Human origins - and evolution. Patterns of cooperation and competition

I'm avoiding politics once again this time, in order to dive into the endlessly fascinating topic of human origins. And hence first, for your holiday shopping.... 

... a while back I suggested the perfect gift for that anthropologist or paleo-historian you know (either professional or amateur!) Or else your role-playing aficionado. My way-fun role-playing game TRIBES simulates life in the stone age! 

Can you hunt and gather and woo and connive to have the most offspring successfully reach adulthood? Only be careful competing! You only win if the the tribe survives!

Alas, folks reported interest last time... but no way to actually order the game!

Well, Steve Jackson has fixed the glitch. You can now order and play this fun diversion that's also highly pertinent to today's topic! 

== News about human origins and evolution ==

Scientists are advancing with synthetic evolution: At 493 genes, the minimal genome of M. mycoides JCVI-syn3B is the smallest known free-living organism, artificially culled-down to the absolutely minimum number that’s viable by folks at the Craig Venter Institute. In comparison, many animal and plant genomes contain more than 20,000 genes. So far, the simplest organism would have no functional redundancies or useless spacers. Note that it requires the researchers to supply food and ideal conditions. Which leads to their next step… altering conditions to see if evolution takes place.

Spoiler alert. It does.

At the opposite end of the scale... Neanderthal genes! Was there a penalty for promiscuity around 50,000 BCE?  People with roots outside Africa tend to have about 2% Neanderthal (or else Denisovan) DNA in their genome. So statistically, by random chance, you would expect Neanderthal DNA to collectively account for around 2% of the genetic risk of disease. Not in all cases, it seems: "But here we find that 8.4% is explained by Neanderthal gene flow," much more than is expected by chance alone.”  

It is so tiresome when sci journalists flub their reporting. Take these reports that the human ancestral line almost died out due to low populations about 800,000 years ago.  Yes “bottlenecks” are very interesting! A recently discovered ‘y-chromosome bottleneck’ around the time of early farming towns, has huge implications! As for these news stories: yes, there was likely a time when Homo Heidelbergensis & Antecessor (ancestor of Homo Saps and Neanderthals) were a small, isolated population, and surviving that isolation helped them to thereupon differentiate and speed our evolution. 

But, this was not about ‘the human line almost dying out’! These articles ignore the fact that very close cousins to Heidelbergensis - Homo Erectus - were everywhere in the Old World with no bottleneck. An isolation bottleneck was likely HOW we surged ahead of Erectus – evolution flourishes on such cycles. But Erectus was still around and would likely have spun off another isolated population. And maybe super-brain sapiens might NOT have happened!  See my speculations in Existence. Still, flawed reporting.

Human origins were definitely in Africa, stretching back to Australopithecus – “Lucy’ and her upright-walking kin. But further back to the ancestors of ALL apes? It appears that earlier hominids not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over 5 million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa. Recent findings establish Anadoluvius turkae as a branch of the part of the evolutionary tree that gave rise to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.

 But sure, long after that, human genetic diversity in non-African populations appeared to have been shaped primarily by an out-of-Africa dispersal 50 or so thousand yr ago (kya). (As I describe in Existence.) With a major shift in reprogramming-by-culture. But somewhere around 7000ya there was another huge effect. Arrival of agriculture, towns and kings led to a Y-Chromosome bottleneck when only a small fraction of males got to breed. Then, rather quickly, actual cities got larger, law happened, and the great culling of males appears to have stopped... though not feudalism, dominating 99% of our ancestors.

We can do - and have done - better than that failed social norm.

See my neoteny article: Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution. 

== Did we evolve all the things that make us what we are? ==

I want to just drop in here a few thoughts about Richard Dawkins (famed author of The Selfish Gene , The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion). Down in the comments community here at "Contrary Brin" (the very best such community online!), some opined a while back about Dawkins's belief that humans have no behaviors that did not arise from evolution. And I also must demur. What Dawkins etc. (and nearly all others) ignore is the emergent effects that occur when one layer of activity creates a new, ‘higher” layer.

Cells are vast communities of sub-cellular entities that do their various tasks & business in a manner that is generally at least as much competitive as cooperative, making and ‘selling’ chemicals and structures to each other, much like an economy. Yet the cell seems from the outside to be a consistent, self-cooperative entity.

In Earth I describe how this same effect happens at the next layer between cells in a macro organism, especially during fetal development, when proto-neurons compete with each other savagely, over growth factors, resulting in whole ecosystem structures – jungles and forests and deserts, across the developing infant brain: structures that combine into vastly better mental processes, wherein many next-layer personality drives and components continue to compete across life… yet, the thing that emerges - an individually identifiable human being - portrays with some verisimilitude a unitary organism, actively and effectively pursuing goals…

…goals that change as the organism satisfies ever-higher layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All the way to abstractions that the cellular and mammal and ape and caveman brains that dwell inside our cortex could never begin to perceive, let alone understand.

And sure, often these higher ‘value’ goals (e.g. religion) can often be just surface justifications for more brutal, lower drives like vengeance, jealously, fear and avarice. And yet… 50,000 years ago (I believe, and argue in Existence), there came a new layering as humans became able to re-program their thinking modes completely via culture, leading to many subsequent major, 'renaissance' shifts in our tools, societies and things we can perceive/contemplate.

And of course this progression continues, as human individuals group themselves in cooperative - but also competitive - associations like families, tribes, communities, towns and nations. And civilizations, which aren't entirely the same thing. 

The crux: Dawkins is completely off-base if he thinks he can ascribe the emergent outcomes from those new and vividly unpredictable layers entirely to earlier evolved selection.  

Every phase and every level reveals the truth that nether cooperation nor competition can explain this, alone. Each is entangled in layer after layer of complexity.

== Where our evolved natures collide with policy? And with AI? ==

Our evolved natures interact fretfully with new technologies. Take recent cries that new generative AI systems may decipher and interpret our personal DNA!  Yes, that could be worrisome! A tool for criminals and oppressors and bigots. As illustrated in the excellent film Gattaca – that DNA is already everywhere. You shed it in flakes of skin wherever you go. 

But that's the point! As shown in that flick, collection and decipherment of our DNA will be trivial and banning all that is a mug's game. What matters - a point I’ve been pushing since the 1990s, in The Transparent Society and elsewhere - is that hiding will neither preserve privacy nor prevent your data being used against you. 

But what matters is not blinding others; it is preventing others from using your information to harm you. There is a possible solution, then. Not by hiding, but by aggressively ripping the veils away from malefactors who might do that sort of thing! 

A look back at our origins

We are the first human civilization to remove our envisioned "golden age" from an imagined-nostalgic past and instead plant that better-than-the-present era (tentatively) in a potential future.

The irony? We can only achieve that great accomplishment if we learn as much as possible, about where we came from.  How we (species, society, individual) came about. What parts of our heritage must be overcome, and what hidden, potential gifts have yet to be realized, or even discovered.

Exploring all of this is exciting stuff. And so, in honor of a newly minted Physical Anthropologist we happen to know, let's start as deep in time as possible.....

...like how about a newly discovered missing link between prokaryotes and eukaryotes? Amazing. Of the three major super-domains of cellular life on Earth – bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (which include metazoan, multi-celled organisms, like us), it now appears that we are more closely related to the archaea, which were discovered as a separate clade not so long ago and were at-first thought to be a relic corner of life’s diversity. This sure puts Greg Bear’s weird novel VITALS in a new light. 

== Galaxies and deadly rhythms! ==

Did Dark Matter Doom the Dinosaurs? “We know there’s a lot of dark matter in the Milky Way, and it’s possible dark matter isn’t evenly distributed but occurs in dense clumps. Maybe our solar system passes through clumps of it periodically." If those clumps are dense enough to wreak havoc, they could knock comets loose and cause collisions...

... or else maybe heat Earth’s interior and cause massive volcanic eruptions?  Or somehow set loose all sorts of other species-obliterating disasters. That’s the premise behind a recent paper by New York University geologist Michael R. Rampino.

Back in 1984 I had an article in ANALOG that calculated a different hypothesis to explain a 26 to 30 million year extinction cycle . What if such a recurring pattern were caused not by the Earth passing through the galactic disk, but by something  'lapping" us, as it orbits, farther in toward Galactic center?  The article was "The Deadly Thing at 2.4 Kiloparsecs," Analog's most popular science bit, that year. Almost any extinction cycle  might correlate with some Lapping Object, which might sear a swathe of devastation on its way around the galaxy, wreaking some degree of havoc, each time it sweeps past our solar system.

I mention this to suggest that there are many potential ways to get galactic time scales in cycles of extinctions.

Speaking of mass extinction events… O-o-okay... folks at CERN now say they might make micro-black holes after all.  And there's nothing to worry about!  In fact, my logical side is not worried.  

But still... I described one potential outcome... in EARTH.

== Becoming Human ==

Do tools make man? Pushing our origins back even further...the world's oldest stone tools have been found in Kenya: stone flakes and anvils found off the shores of Lake Turkana date back more than 3.3 million years ago -- half a million years before the appearance of our genus Homo.

Another re-assessment of our ancient family tree comes from a partial jawbone discovered in Ethiopia, radiometrically dating to nearly 2.8 million years ago -- which makes it the oldest known fossil of our genus Homo. 

How has biology shaped humanity? How did humans rise to dominance on planet earth? In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari tracks the evolution of homo sapiens from the Paleolithic to modern-day, charting three major upheavals...

the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution and most recently, the scientific revolution, that shaped the trajectory of humanity and human civilization -- covering some of the same ideas as Jared Diamond's 1999 classic book, Guns, Germs and Steel. See an extensive review of Sapiens in the Wall Street Journal.

== Bottlenecks of Evolution ==

Indeed, genetics has shed light on what may have been “bottlenecks” in human evolution.  One of them, purported to have been 70,000 years ago, might have reduced the population of human ancestors under 10,000 and threatened extinction. 

Now, another bottleneck is proposed that might have occurred as recently at 8,000 years ago, while early agriculturalists were preparing to leap into urban life. By studying Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA, scientists are able to deduce the numbers of female and male ancestors a population has. It's always more female, which is consistent also with mammals, in general. Not all males get to breed.  But the normal human ratio is about 1.3 female breeders-to-one male. Apparently is was much bigger disparity, during a period around 8000 years ago. Explanations range from a sudden advantage to certain kinds of males to some sort of weird virus that only affected males across the whole globe, just before large villages formed towns.

Or did agriculture itself, often requiring brutally hard physical labor, play a role? Might the "taming" of human males, making them suitable for denser living, have had some weird side effects? Will we ever know? See: A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture.

Another look at a leap for human evolution: Did humans -- and their dogs -- help drive Neanderthals to extinction? See this explored in The Invaders: How Humans and their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, by Pat Shipman. 

More evidence for 'recent' human interbreeding with Neanderthals: Genetic analysis 40,000-year old jaw from Romania revealed that 5 to 11% of this ancient European man's DNA was Neanderthal -- indicating that he must have had a Neanderthal ancestor in the previous four to six generations. 

Insight into the darker side of the human past: Paleolithic remains show cannibalistic habits of our ancestors -- at sites in England dating back about 15,000 years ago.

== even weirder ==

Marshall Brain’s new book “The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches” wins a prize for telegraphing its point in the title, alone!  

It explores how the future will unfold as the second intelligent species – Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- emerges.  Well, well.  

We are getting plenty of folks taking up extreme apocalyptic or utopian views of all this.  But I just don’t think that way.

Where are we headed? Looking ahead: The Atlantic Council has reprinted my brief future projection: The Avalon Missions: Race for the Stars.

== Mickey points the way? ==

Disney is “betting a billion dollars on a magical wrist band.” A new ticketing method that will let each member of your family get personalized treatment from the instant you enter the park, always welcomed into the correct line, walking out of stores with merchandise paid for without visiting a cashier, ordering food before arriving at a restaurant and sitting at any table, knowing the food will arrive….

…And if someone doesn’t add this to my predictions registry wiki, then I don’t have fans anymore! 

Read this chapter from EXISTENCE --- The Shelter of Tradition -- set at the Shanghai World of Disney and the Monkey King, in the year 2045.  And tell me Disney shouldn’t at least give me a nice family pass. Only the date was wrong.  

Stuff catches up with science fiction faster and faster.

The Roots…and Future... of Humanity

== Digging into the roots of humanity ==

In a study conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and the University of Cologne, it was found that the children of obese mothers who subsisted on a high-fat diet during the course of their pregnancy are at a higher risk for obesity and related metabolic disorders all their lives.

But help is on the way!  The world's first genetically modified babies have been born -- with genes from three parents. This news is not quite as big as it sounds.  The third parent only contributed the mitochondria of the fertilized egg, so no meddling in the chromosomal "human DNA" parts happened.  Still, it is a milestone.

More meddlesome methods are coming! Utilizing the he CRISPR/Cas9 method, RNA can be specifically designed to cut a particular part of the genome, allowing specific genes to be targeted. Once cut, the gene can be knocked out or replaced with a slightly different copy to replace faulty ones with healthy copies. Now, in China, this method has been used to alter the first "GM monkeys."

And in the same … vein… researchers at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) have developed a robotic “nanobiopsy” system that can extract tiny samples from inside a living cell without killing it. The single-cell nanobiopsy technique is a powerful tool for scientists working to understand the dynamic processes that occur within living cells. While the therapeutic and scientific uses are huge, it might also affect the Singularity Movement… by determining whether or not intracellular computing  takes place to any large degree.  If it does, then the dream of replicating human cognition in-silico may be many more Moore's Law doublings away.

And what about those human roots? As few as 300 matings could have inserted the Neanderthal heritage in the genome of the common ancestors of Europeans and East Asians. The strongest remnant of our Neanderthal heritage appears to be centered around as-yet unknown changes in skin and hair that likely proved advantageous. 

Take a look at this video showing one anthropologist's best reconstructions for the evolution of the human face over seven million years.

Where are we headed? The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, explores the  threats humanity faces now…and in the future. In fact, even if humanity does mark the "anthropocene" with devastation through nature, there have been five preceding MAJOR mass extinctions… but very many more of lesser types. Frankly, I am amazed that by 2014 the worst forecasts have not (yet?) come true.  Are we in the process of wising up in time?  You gotta hope so.  You gotta work to make it so.

Of course, remamber we can be replaced! With a plummeting shrimp industry, fishermen in the US southeast are throwing nets to collect… jellyfish. Certain types that are loved by Asian countries… and by sea turtles… are being harvested by the kilotons. As the seas appear to be trending more friendly to jellies and less so for fish. (As I portray in Existence.) Let's consider before thoughtlessly changing the Earth too much.

And finally… while we're on the bio-news… why has the rate of abortions in the US declined so steeply?  Explanations range from interesting to flat-out absurd.

== Technology! ==

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used as a potential therapeutic tool to control and train specific targeted brain regions. A new brain-imaging technique enables people to ‘watch’ their own brain activity in real time and to control or adjust function in pre-determined brain regions.  Will this finally lead to those excellent teaching-games  we were promise 20 years ago?

This animation of a mouse brain looks like driving down a highway and watching buildings on the roadside appearing, becoming larger, and then shrinking in the rearview.

From Elon Musk: Forward-looking Innovations that will change our future.

As crystalline silicon module prices crashed in recent years, developers and installers benefitted greatly from the low prices and sudden economic feasibility of solar in new markets. Now attention is paid to reducing racking and mounting cost and microinverters and high-voltage configurations stand to accelerate those reductions.

== Sustaining our world ==

 Cool roofs — painted white or other light colors to reflect sunlight — as well as green (vegetation covered)  roofs have surged in popularity as cities such as New York promote their use and research shows they lower the need for air conditioning. Now comes another federally funded study that reinforces that idea — with caveats.  "Each can completely offset the warming due to urban expansion and can even offset the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions," says the study author.  A newer Berkeley Lab study, published online last month, found white roofs are more cost-effective than black or green ones over a 50-year period when installation, maintenance and a building's subsequent energy use are considered. But that leaves out the edible produce from green roofs!

We've all seen calculations comparing sustainables to fossil fuels… and undeniable is the trend -- much faster than anyone expected -- for solar and wind etc to break even with oil and coal. We should all rejoice (all except the coal and middle-eastern-petro princes)… though I think not without a tinge of gratitude for the biggest thing that fossil fuels gave us: an industrial revolution that lifted billions out of poverty, raising generations of children so comfortable that they could then start contemplating the dismal side effects of over-reliance on fossil fuels!

(If you are unable to appreciate ironies, then you are WAY too dogmatic.  Loosen up.)

But there is one calculation we never see… thermodynamic comparison of the total investment costs of fossil fuels by the Earth, weighing in the inefficiencies of the hundred million years it took to cook each utterly irreplaceable pool of liquid gold down there.  According to this study, solar is better by a ratio of 100,000:1!  All right, that Big Picture Perspective is too grand, even for me.  Still….

== physical stuff! ==

Did Google buy a "quantum computer" that's not-so-quantum, after all?  It's harder than you might think, to tell the difference, at least in these early days.  A month or two ago, preliminary models suggested D-Wave's machine "did the Q."  Now, researchers at IBM reveal it may not necessarily be so.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have invented a plasmonic graphene nano-antenna that can be efficiently used at millimeter radio wavelengths, taking one more step toward smart dust. Utility fog. Programmable matter. Grey and blue goo. Cooperating swarms of micron-sized devices (motes) offer completely new solutions and capabilities that can hardly be imagined. Except… well… by Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear and at least one other science fiction author I could name…

And now some good news? At least under some sets of assumptions and parameters,  the Large Hadron Collider appears to have excluded having seen any signs of the production of micro-black holes.  So… my doom scenario in EARTH is impossible? Reassuring… a little bit.

Can we see inside super-dangerous volcanoes like Vesuvius? Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo reasoned that the throat of a volcano could be "x-rayed" with energetic muons produced in cosmic-ray showers. The number of muons passing through the volcano would depend on the density of intervening rock, so measuring the number of muons passing through various parts of the volcano could yield a crude, 3-D view of the interior.  One of the fellows with a NASA NIAC grant showed us even more spectacular potential uses for this method… a way to peer inside asteroids!

== Astronomy! And space! ==

The oldest star (known so far) in the universe (13.7 billion years) was found using ANU's Skymapper, which has a "unique" ability to "find stars with low iron from their color." This comes in handy for stars such as this one which the astronomers believe to be a "first star" originating from the earliest days of the Big Bang itself.

A new map of asteroids developed by researchers from MIT and the Paris Observatory charts the size, composition, and location of more than 100,000 asteroids throughout the solar system, and shows that "rogue" asteroids are more common than previously thought.

Looking to our future in space: In 2018, NASA hopes to put a rover on the Moon. RESOLVE will sift through the Moon’s regolith (loose surface soil) and heat them up, looking for traces of hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be combined to make water. A similar payload would be attached to Curiosity’s successor, which is currently being specced out by NASA and will hopefully launch in 2020. This second IRSU experiment will probably suck in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, filter out the dust, and then process the CO2 into oxygen.

More about NASA soon, with my report from the annual NIAC Symposium!

== Ah… the climate ==

The US government is creating seven new "climate hubs" that will help everyday people, particularly farmers, handle the effects of global warming, which have recently caused wild gyrations of drought and record temperatures alternating with severe storms and winter plunges -- exactly as the models predicted. Only we should stop calling it Global Warming and use"climate instability."  Let's see the denialists worm their way out of that one. See my article: Perspectives on Climate Change and the Ritualization of Denial.

Satellite observations of global sea-surface temperature have shown that a 30-year upward trend slowed in the last 15 years.  It can't be due to successful mitigation, since outside the United States and a few countries in Europe, CO2 emissions have not dropped back to those levels.  What might it mean? Reports Science2.0: "Climate scientists have been scrambling to explain it and think they have an answer; rearrangement in the energy flow of the climate system and how the ocean stores heat. Scientists have speculated that one of the causes of this ‘plateau’ in sea-surface temperature could be a change in the exchange of ocean water between warm, surface waters and cold, deep waters below 700 m – as if the warming is ‘hiding’ underwater. Temperature measurements at this depth cover a relatively short period.

But the warm water won’t hide below the surface forever: scientists believe that it may re-emerge later or affect other climate indicators, such as sea level or ocean circulation."

Indeed, more and more cracks appear in the Edifice of Deliberate Lobotomization.  For example… Televangelist Pat Robertson reacted Wednesday to the big debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham over the age of the Earth and so on. Robertson actually took issue with one of the central arguments of creationism and said it’s “nonsense” to say the world’s only six thousand years old. He brought up the findings of a bishop centuries ago who came up with that figure and said, “There ain’t no way that’s possible.”

Read the rest… and use it.

== and… ==

The oldest human footprints have been found outside Africa.

Right now, with a couple of exceptions, Africa's population density is relatively low; it's a very big continent more sparsely populated than, say, Europe or East Asia. That's changing very quickly. The continent's overall population is expected to more than quadruple over just 90 years.  The United Nations Population Division, which tracks demographic data from around the world, has dramatically revised its projections for what will happen in the next nine decades. The new statistics, based on in-depth survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, tell the story of a world poised to change drastically over the next several decades.