apparently a transcriptional target of the infamous FOXP2 “language gene” – [...]

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My ‘HUMAN’ brain

Posted in ASPM, tagged , , on September 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia Having a great time reading Michael Gazzaniga‘s new book, “Human – the science behind what makes us unique” and thought I’d see to what extent his conclusions might square with genetic data on population history and natural selection etc. and also evaluate my 23andMe profile to see to what extent I’m carrying [...]

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Kicking the “common disease/common variant hypothesis” while its down

Posted in COMT, tagged , , on September 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr Just piling on to the many comments on today’s NY Times profile of David Goldstein who justifiably points out a dearth of whole-genome-snp-scanning success. One interesting debate is whether natural selection had anything to do with expunging the much sought-after (impossible to find) deleterious, disorder-promoting variants (he suggests yes) [...]

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Autism risk factor CNTNAP2 bears phylogenetic evidence of positive selection

Posted in CNTNAP2, tagged , on March 7, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Image via Wikipedia I was just browsing the recent paper “Natural selection has driven population differentiation in modern humans” by Barreiro and colleagues (doi:10.1038/ng.78) and noticed in their supplementary table that the autism risk factor CNTNAP2 (as blogged about earlier here) contains at least one non-synonymous or 5′-UTR SNP with a high Fst value. Yann [...]

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Humans & li’l birdies share genetic pathway for speech

Posted in FOXP2, Striatum, tagged , on December 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia The evolution of language sometimes seems like a sort of jewel in the evolutionary crown of homo sapiens. Evidence of positive selection in the verbal dyspraxia FOXP2 gene, is often discussed with amazement and a reverential tone befitting this special evolutionary achievement. Enter the humble zebra finch – who’s songs and language [...]

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Evolution of the human mind: learning to read the genetic history book

Posted in ASPM, MCPH1, tagged , on November 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr Comparisons of human genome variation within and across closely related species have great potential to reveal ways in which the brain and mind of modern humans may or may not have differed from our hominid ancestors. Such comparisons have recently revealed a great many genomic targets of natural selection, [...]

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Talkin’ bout SRPX2

Posted in FOXP2, SRPX2, Sylvian fissure, tagged , , on October 2, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Image by wallyg via Flickr Can you say this 5 times quickly, “secreted sushi containing SRPX2 as a source of sylvian seizures seems like a spandrel” ? Well, if you can, you might say thanks to your FOXP2 gene (much ado recently), but of course its important to say thanks to so many other co-evolutionary [...]

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Genome as an history book: a story of intragenomic coevolution

Posted in MHC loci, tagged , , on July 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Image via Wikipedia To me, phylogenetics is one of the coolest ways to use human sequence diversity. I’m not an expert, but roughly speaking, the method involves looking at sequences among ancestral populations and comparisons to sequences in groups that have migrated out over space and time. In these out groups, recombination and mutation have [...]

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