January 2012

Domestication Syndrome: How Animals Become Domesticated Without People

Bonobos exhibit a higher degree of domestication than chimpanzees, and all on their own.

There’s a common assumption (and rightly so) that the story of domesticated animals runs parallel to that of the story of human civilization. Once we had learned to plant and harvest, to build shelter and cook our food, we began the process of enlisting animals to help. However, recent ideas from a dynamic anthropologist from Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences hypothesizes that domestication may not be an exclusively human endeavor. Bonobos, primates that are closely related to Chimpanzees, show an incredible range of domestic traits without ever having been actively domesticated by people.

Hare recalls a a lecture from Harvard anthropologist Richard Wranghem on the evolutionary puzzle of the Bonobo, which share a number of traits with Chimpanzees but no one can seem to explain why.” Hare made the connection to a breed of “silver foxes”, bred by Russian geneticist Demitri Belyaev. Belyaev took the least aggressive foxes and interbred them, looking for naturally occurring domestic traits; docility, trainability, temperament and response to stress and social cues. The result was a white splotchy fox that behaviorally was no different than today’s domestic dogs, with some added physical changes as well; shorter canines, white splotches on the fur, floppier ears, and a curlier tail. He managed this within 20 generations of his “silver foxes”, an evolutionary nanosecond.

Brain Scans Show Morality And Physical Disgust Closely Linked

fMRI scans show that the moral center of our brains and the physical disgust center show significant overlap, which may explain a lot.

There’s a reason that we have a physical reaction to men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Anthony Weiner, and John Edwards. There’s a reason why we can dismiss the death of Osama bin Laden with a, “he got what he deserved”, but seethe with hatred for someone like Dominique Strauss-Khan. It’s the same reason that liberals look at photos of Rush Limbaugh or Mitt Romney and become inflamed in the same way that conservatives may physically react to pictures of President Barack Obama. Our perceptions guide our moral and physical “disgust centers” in our brains, and often, those two neural networks overlap.

The widespread use of fMRI (functional magnetic imaging) has allowed researchers to watch as sensory stimuli literally “light up” various areas of the brain, which has lead to some very illuminating understandings of how our brains actually work. One of those areas, our “moral” center, is actually closely connected to the area of our brain in which physical revulsion is located. In other words, according to our brain circuitry, morality and disgust are closely related.

Genetically Modified Silkworms Spin Super-Strong Spider Silks

This stuff is some of the strongest and most elastic material on the planet, and it might just become commercially available.

Perhaps one of the most unusual and provocative ideas coming out of the bio-technology field today is the idea of industrial spider-silk fibers. The strands, or silks, of a spider is nature’s toughest, most durable, and most elastic material. In fact, the silks of some spiders are 10-times more resilient than Kevlar, while still being elastic enough to stretch to twice their original length. Oh, and they’re biodegradable. Being able to mass-produce spider silks would create an epic windfall for both biotechnological advances, as well as investment for the company that was able to do it. Fortunately, we’re making progress in that department.

There have been a few Herculean hurdles in the quest to be able to create spider-silk fibers on a massive scale. Although geneticists have been able to isolate the proteins within a spider’s silks (in fact, they’re so good that they can even genetically customize the silks for different properties), they have not been able to figure out how to turn them into fibers.

Researchers Closer To Locating The Origin Of Schizophrenia

Researchers have found that it's not a defect in the genes, but in the cell housing the DNA.

The new year is starting with some good news for individuals stricken with schizophrenia and a host of other neurological disorders. Schizophrenia, which has been a bit of a catch-all disorder in which victims suffer from extreme paranoia, delusions, dissociative thinking and even hallucinations, has long been thought to be a genetic disorder. After more than a decade of looking for evidence of schizeophrenia in gene, new evidence shows that the disease actually originates in the cell around the gene.

Scientists at Scripps Research Institute have recently found that schizophrenia is not a genetic disorder at all. In fact, it’s an epigenetic disorder, one cause by the structures of the cell that house our DNA. Particular to disorders like schizophrenia, there is a protein that functions a bit like a storage rack in the cell called a histone. The DNA, which would not otherwise fit within a single cell, is wrapped around the histone. However, in order for the DNA to express itself the histone has a tail which undergoes a perpetual chemical reaction called acetylation, which relaxes the DNA and allows it to express. Then acetylation takes place and the DNA once again contracts around the histone. The histones and DNA create chromatin, which manages the constant cycle of relaxation and contraction that allows all the genes of a cell to functions properly.