Comments on: Human Evolution and Frameshift Mutations

By: Mary Cait

Mary Cait — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:27:32 +0000

“Viewing the world as a hostile agent of noise and fury, winding down to an eventual death by entropy is wrong. You can fold a piece of paper, give it to a child, and have them cut crude holes in it with cheap scissors – and when you unfold it, the snowflake is beautiful.

So too can randomness be folded and twisted by logical structures in biology and physics – and the result is our amazing world.”

That is beautiful.

By: Carnival of Evolution #11 « OH, FOR THE LOVE OF SCIENCE!

Carnival of Evolution #11 « OH, FOR THE LOVE OF SCIENCE! — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:59:40 +0000

[...] us that, but also taught us what happens when we get old. Christie really liked Geoff’s human evolution and frameshift mutation explanation, saying that it was a “very interesting hypothesis about human departure from [...]

By: Geoff

Geoff — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:38:30 +0000

It doesn't need to be an advantage - they just need to survive. Early humans were hardly rulers of the Earth. Those with social skills and the ability to help each other would survive, those without would die. A weakness like this could arise from self-selection for social traits, (see Clever as a Fox for traits arising that are not directly selected for), and end up reinforcing these behaviours as only those social enough to band together and learn to adapt would survive.

By: 10 Interesting Links From April 3rd | Greg In The Desert

10 Interesting Links From April 3rd | Greg In The Desert — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:02:08 +0000

[...] Human Evolution and Frameshift Mutations | gmilburn.ca – How did humans evolve from early primates? How did “human like” traits such as a smaller jaw relative to apes and hairlessness pop up when they don’t appear in the wild in any real frequency? The typical explanation for why humans have smaller jaws than early primates is that [...]

By: haig

haig — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:45:36 +0000

How would such a frameshift mutation prove adaptive to those apes at the time? Weaker jaws coming first would not make them have larger brains automatically, so they would just be weaker-jawed apes of average intelligence and would have died off. Why would any ape with this mutation survive long enough to start to evolve smaller jaws and eventually larger brains in the first place?

By: JoshSN

JoshSN — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:08:32 +0000

Since prominent jaws have never been, to my culturally poisoned mind, labelled attractive, maybe the sex-selection factor was all it took.

By: vaughn micciche

vaughn micciche — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:55:18 +0000

So your thinking is that the jaw was first..and everyone is saying that the smaller jaw’s ability to subsist must be due to lower calories needed or something…

What if the reproductive bias was toward smarter (bigger brained) males..not because they looked sexy but because they could outsmart others when it came to reproducing..and the heads needed a smaller jaw for the bigger brain…and we needed to use our mouth less and less as we got smarter with using our hands and tools….so bigger brain = less of a need for crazy jaw and increased brain space (also helped along with smaller jaw)

I wonder if diet was the real catalyst for the divergence–

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:53:28 +0000

The image is actually from the DVD extras where Buddy has to make a scale model of hemoglobin for little Timmy, who loves biology. Honest.

By: .

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:36:41 +0000

shopped

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:16:41 +0000

What a great article – and good job making it accessible to people like me! Thanks keep it up!