May Newsletter : The Human Difference
I had a quasi-religious information experience today. And I'd like to share it with you. This wasn't just a run of the mill 'Aha' insight. This was a real "Now I see. . "
Appropriately enough it came while reading Scientific American [May 2009]. They seem to have excelled themselves with the earth-shatteringness of their articles this month:
- Lester Brown on how food shortages threaten civilisation as we know it. . .
- a fascinating comparison of planetary atmospheric processes - suggesting that in the past Mars was us and in the future we'll be Venus. . .
- and the one I bought it for - What Makes Us Human? - a report by Katherine S Pollard into the work she's done to analyse that 1% difference between us and the chimpanzees.
These are differences we obviously can see today - what Pollard has done is to find out which changes were most pivotal in separating us from other primates. She worked from the ground up, sifting through the 1% of different DNA - millions of individual sequences - to find the genes that changed fastest in humans and then working out what their role was.
Pollard discusses three of the most pivotal mutations she found among our genes - one which improved control of the facial muscles, making speech easier, another - bringing about the opposition of finger and thumb - which presumably increased dexterity and tool use. . .
And the number one rapidly evolving human mutation - a sequence which plays a strategic role in developing the characteristic folds in the human cerebral cortex. Before we had the thoughts, we had to have a place to put them. . .
This sequence is called HAR1 - part of a newly important group of sequences that used to be dismissed as junk DNA because they don't encode a protein. I say this like I know why that matters but in truth I don't have the faintest idea. To put it another way - these sequences just tell other sequences what to do - they don't do anything themselves. Sounds like management to me.
So that's very cool but it's not the NIS moment. That comes when Katherine Pollard talks about the fact that it's the acceleration of crucial elements of the genome, rather than the overall number of changes that is the critical aspect. She says: "..the secret is to have rapid change occur in sites where these changes make an important difference in an organism's functioning".
To those of us steeped in complexity theory - or in just plain common sense - the idea that radical change is pinpointed, not broad, and rapidly evolving, not one-off, seems almost self-evident. There has to be an element of 'can't go back' to embed radical change.
Yet those whose business is change seem often to see radical change as widespread change. Change everything! You won't get another chance. . Change because you can. . You're new, so bring in a whole new model. . Change for change's sake.
Yet you always seem to hear from successful people that "one thing led to another". Perhaps that's not just a truism but actually the killer app! Encourage one thing to lead to another and beneficial mutations are more likely to occur. Streamline the process of change and change will be more likely to happen.
Of course, there are always unintended consequences. Successful mutations in one direction can cut off other options. Pollard explains in the article how an ancient mutation that helped humans to deal better than apes with a devastating retrovirus, now leaves us vulnerable to AIDS, while chimps don't progress beyond HIV.
Honestly it was one of the most fascinating articles I ever read. I love how they look for verification in all the chaos and complexity of the human genome.
Simple logic. Comparing the genomes of different creatures, on the assumption that if a hen, a chimp and a human are all showing the same gene sequence, not much evolution is going on. And they used human genetic abnormalities as evidence for the role that particular sequences play - to show what happens when it doesn't work properly.
So what did we learn from this?
Well #1 - if you live in the deep forest, it's probably easiest if you don't have the capacity for reflective thought - that way you won't realise how dull your life is. So don't mess with things that are working well just as they are.
But if you're flailing about in the face of change or victim of some of humanity's more self-destructive behaviours, as we have all become lately, the best thing to change is the fundamental thing that's limiting our ability to grasp effective solutions.
Some would see this as the need for more altruism and less greed.! Others might see it as a need to develop greater foresight. I see it more fundamentally as a need to process and communicate complex information more effectively. It's like that thing that Gladwell says in Outliers about Asian number concepts and how they enable greater and faster maths fluency. [Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell pp 224 ff]
Just recognising that's nothing's simple and that you need to look at problems from different perspectives to get the full picture - that'd be a great start. We've got all those fantastic folds in our cerebral cortext - so no excuse for monkey thinkng.
Cheers
Jill
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006]
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". . . Before we had the thoughts, we had to have a place to put them. . .”
