HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries written in May 2007
Appropriate gifts are always hard to find - just what do you get the guy who discovered the structure of DNA? A gift basket? A book voucher? or -
“When we began the Human Genome Project, we anticipated it would take 15 years to sequence the 3 billion base pairs and identify all the genes,” [...]
Michelle Tsai in Slate:
Close to 300 boys and girls will be stepping up to the mic at this week’s Scripps National Spelling Bee. They hail from across the United States, as well as from countries like Germany, Jamaica, the Bahamas, New Zealand, and Canada. Wait, do non-English-speaking countries have spelling bees, too?
Not exactly. Spelling bees are a particularly British and American phenomenon.
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There’s a new paper out soon in P.N.A.S. that I’m betting will cause a bit of a stir. The paper by Dediu and Ladd, apparently shows that tonal languages like Chinese, Thai and Yoruba, are correlated with the certain derived forms of two genes thought to underlie complex cognition in humans; ASPM and Microcephalin.
The New Scientist says:
Using statistical analysis, the pair showed that people in regions where non-tonal languages are spoken are more likely to carry different, more recently evolved forms of two brain development genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, than people in tonal regions. Dediu and Ladd accounted for geography and history, and the gene differences remained.
The authors of the paper have a website where they provide more information: Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin.
Update: P.N.A.S. has de-embargoed the paper (DOI):
The correlations between interpopulation genetic and linguistic diversities are mostly noncausal (spurious), being due to historical processes and geographical factors that shape them in similar ways. Studies of such correlations usually consider allele frequencies and linguistic groupings (dialects, languages, linguistic families or phyla), sometimes controlling for geographic, topographic, or ecological factors. Here, we consider the relation between allele frequencies and linguistic typological features. Specifically, we focus on the derived haplogroups of the brain growth and development-related genes ASPM and Microcephalin, which show signs of natural selection and a marked geographic structure, and on linguistic tone, the use of voice pitch to convey lexical or grammatical distinctions. We hypothesize that there is a relationship between the population frequency of these two alleles and the presence of linguistic tone and test this hypothesis relative to a large database (983 alleles and 26 linguistic features in 49 populations), showing that it is not due to the usual explanatory factors represented by geography and history. The relationship between genetic and linguistic diversity in this case may be causal: certain alleles can bias language acquisition or processing and thereby influence the trajectory of language change through iterated cultural transmission.
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Cruciani et al in Molecular Biology and Evolution:
Detailed population data were obtained on the distribution of novel biallelic markers that finely dissect the human Y-chromosome haplogroup E-M78. Among 6,501 Y chromosomes sampled in 81 human populations worldwide, we found 517 E-M78 chromosomes and assigned them to 10 subhaplogroups. Eleven microsatellite loci were used to [...]
It’s commonly accepted that feathers evolved as structures to keep dinosaurs warm, before becoming exapted for flight. However, a new specimen of Sinosauropteryx suggests that these proto-feathers are actually degraded collagen, and were probably the result of decomposed soft tissue surrounding them.
The paper is available here: A new Chinese specimen indicates that ‘protofeathers’ in the [...]
The tone intervals in music sound good because they’re linked to the ones we use in our languages:
Throughout history and across cultures, humans have created music using pitch intervals that divide octaves into the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Why these specific intervals in music are preferred, however, is not known. In the present [...]
Please welcome DialectSyntax.org to the internet, it’s a “digital meeting place for researchers in the field of micro-comparative syntax”. Currently they’ve got links to research groups involved in studying the syntax of dialects, conferences and events about dialect syntax, and links to papers about, well, dialect syntax.
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