Anthropology.net

Two days ago, Matt Ridley published a rhetorical editorial in the Wall Street Journal‘s column Mind & Matter. Ridley addresses the decline in incidence of inheritable diseases, overcoming infertility with in vitro fertilization (IVF), and other topics such as the impact of culture and brain expansion. The piece has gained a lot of attention in social media with over 1,900 Facebook shares and 650 Tweets at the time of writing this blog post. This is poignant discussion to be had but Ridley’s assessment falls short.

Ridley discusses relaxed selection by bringing up an IVF technique, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, used help men with immotile sperm to father children. Firstly, since he didn’t mention the cause of immobility of the sperm, I must mention that in any given man a significant portion of sperm are immotile. The ratio of immobile sperm to motile sperm is critical, as is the volume of or sperm count. The WHO standard for motility of sperm is about 50% of the sample, any less than the risk of infertility rises. However, if the sperm count is high, then having less than 50% motility is not an issue.

There are certain circumstances where almost all sperm are immobile, such as Kartagener’s syndrome. Kartagener’s syndrome is a primary ciliary dyskenesia. This is an autosomal recessive genetic disruption in the arms of the motor protein dynein. Kartagener’s syndrome is approximated to be present in 1 out of 15,000 – 32,000 men., of which infertility is not a primary concern. I write this because main result of impaired ciliary function is the impairment of clearing mucous to the lungs. Chronic respiratory infections due to progressive damage to the respiratory system, leads severe diseases like bronchiectasis beginning in early childhood. Prevention of these complications is more important than using IVF.

Ridley weakened his argument on relaxed selection, because he failed to discuss the details of what sperm immobility is and means. Furthermore, in an example of true spermatic immobility, surviving to reproductive age when respiratory complications hit is low. Why didn’t he address the relaxation on selection with the increase use of C-sections?

In the next half of the article, I can’t tell if Ridley was playing Devil’s advocate with this excerpt,

“Now, thanks to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, parents can deliberately choose to implant embryos that lack certain deleterious mutations carried in their families, with the result that genes for Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s and other diseases are retreating in frequency. The old and overblown worry of the early eugenicists—that “bad” mutations were progressively accumulating in the species—is beginning to be addressed not by stopping people from breeding, but by allowing them to breed, safe in the knowledge that they won’t pass on painful conditions.”

Parents are still giving birth to children with known and unknown deleterious mutations. Post-implantation diagnosis of genetic diseases with techniques like such as amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling are not offered to all expecting mothers, nor do all expecting mothers chose to these tests… Let alone pre-implantation! To say that these this practically non-existent option has directly caused a decrease deleterious traits to no longer be selected against is a bold and brash statement. The increase in admixture is a more impactful variable in the reduction of incidence in genetic diseases the pre-implantation diagnosis.

Ridley also brings up the differences of SNPs seen between people of European and African ancestry, attributing nothing of substance to the observation that Europeans have half as many SNPs as Africans. He implies, “larger population allow more variants [with] less severe selection against mildly disadvantageous genes,” and attributes the expansion of population in the last 5,000 years to this. But within a species, mutation rates are constant, regardless of the selective pressure.

Lastly, commenting on the slow rate of brain expansion and how modern advances in technology and culture will have an effect on evolution is akin to equating how the Kardashians will effect the Sun’s eventual implosion. The sum of the pressures of selection occur with drift. The time frames of history, in the thousands of years are too small to capture this phenomenon. A genetic example to outline this, is the Black Plague. European communities show much lower genetic diversity because of mass death that wiped out large populations, it had almost a nil effect on our genetic traits as a whole.

Like any progressing variable, time and culture offer different selective pressures upon the evolution of humans. While on one hand we maybe selecting for people with deleterious traits by offering IVF and C-sections to those who wouldn’t normally become parents, we on the other hand can prevent the births of offspring with such traits by early diagnosis. Additionally, as our population continues to expand and cultures admix, can we with certainty say we see an impact on the genetic and phenotypic makeup of humans?

These questions lead me to ask, “What Should Human Evolution Be?”

A couple weeks ago, proof of the oldest examples of human art made the rounds. I did not publish a post about that on here because I did not find the evidence compelling enough to warrant a discussion. Today, however, another archaeological story does deserve a nod. The Journal of Human Evolution published a paper on the oldest evidence of a human made evidence. The bone flutes come from the Geißenklösterle cave in Germany and outdate prior musical instruments by at least 5,000 years.

The flutes are made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, and look similar to the more younger examples that were announced in 2009. Tom Higham is the lead author, and the man who I presume dated the bones; the paper includes Nick Conard.

In their paper, the authors discuss the importance of the Danube River in providing a corridor to funnel humans and their technologies into central Europe during the dawn of the Aurignacian. To support this claim, the Geißenklösterle site has yielded more than just these flutes. The researchers have found personal ornaments, figurative art, mythical imagery and musical instruments from the cave, all dating to a period before the beginning of an ice age around 40,000 years ago. Highman writes,

“[Modern humans] were in Central Europe at least 2,000-3,000 years before this climatic deterioration, when huge icebergs calved from ice sheets in the northern Atlantic and temperatures plummeted… The question is what effect this downturn might have had on the people in Europe at the time.”

Higham, T., Basell, L., Jacobi, R., Wood, R., Ramsey, C., & Conard, N. (2012). Τesting models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: The radiocarbon chronology of Geißenklösterle Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.003

One of my favorite columns is the NCBI ROFL series from Discoblog. Yesterday’s post is a case in point example. The May 2012 issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences included an interpretation of the 2009 finding of a medieval plague burial site including a female individual with a brick in her mouth. The burial site dates to 1576. After ruling out that the brick could not have accidentally fallen into this dead lady’s mouth, and understanding of this ritual was built,

“We assume that during the digging of a hole in the ground for a person who had just died of the plague, the gravediggers cut off the ID 6 deposition. They noticed the shroud (its presence is suggested by the verticalization of the clavicle) and a hole, which corresponded with the mouth. As the body appeared as quite intact, they probably recognized in that body the so-called vampire, responsible for plague by chewing her shroud. As a consequence, they inserted a brick in her mouth. The sequence of those events (time since death) can be deduced by the lack of alteration on the skeleton joints, so that we can suppose that the gravediggers dealt with the corpse when it was not disjointed yet. The insertion of the brick into the mouth at the time of the primary deposition can be ruled out because we have no reference, even folkloric, for such a practice in that historical and cultural context.

It is not strange that superstitions concerning vampires were widespread in the 16th to 17th centuries even in a “cosmopolitan” and evolved city like Venice. It is surprising, however, that this exorcism ritual has been clearly recognized in an archaeological context: the ID 6 grave could well be the first “vampire” burial archaeologically attested and studied by a forensic odontological and anthropological approach.”

Minozzi, S., Fornaciari, A., & Fornaciari, G. (2012). Commentary on: Nuzzolese E, Borrini M. Forensic approach to an archaeological casework of “vampire” skeletal remains in Venice: odontological and anthropological prospectus. J Forensic Sci 2010; 55(6):1634-37 Journal of Forensic Sciences, 57 (3), 843-844 DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-4029.2012.02100.x

Yesterday evening I attended the American Museum of Natural History’s SciCafe with guest speaker Nina Jablonski. She gave a talk about the evolution of skin. If you are a follower of this blog, you would know the genetics of skin color is one of my favorite topics. It has been a while since I have kept up with the research, but I do remember most of the major alleles. Suffice to say, it was a pleasure to be back in the midst of it all.

The talk was engaging. Many people got a chance to ask questions. This was an outstanding feature of this format in this sort of venue. Most lectures I’ve been to leave such pressed time for questions that only 2-3 get fired away. That often leaves patrons at a loss. But SciCafe did it well, offering a good hour or so of discussion.

Nina’s talk is a good segway into some news that I came across today. As we know blond hair is a phenotype and carried by at least one a recessive allele in European populations. But many Oceanic peoples also have blonde hair, specifically those from Melanesia — distinct from Polynesia and Micronesia.

Melanesian Blond Hair

In a new Science paper, researchers identified a new missense mutation in TYRP1 in about half of the blondes in Micronesia which was not found in any of the 900 other individuals sampled from outside the South Pacific. This novel blond mutation in Solomon Islanders is thought to have popped up around 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, it appears to be the same one behind blondness in Fiji and other regions of the South Pacific.

Nina Jablonski eluded to the evolution of lighter phenotypes, like light skin occurring at least twice in the evolution of Homo sapiens and at least once in Homo neanderthalensis. But light skin need not be light hair, which is often a misconception. Research like this shows us that in dark-skinned people, one base pair mismatch leads to light hair.

Kenny, E., Timpson, N., Sikora, M., Yee, M., Moreno-Estrada, A., Eng, C., Huntsman, S., Burchard, E., Stoneking, M., Bustamante, C., & Myles, S. (2012). Melanesian Blond Hair Is Caused by an Amino Acid Change in TYRP1 Science, 336 (6081), 554-554 DOI: 10.1126/science.1217849

Yesterday, my father emailed me a link to the Iranian Genome Project that caught my eye. Ironically, Razib over at Gene Expression also highlighted this project in a recent post. Much like the intentions Harappa & Dodecad ancestry projects, of which I’ve participated in by submitting my 23andme data, the Iranian Genome Project aims to enlighten Iranian heritage and health. As an Iranian American who follows population genetics regularly, I am very keen on intersection of these two topics.

I’ll be following the project, but honestly I don’t have high hopes. I would love to be proven wrong. It seems lofty, using a lot of high yield buzzwords. My first impression was if this nothing more than a CV booster … Especially since it hasn’t been updated since last September. I guess it can’t be completely an empty shell because they have an impressive member on research team, Pardis Sabeti.

You can learn more about this project by checking out their site, watching the following video and following them on Twitter: @irangenes. If you want, you can participate in the project by filling out this survey.

We’ve covered the mitochondrial genome of the Denisova individual 2 years ago, back in March 2010. For those not familiar with the Denisova hominin, this specimen represents an archaic human species present at least 41,000 years ago – coexisting with Neandertals and modern humans in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The species is represented by a tooth and phalange.

A draft of the genome was released shortly afterwards in December, 2010. Today, after 30-fold coverage of the genome using Illumina GAIIx sequencing platform, the complete genome was released. It is free to download and use on Amazon Web Services… weighing in at 160gb.  I can imagine a lot of interesting comparisons can be made with this dataset and am happy the researchers made it available to the public.  There’s a caveat though, you can use the data but however agree that you cannot publish your findings until the researchers at Max Planck first get a stab at it.

I am now two-thirds done with my psychiatry rotation. It has been a fascinating experience so far. I’ve seen the gamut of psychiatric cases, depressed people who cut their necks through and through, to florid schizophrenics worried that the Hiroshima bomb will go off any moment. The treatment of psychiatric conditions like depression or schizophrenia often revolves around regulating monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine.

Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter that functions in a lot of behaviors and reactions, such as movement, lactation, aggression, fear, etc. In diseases like Parkinson, dopamine levels lower and movement becomes uncontrolled. In other diseases like schizophrenia, either dopamine levels are high or response to dopamine is higher, and paranoia & hallucinations manifest. Treating schizophrenia involves blocking dopamine receptors. As you can imagine, a common side effect of antipsychotics is movement disorders — or Parkinsonism.

So why am I on this neuropsychiatric kick on an anthropology blog? Our cultural and behavioral predisopostions ultimately boil down to chemicals in our brain interacting and stimulating other areas. One of the most important functions of dopamine is in the reward system of the brain, an area called the nucleus accumbens that primes pleasurable behavior to repeat, such as sex, eating, and drugs.

In this video, Robert Sapolsky of Stanford Neurology makes the distinction between how dopamine levels rise in the anticipation of pleasure and not as a response to pleasure. I especially like that comment he made regarding reward and religion, “There’s no monkey out there willing to lever press because St. Peter is down the line.”

Anonymous is not a force to be reckoned with. Scientologists have felt their wrath for sometime, Sarah Palin did as well, as have MasterCard & Visa post-Wikileaks fiasco. I’m sure Aaron Barr is now realizing the impact Anon has. Aaron Barr is head of an internet security company, HBGary Federal. His company was contracted by Bank of America as a counter Wikileaks impending release of cables that will incriminate BofA.

Anon vs. Scientology

Ars Technica has written up a 3 page account of the situation, which is absolutely fascinating. The tl;dr seems like its comes straight out of a B movie. Aaron’s ingenious plan was to ‘infiltrate’ Anon…He joined IRC channels in an attempt to sabotage Anon and get names of those in the organization.

His problems started here. Aaron failed to realize Anon is not a true organization. At its core, Anon is an anti-organization, as anarchist as you can be, with no leadership and an ever-changing membership. Aside from infiltrating the chat groups, Aaron attempted to flesh out members of Anon via a guilt-by-association method using something akin to 6-degrees-of-separation and social media. He revealed himself to the group, claiming to research them.

What ended up completely backfired on Aaron. Anon was pissed. In traditional hacking manner, they hacked his company’s site and replaced the front page. They also managed to get a hold of at least 44,000 of his emails and release them via torrents. They deleted 1 TB of his backups, wiped his devices and to top it all of, got a hold of his Twitter and LinkedIn accounts where they posted messages as him. For a company that was in the midst of a sale, Anon effectively ruined that.

This leads me to a open up a discussion regarding the Anthropology of Hackers, a timely piece that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday by NYU’s Gabriella Coleman. In her write up she outlines her 13 week curriculum on the culture of hacking, covering topics like open source, privacy & anonymity, and the dawn of the nerds. Ironically, almost all are relavent to HBGary Federal, given Aaron’s troubles. I wonder how they’d benefit from a crash course in Coleman’s class. Looking at Coleman’s course topics, there’s a lot to consider regarding hacking. The most relevant to this topic is the material covered in Weeks 11 & 12,

Week Eleven: Anarchism and the Politically Minded Hacker

Many hackers express some degree of ambivalence over the politics of hacking as Patrice Riemens has argued and as hackers themselves have raised. This is not the case with a small but well organized cadre of hackers located primarily in Latin America, Europe, and North America who havecharted collectives, many of them influenced by the political philosophy of anarchism. To grapple with anarchism as a political philosophy (which, similar to hacking, is plagued with a parade of misconceptions), we turn to David Graeber‘s fantastic pamphlet, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. We also read Jeff Juris’s ethnographic work about technology activists during the counter-globalization era Networking Futures.

Week Twelve: Trolls and the Politics of Spectacle

If anyone has been paying attention to the Internet in recent years, it has been impossible to miss a class of provocateur and saboteur: the Internet troll, whose raison d’être is to be as offensive as humanely possible via raunchy (but often humorous and quite esoteric) language, images, pranks, and tricks, basically, doing it for what they call the “lulz.” To get a sense of the cultural logic and exploits of trolls we read “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz. To help us grapple with the nature of spectacle, we read a couple of chapters of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe. We read excerpts from Lewis Hyde’s magnificent book on tricksters to consider whether the troll might be an example of these mythical creatures that have dazzled countless societies with their trickery. We watch a talk on a protest movement against the Church of Scientology whose roots lie in the act of trolling buteventually turned into a morally serious protest movement, which nonetheless retained the tactics of spectacle as part of its political arsenal.

This is a very interesting time to be looking at the intersection of technology and culture. There are anthropologists doing some fascinating work researching the sense of identity in online communities like World of Warcraft and Facebook… These groups share an online space, often with avatars and complex long-lasting interactions.

But with Anon there’s no identity.

Anon remains behind ever-changing screen names and masked localities behind proxies. I’m sure if you’ve ever taken an Intro to Cultural Anthropology course you would have touched on Erik Erikson’s theories of personality, We know what defines identity is a loose association of markers like behavior, language, dress, shared spaces, etc. Anon is disparate to any modern definition of identity. They do not share the same space, language, or any other measure of similarity except for behavior and ideology…

“We are Anonymous.  We are Legion.  We do not forgive.  We do not forget.  Expect us.”

I’d really like to get to hear Coleman’s take on this current event, or any cultural anthropologist for the matter. So if you’re interested, please chime in on your take on this all — What do you understand on Anon and how are they similar/dissimilar to other groups?

Carol Ward1, William Kimbel, and Donald Johanson have published a paper in Science on the arch seen in a newly discovered fourth metatarsal of Australopithecus afarensis (AL 333-160). A lot of the popular press are publishing misleading headlines that this proves bipedalism in australopithecines. No, we’ve known they were bipedal — we just didn’t have a true idea as to what extent they were bipedal. So a find like this helps investigate the degree of bipedalism.

AL 333-160 left fourth metatarsal in dorsal, lateral, medial, plantar, and proximal views.

How does this tell us how bipedal A. afarensis were?

) Box plots of angular relations of the proximal and distal metatarsal ends to the diaphysis in chimpanzees, gorillas, humans, and AL 333-160.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting a podiatrist, you’d know flat feet are not conducive to bipedalism. The two-way arch helps support upright walking and distribute recoil force. Other great apes like, chimps and gorillas have flatter feet than us. The authors of this paper confirmed this by comparing the fourth metatarsal of chimps, gorillas, and humans to AL 333-160.

On all their comparisons, AL 333-160 fell within range of humans. There were some occasions where there’s a lot of gray area which I’ll address later. Nonetheless, to the right you can see the best comparison, in my opinion, which the comparison of the arch of the diaphysis of the bone between the two species. You can have a look at the rest of the figures here.

The problem I am seeing here is that this metatarsal is not Lucy’s (AL 288-1). AL 333 is designated to fossils from the site where the “First Family” came from and not the same  locality as AL 288. Nonetheless, they are not the same individual. Kimbel is quoted in the BBC News, saying,

“Lucy’s spine has the double curve that our own spine does,” Professor Kimbel said.

“Her hips functioned much as human hips do in providing balance to the body with each step, which in a biped of course means that you’re actually standing on only one leg at a time during striding.

“The knees likewise in Lucy’s species are drawn underneath the body such that the thighbone, or femur, angles inwards to the knees from the hip-joints – as in humans.

“And now we can say that the foot, too, joins these other anatomical regions in pointing towards a fundamentally human-like form of locomotion in this ancient human ancestor.”

This is a flawed association to make; a form of what I would call confounding bias. We don’t have Lucy’s 4th metatarsal to see what it looks like and unfortunately we don’t have the rest of the this specimens skeleton to say it looked like Lucy’s. In fact, we have very little australopithecine appendicular and skeletons other than AL 288-1 (most notable are AL 129-1 and STS 14). So how can Kimbel say that the foot joins other anatomical regions when we don’t know what the other regions really looked like?

See, the n of this sample is 1. Looking at the intervals in the figures, especially Fig 3 & 4, there a a significant amount of variation in humans and chimpanzees that overlap. Chimps aren’t bipedal but we are. So imagine you are a paleoanthropologist way in the future looking at one metatarsal of a now-current then-ancient chimpanzee way and comparing it to a humans — surely you could make the same conclusion as these three have. And herein lies the big issue with sensationalism… as is the problem often in paleoanthropology, we just don’t have many comparative samples but people want definitive conclusions.

Ward, C., Kimbel, W., & Johanson, D. (2011). Complete Fourth Metatarsal and Arches in the Foot of Australopithecus afarensis Science, 331 (6018), 750-753 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201463

Anyone remember 2 years ago, when Survival International released some photos of an uncontacted tribe at the border of Brazil and Peru? Well an update came out, a remarkable video showing the tribe and describing what’s being done to protect them. Oh and by the way, this is part of BBC’s Human Planet.

Check out the video here.