Category — Evolution

Psychologists at Cornell have found a link between high disgust sensitivity and conservative political views, lending support to the idea that emotion (rather than some form of reason) is the driving factor behind our sense of morality:

“To test whether disgust sensitivity is linked to specific conservative attitudes, the researchers then surveyed 91 Cornell undergraduates with the DSS (Disgust Sensitivity Scale), as well as with questions about their positions on issues including gay marriage, abortion, gun control, labor unions, tax cuts and affirmative action.

Participants who rated higher in disgust sensitivity were more likely to oppose gay marriage and abortion, issues that are related to notions of morality or purity. The researchers also found a weak correlation between disgust sensitivity and support for tax cuts, but no link between disgust sensitivity and the other issues.”

This is an interesting issue, because the disgust reaction is believed to have evolved as a mechanism to help humans avoid disease, and yet here it is playing a part in how we define moral ideas of purity.  One of the more interesting results of the study is that people who generally fit the tag of liberal tend to weigh the moral worth of an act by the actual good or harm it does, and less by their emotional reaction to it, while conservatives seem to be very much the opposite.

A new study out of the University of Exeter once again shows that Dolphins are more advanced than we might have thought.  In this study, they were observed partaking in sophisticated food preparation:

“The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor.  The dolphin, identified using circular body scars, then pinned the cuttlefish with its snout while standing on its head, before killing it instantly with a rapid downward thrust and “loud click” audible to divers as the hard cuttlebone broke.  The dolphin then lifted the body up and beat it with her nose to drain the toxic black ink that cuttlefish squirt into the water to defend themselves when attacked.  Next the prey was taken back to the seafloor, where the dolphin scraped it along the sand to strip out the cuttlebone, making the cuttlefish soft for eating.”

It’s not exactly haute cuisine, but this type of behaviour has never been observed outside of the higher primates.  Pretty amazing for a species that doesn’t even have hands!

Sex in space has always been a bit of a taboo subject, at least as far as the public face of agencies like NASA and the RFSA are concerned.  I’ve always been baffled and disappointed by their singular tactic of deny, deny, deny every time someone brings up the possibility that two Astro/Cosmonauts might have been getting it on.  It’s as if they’re worried that admitting to/allowing sex on missions will somehow  make it seem that they aren’t really in the business of conducting serious science.  I mean, really; putting people in space and conducting experiments on everything from physics to botany to animal physiology isn’t enough?  In-orbit sexual encounters between two consenting adults are somehow going to tear down their image as credible scientific and technological institutions? [Read more →]

Researchers in the US and the UK have developed a way to record the sounds made by dolphins at a very high resolutions, taking a major step towards a better understanding of how they communicate:

“Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water.   They call it CymaScope and say it reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially.  The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word’.”

The question of whether dolphins have a true ‘language’ is an interesting one.  At what point does communication become language?  Do the basic sounds for warning, defense and group co-ordination made by most animals constitute language?  Would a sophisticated sound-per-concept form of communication between two animals constitute a language?  How complex does communication have to be to be defined as a language?  Is it just a matter of semantics?  Can we open up the definition to include all forms of audible communication?  As with many things (life, consciousness, et al.), I tend to look at communication as residing along a spectrum.  Drawing a hard line to denote where basic communication ends and language begins seems arbitrary to me, and might not be very helpful in understanding how living things communicate.

There may be such a threshhold, but I suspect if it exists it’s not so much dependant on the complexity of the communication, but on what concepts are being represented.  It would be difficult to deny that any system that communicates concepts such as ’self’ and ‘life”, or that includes meta-concepts, allowing the speakers to talk about communication isn’t a language.

That’s the ultimate question that needs to be answered with respect to dolphin (and in general, animal) communication; what kind of concepts do they share with each other?  If we discover that some species have the ability to talk not just about what’s going on in their environment (threats, food, etc) but about their relationships and mental states, will we need to re-evaluate how we treat them?  (hint: I’m leaning towards yes!)

Researchers at Princeton have discovered that chains of proteins in a certain metabolic pathway can respond to changes brought on by natural selection and help direct their own evolution.  From the Princeton website:

“A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on evolution, the scientists said.”

The mechanism works like a feedback loop, correcting or improving changes brought on by mutation.  At some point, this feeback loop evolved, allowing for evolutionary changes to the proteins to be fine-tuned by the proteins themselves.  The researchers are convinced that the mechanism must have evolved early on, and has played a key part in the development of all the complexity we see today.

This is a huge discovery for evolutionary researchers because it adds an entirely new level to the Theory of Evolution.  Before now, genetic changes were thought to be brought on only by random processes (mutations caused by radiation, chemicals, genetic copying errors, etc), but this shows that organisms have evolved mechanisms for further refinement of those genetic changes.  This is an entirely new source of evolutionary change, caused by processes within the organism itself.  While it’s only been discovered in one particular biochemical process, research will undoubtedly turn to findind more examples of what biologists are calling “Evolutionary Control”.

Of course, this discovery can easily be misinterpreted by some, so the researchers were quick to add some prespective:

“The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.”

Source: Princeton University