KellanStec

Are primates really that closely related to us? I have had people tell me that it is demeaning to even consider the idea that we are related to any animal. Myself being an animal, I have no problem believing we came from a different animal. But how different are we from primates, really? Is it that much of a stretch to see the resemblances in our phenotypes, genotypes, and culture? (Yes, primates do have culture.)

I hadn’t thought about this much recently until I read an article on the Guardian detailing a primate closely related to chimpanzees found only in the Congo. Time also wrote about this in 2005. Initially all that was known about these animals was known through the locals describing “lion killers”. There isn’t much evidence for the primates killing large cats from what I can tell. From the evidence, the idea stops at legend.

There is another species of chimp living in the same area commonly known as Bonobo. The term is used to describe a type of “pygmy chimpanzee”, although they are not noticeably smaller than a normal chimp. The scientific term for the species is Pan paniscus. The species shares a common ancestor with the other chimps, Pan troglodytes. This common ancestor, then, shares a common ancestor with modern humans. This means that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas.

I thought I should clear that up, because when I begin writing about some of the traits this species has, it would be easy to think that this species was more closely related to humans than the other species of chimpanzees, and this is simply not the case. To the left, you can see the phylogenic tree for primates. If you are wondering how we are able to map this tree, please read this.

The Bonobo were discovered in 1928 by American anatomist Harold Coolidge. The find was represented only by a skull, and was at first mistaken for an juvenile chimpanzee. We now know that they are a separate species.

There are a number of things that distinguish this species from the rest of its primate cousins. The Bonobo have a gait that is commonly upright in situations where they need to carry things, such as food or nest-building material. They seem to have much less problems accomplishing this than the other chimpanzees. They are able to walk upright about 25% of the time.

What got me interested, though is not what makes them different from other primates, but what makes them similar to us. It is not only the Bonobo and other chimps that share suprisingly similar characteristics with humans, but most of the closelt related primates do. If you’d like to read more about the similarities, see this page. It is very interesting to see that things we would normally consider human–maternal bonds, depression, guilt, shame, love–are not unique in humans at all. Even their sexual behavior is astonishingly similar.

I’d like to direct your attention to a talk that I watched on TED a while ago. Taken directly from the description:

Savage-Rumbaugh asks whether uniquely human traits, and other animals’ behaviors, are hardwired by species. Then she rolls a video that makes you think: maybe not. The bonobo apes she works with understand spoken English. One follows her instructions to take a cigarette lighter from her pocket and use it to start a fire. Bonobos are shown making tools, drawing symbols to communicate, and playing Pac-Man — all tasks learned just by watching. Maybe it’s not always biology that causes a species to act as it does, she suggests. Maybe it’s cultural exposure to how things are done.

Give it a watch. It’s very interesting.

To the regular readers that I probably don’t even have, I am sorry for my lack of activity in the past two months. My summer job has been keeping me very busy. I might write about that later.

A few days ago, I saw this article, and found it to be very interesting. Apparently, some scientists have managed to inject foreign DNA into a bacterium of another species with few adverse side effects. The bacterium acted as though it were the organism from which the DNA originated. The success rate was not very high (1 out of every 150,000 attempts), but with more research the rate should improve.

The team includes Craig Venter (the first man to have his entire genome read) and Ham Smith (a Nobel Prizewinner). Venter was featured on The Colbert Report on February 27, 2007 and is also the co-founder of Synthetic Genomics. I suggest visiting their website and looking around. It’s cool stuff. They describe the process in greater detail there–and with pictures!

Anyone familiar with genetics knows that this “species transplant” is a huge step for scientists. What exactly does this mean for us? Well, with more research and fine-tuning of the technique, we will be able to inject synthetic genes into bacterium (or even multicellular organisms!) to basically get them to do whatever we want. We could program them to digest toxic chemicals into something harmless, produce fuel, absorb CO₂ from the air, among many other uses.

Here’s what I envision scientists doing with this amazing technology. They could start from scratch, and create a genome minimal to supporting life in the bacterium. This would only require genes for metabolizing energy, reproduction, and other (minor?) cell functions. From this “parent genome”, they could add all kinds of genetic material. This is entirely possible with the help of computers, although there would be a significant amount of time involved until we can perfect the technique.

I like this quote from another article:

Journalists have often asked if the creation of artificial life is a step too far, whether Dr Venter and his team are ‘playing God’. (‘We don’t play,’ Ham Smith likes to joke.)

It will be interesting to see how long it takes the team to develop an entirely new organism from scratch. Will “within months” be accurate?

Further information:
Download the mp3 interview with Roger Highfield. (2.1 MB)
Visit the Synthetic Genomics homepage.

Yesterday, one of my friends forwarded me to this article on Newsweek. It discusses some new discoveries in the physiology and cell mechanics of the human body. Apparently, once someone has died–that is, their heart has stopped beating–their cells aren’t really dead. Clinically, their body is declared dead, even though their cells are not. The cells can survive for an hour or more with no oxygen!

What was even more amazing is what triggers the cells to die. After more than five minutes of oxygen deprivation, the cells die when the oxygen supply is resumed–a process called reperfusion. The cell death is a misfiring of the natural process of cell suicide (apoptosis) carried out by the mitochondria. This cell suicide is a method of controlling cancer. When the cells are deprived of oxygen and are reperfused more than five minutes after deprivation, the cells are tricked into thinking that they are cancerous and kill themselves. Dr. Lance Becker quotes:

It looks to us as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die.

Amazing! The implications of this are startling: the standard procedures for treating victims of a heart attack are exactly backward. In attempting to restore oxygen to the cells–and succeeding–we are inadvertently killing the cells.

So, doctors are now experimenting with new methods of resuscitation. What they do is use a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain while the heart can be safely restarted with minimal cell death resulting. The procedure found an eighty percent success rate among a group of 34 individuals, while the traditional method produced a fifteen percent success rate.

The article closes with a chilling quote:

The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life.

Now, my friend and I were thinking: what could this mean to the world’s religions that believe in an afterlife? If we brought back a number of people from an hour or more of death, we would know for certain whether or not one exists. We would be able to verify what science says about near-death experiences–that they are a result of the natural release of chemicals of a dying brain. Many religions rely on the afterlife as a “great equalizer” for the injustices that we suffer in this world. It gives comfort to those who have lost a loved one to know that they are in a better place.

How many people would be willing to accept the truth if it were presented to them? I wouldn’t have much of a choice to accept the reality if we discovered that there was no afterlife. On the flip side, what if we were to discover for certain that there was an afterlife? Those who do not believe in the supernatural would have to radically alter their worldview to reconcile with this new evidence. Those of faith could boast to be certain about something that no human could possibly be certain about today. I am not saying that this itself could determine whether or not an afterlife exists, but I think there’s reasonably strong evidence that can go either way.

So, my question is: if we could unequivocally say whether or not there was an afterlife, would you be willing to radically alter your current worldview to coincide with the new evidence?

Since when was it the government’s responsibility to legislate astronomy? Yesterday, Wired posted an article about a Republican representative form New Mexico named Joni Marie Gutierrez who proposed a bill to make Pluto a planet “as [it] passes overhead through New Mexico’s excellent night skies”. The absurd notion that New Mexico has its own sky through which an object 3.5 billion miles can pass coupled with the fact that it can’t be seen by 99% of the New Mexico population makes Gutierrez look all the more ridiculous until you consider that she is passing this bill through legislation. The bill also declares March 13 to be “Pluto Planet Day”.

She appeals to emotion, saying that “We always took a lot of pride in the fact that [Clyde Tombaugh, a New Mexico native] discovered Pluto…When they declared it a dwarf planet, we took it as a personal affront.” Well, aside from the fact that passing a bill solely to make people feel proud is never a good idea, it is not the government’s job to decide what a planet is and what is not. Leave astronomy to the astronomers. I didn’t really know how to respond to this, so I am going to give seven reasons why Pluto should not be considered a planet.

1. Pluto does not have a central nervous system. It is a ball of frozen water and methane billions of miles away. It cannot feel pain, love, or any emotion whatsoever. Its feelings will not be hurt if we make it a dwarf planet. This sounds silly, but it seems to me that all the groups created on Facebook somehow think that removing planetary status deals a devastating blow to Pluto’s self-esteem. Emotional appeal is never a good reason to make something a scientific truth.
2. Pluto does not orbit in the ecliptic plane. Every other planet orbits in this plane. Pluto is inclined by as much as 17°. This means at perihelion, Pluto is about 8 Astronomical Units above the plane. This is absurdly divergent from the other planets.
3. Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit. Well, all planets have an elliptical orbit, but Pluto’s is abnormally high. This puts Pluto closer to the sun than Neptune for part of its year. 8th or 9th planet? Make up your mind, Pluto!
4. Pluto is tiny. At 2/3 the size of the moon, why should we even consider this a planet? There are numerous other Jovian moons that are quite a bit larger than Pluto as well.
5. Incretio ad absurdum. This is a Latin derivation that I made up, which means increasing to absurdity. The definition of planet that allowed Pluto to become a planet in the first place could potentially be applied to dozens of bodies in the solar system not currently considered planets. In fact, we already have discovered a few, and one of them is larger than Pluto–Eris.
6. Why aren’t Ceres and Eris planets? I think if this question is asked in an astronomy class, there should be a better answer than “The public is afraid of change.”
7. It’s a ball of ice. Pluto would be the first planet to melt into liquid if it were brought closer to the sun. If it were orbiting closer to the sun, we would probably call it a comet. It would have a tail just like all other comets.

Pluto’s planetary status has been questioned by science for years, so this is nothing new. Finally, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to include the three following criteria in a formal definition of a planet:

• The body must orbit the sun and have a diameter of 2000 km.
• The body must keep its shape stable due to its own gravity.
• The body must be dominant in its immediate neighborhood.

These make sense to me. Of course, there were other things defined, such as what exactly constitutes “dominance”, but that’s not the point. These guidelines were designed to create more order in the naming of solar system objects. It’s great that the Pluto debate is sparking an interest in the public for science, but nostalgia does not make a science. If we start identifying remote snowballs smaller than our Moon with unconventional orbits as planets, then before you know it, lozenge-shaped lumps of iron will want to be planets, too. What’s next? A Voyager heat shield? Wow, that reductio ad absurdum is actually pretty funny.

If people want to form a close emotional relationship to a ball of ice billions of miles away, that’s fine with me. But some people expect the scientific community to gratify their fixation by distorting the definition of a planet into something that includes Pluto, purely for emotional and nostalgic reasons. Sorry, it does not work that way.

This is going to be good. And I mean that in the most sarcastic way possible. For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, there was a discovery made about 27 years ago of a tomb containing ten bone boxes–some of which contain names of Biblical significance. There’s a documentary set to air this Sunday, March 4 on the Discovery Channel brought to you by the same man who brought us the vomit-inducing three hours that is The Titanic: James Cameron. The names found in the tomb include:

• Yeshua` bar Yehosef – “Jesus son of Joseph”
• Maryah – “Mary”
• Yoseh – “Joseph”
• Mariamene e Mara – “Mary also known as Mara”
• Mattiah – “Matthew”
• Yehudah bar Yeshua` – “Judas son of Jesus”

Before we jump to any conclusions, let us look at the facts. Tombs like these are discovered all the time. Hundreds of tombs and thousands of bone boxes have been discovered in the Jerusalem area since the 1970s. Not only are the tombs common, but the names inscribed on the bone boxes are commonly from a pool of fifteen or so names. From our current discoveries, there are 45 bone boxes labeled “Joseph”, 22 labeled “Jesus”, and 42 labeled “Mary”.

But we are talking about something explicit. Right there it is: a bone box containing Jesus, son of someone named Joseph. How likely is it that these two names are found in the same tomb, one claiming to be the father of another, which seems to match the biblical story? Well, David Mavorah, a custodian of the Israel museum in Jerusalem, points out just how common these names were. “We know that Joseph, Jesus and Mariamene were all among the most common names of the period” he says, “To start with all these names being together in a single tomb and leap from there to say this is the tomb of Jesus is a little far-fetched, to put it politely.” Is it wrong to assume the connection, though?

There are several problems with the assumption that it must be the same family the bible describes. First, it presupposes that it was extremely unlikely that a man named Joseph ever sired a man named Jesus. This is one of the reason that the filmmakers turned to statisticians to verify the unlikelihood of coincidence. The odds that these names would be found together run anywhere from 1:600 to 1:1 million, depending on the statistician you turn to. These aren’t particularly good odds on which to base an assertion–especially since we know how common these names really were. Just to give you an example, Jesus was the sixth most popular name of Jewish men. Mary was more popular still, ranked at number one among women. But let’s look at the second problem: translation.

Things written two thousand years ago, even when carved into stone, don’t conserve as well as we would like them to. Aside from the difficulty in reading, translating the names has generated a fair amount of controversy. Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem is even uncertain that the name Jesus on the caskets was read properly. He thinks it’s more probably the name “Hanun.” Ancient Semitic script is infamously tricky to translate. Just check out the picture to the left.

A third consideration, and possibly the most damaging facet to the claim (aside from the utter lack of historical evidence that Jesus ever existed, although I suspect he probably did), is the extreme unlikelihood that the Jesus of the Bible and his family were ever buried in such a tomb. Archaeologist Amos Kloner is unconvinced of the connection, and even states that Jesus’ family probably never had a tomb, much less a tomb in Jerusalem. “It makes a great story for TV, but it’s nonsense,” he told the Jerusalem Post in February. “There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no Jerusalem ties. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE.”

Alright, so it’s not very likely that these bone boxes contain the same family written about in the Bible. However, James Cameron remains determined to somehow connect this discovery to the Da Vinci Code. Laughably, he plans to do this using DNA evidence to show that the Jesus and one of the Marys in the tomb are not genetically related, giving credence to the theory that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were romantically involved. You read right. James Cameron is perverting science and archaeology to support something that Dan Brown just made up.

This sick publicity stunt is designed from the inside out to profit James Cameron and his pseudoscience and pseudo history. The worst part is, the profit will be coming from innocent people who are unable to differentiate a fabrication from reality. This could lend a damaging blow to people’s faith that Jesus resurrected on the third day–something many hold dear. The idea that Jesus rose from the dead and is now in heaven is essential to the Christian faith. This depends on an empty tomb.

In conclusion, there is little credible evidence that suggests we should think this tomb contains the family described in the Bible. There are several major problems associated with the assumption that they are connected, and the documentary has little basis in fact. I’m kind of curious to know exactly where Cameron will go with this.

What do you think?