Where was the Garden of Eden?

Some time ago when I was giving a talk about my book, The Big Bang to Now, someone asked me where the Garden of Eden was.  At the time, all I could say was that we knew it was somewhere in Africa, and  most certainly not in England, Germany, America, or Iran, all of which have laid claim, at some point, to being the birthplace of humanity.  

But I said that a DNA study was currently underway that might make it clearer just where in Africa Homo sapiens had first emerged.

One such study has just been completed, and it suggests that the original Eden was in Namibia.  Its first inhabitants were quite probably Bushmen known today as the San people.  Their language of clicks may tell us something about the sounds of earliest human language.

The study also offers further evidence that race is a concept with little scientific foundation.  Africa is the most genetically diverse of all the continents in the world and modern Africans have evolved from at least 14 different ancestral populations.  

All the people who settled in other parts of the world, on the other hand, are descendants from a small band of perhaps as few as 150 people who left Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Groovy

For thousands of years, humans recognized a kinship with other animals.  But this recognition of kinship disappeared throughout much of Western thought when a view of a purely mechanical world that gradually took over with the scientific revolution.  Newton’s theory of gravity, in which the entire universe was envisaged as a kind of giant machine, gave an apparently solid foundation to this view in which humans, and only humans, were capable of feeling and thoughts, and much else.

Today many people are delighted, others horrified, to discover that animals can think and feel.  They solve problems, they mourn,  they often demonstrate a sense of fair play and altruism, and sometimes deliberately deceive, manipulate and play tricks.

Now we are discovering that they can even dance! Parrots are among the most prolific groovers, and may suggest just how deep our own human capacity for rhythm and dance lies.

How bad could a flu pandemic be?

Officials in countries as far away from each other as the United States and New Zealand announced today that cases of swine flu had been identified among several residents who had recently returned from Mexico.  In Mexico itself, at least 80 people have died, and hundreds have become sick.

What is worrisome about swine flu is that it is caused by a hybrid virus taken from bird, pig, and human sources.  The last flu of this mix was the Spanish flu which began in 1918 and killed some 29 million people, about twice as many as died during World War I which had just ended.

Could Mexican swine flu be as deadly as the Spanish flu almost a century ago?

Unlike most flu strains, the Spanish flu was most deadly among young, healthy adults, and there is some evidence that the Mexican swine flu may be developing along a similar pattern.  To make matters worse, world-wide travel is much more wide spread than it was in 1920, making the potential spread of this potentially infectious disease terrifyingly rapid.

On the other hand, thus far, swine flu is not nearly as lethal as Spanish flu.  And should it develop into a killer flu, the world now has anti-viral drugs on a scale that were not available to combat the Spanish flu.

So a swine flu pandemic could be very very bad.  But maybe it won’t be.

Mother nature’s weapons of mass destruction

This week several of nature’s most deadly attacks have reminded us that occasionally there is a high price for calling Earth our home.  It’s an amazing place, if only because it is the only place in the universe we know of at this point where people like us could survive.  But we don’t live here without cost.

The earthquake that struck L’Aquila in central Italy has killed at least several hundred people and left tens of thousands homeless.  This isn’t the first or worst earthquake Italy has experienced, and it will not be its last.

Like San Francisco and Tokyo, among many others, it is where several tectonic plates are pushing against each other.  As they float inexorably in opposite directions, pressure builds up, and earthquakes are what happens when something finally snaps.  

Tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes are all the result of living on the surface of a dynamic planet.  If we didn’t have these deadly eruptions, the surface of Earth would gradually be worn smooth, and water would cover the entire surface.  There wouldn’t be any land not covered by water anywhere.

So the price of keeping our world habitable on the most basic level is sometimes lethal to hundreds of thousands of people in just a few minutes, the product of an unexpected gigantic upheaval from the bowels of the earth.

Finger-counting

When I was a child in school, we were taught that using our fingers to figure out the answer to an arthmetic problem was wrong.  Some kids even got their hands slapped for doing it.

But it looks as if in this case it was the teachers who were wrong.  Research is showing that using gestures while one is thinking about a math problem actually improves thinking.  This seems to apply whether we are trying to solve a problem, being taught how to solve it by someone else, or explaining how we solved it.

So hand shakes all around.  

There are several radio podcast on children’s gestures on line well as several books by the author who has studied this subject most extensively.

Neanderthal genes

On Darwin’s birthday last month,  Svante Paabo announced that his work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig had mapped 60% of the genetic code for Neanderthal man.  

Why is this so fantastic?  Because Neanderthal man, who became extinct about 30 thousand years ago, is the nearest relative of Homo sapiens.  Even the incomplete code answers some questions we’ve been asking ever since the first Neanderthal fossil was founder in the Neander Valley in Germany:

• When and where did the Neanderthals live?  In Europe and western Asia from beginning about 400,000 years ago.  Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, but did not arrive in Europe until about 40 thousand years ago – just before the Neanderthals died out.
• Did the Neanderthals interbreed with Homo sapiens, or do the two species have similar ancestors?  The genetic code suggests that very little interbreeding, if any occurred between the two human species.  But both descended from Homo erectus.
• Why did the Neanderthals die out when Homo sapiens didn’t?  We still don’t know.  Some anthropologists speculate that it was the arrival of Homo sapiens.  Perhaps Homo sapiens hunted them for food, or simply competed with the Neanderthals for a decreasing supply of wild food provided by hunting-gathering methods.

Or perhaps the ice age which also coincided with the Neanderthal demise changed the conditions in which the Neanderthals thrived, and they could not adapt.

• Did the Neanderthals talk to each other?  Not sure yet.  They did possess a gene which humans must have in order to talk, a gene which chimpanzees don’t have.  If they did talk, their mental abilities were unquestionably greater than the cartoon Neanderthal would suggest.

The chances are that the insult to intelligence as “Neanderthal” is misplaced.  They survived for at least 375 thousand years.  Thus far, Homo sapiens has survived for about 200 thousand.

Bees on a fast-food diet

In his best selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan argues that too much of our food is raised as a single crop in vast fields, and that above all, corn constitutes way too much of our diet.  He says these concentrations by big agri-businesses are undermining our health, the welfare of our animals, and depleting our soil.

Now it looks as if it’s also one of the causes of bee colony collapse.  Bees, like people, need a diversified diet to be able to fight off disease.  We need the bees to pollinate the plants that produce the food we eat, so the world-wide collapse of bee colonies is a serious global worry.

That’s the bad news.  But the good news is that the bees’ demise is not being caused – as many feared – by global warming, by genetically-modified crops, or even by pesticides.  It’s being caused by the bees’ vulnerability to several virus strains that are attacking their colonies.  And a diversified diet for the bees greatly increases their ability to fight it off.

Some beekeepers have resorted to giving supplements to their colonies – much as many of us take vitamin supplements to augment the nutrition in our daily food intake.  It helps.  But it’s expensive.

It would get to the heart of the problem if instead crops were more diversified in the first place, so that bees did not have to subsist on the bee-equivalent of fast food.

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=548064&story_id=13226733

Rhythms of life

Body clocks are the biological rhythms that make us feel, at different times, tired, hungry, energetic, or sexy.  They influence when we think best, when we get the most out of exercise, the times of the day when we are most vulnerable to infection and when we are best able to fight it off.  

They are also the chief cause of that annoying phenomenon called jet lag, the inability to fall asleep at night when we have just jetted in from another time zone.  Instead, our bodies keep acting as if they were still back where they started, making us hungry and sleepy when everybody else is doing something else.

These rhythms are called circadian rhythms, and are based on biological clocks inside all our major organs.  Our eyes are a major source of information which our bodies use to set its clocks.

Research exploring these rhythms suggests that much of modern life violates our best rhythms.  Ideally, we should be doing brain work before lunch, exercise in the late afternoon, eat just a little for our evening repast, and to avoid shift work altogether.

However, these suggestions suit what might be called the average person.  For people who aren’t average, whose body clocks aren’t set in exactly the same way, their advice might be a little different.

It does suggest, however, that each of us would benefit from observing and paying attention to our particular biological rhythms.

http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayContent&id=00000001313

Aliens may have already reached Earth

When most of us think about alien life, the images we conjure up are often suggested by the media is productions like Star Trek or Dr. Who.  But these ideas almost always are simply a slight change from the life forms with which we are familiar.  Perhaps aliens have pointy ears or wear vaguely medieval clothes, but they are not truly alien.

This week, however, a serious scientific suggestion has been made that alien life already exists on Earth.  We just don’t recognize it.  In fact, we haven’t even really looked for it.

Alien life, physicist Paul Davies suggests, is quite possibly living in Earth’s most alien environments – under conditions of extreme heat or cold, intense pressure, or surrounded in what life as we know it would find toxic.  It may not even be based on the carbon/hydrogen/oxygen combination which characterizes all life with which we are acquainted.

Would any of this matter in any practical sense?  Professor Davies says that what he believes may have happened is that life may have arrived colonized Earth on at least two separated occasions.  It may have arrived on a rock from Mars or on the tail of a comet from some place else.  But if life arrived and thrived on this single planet twice in Earth’s five billion year existence, then almost certainly the Universe is teeming with life.

And we are not alone.

Professor Davies is looking.  

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7893414.stm

Birthdays of heroes

During this last week, we have celebrated the birthdays of two great men – Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

Lincoln was President of the United States during the American Civil War, the war in which Americans killed each other by the thousands.  Ostensibly the issue was states rights.  But in fact, they were fighting over the issue of slavery, and it was Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Decree freeing all the slaves in America.  From then on, the Constitution that declared that “all men are created equal” did not have a hidden parenthesis excluding people with black skin.

150 years ago Charles Darwin published his book about evolution, “The Origin of the Species.”  Evolution is a story of amazing beauty and astonishing complexity in which life moves forward in a myriad of glorious manifestations.  To those who believe in God, it is a great peon of praise and honour.

Both Lincoln and Darwin in their own ways defended and celebrated the diversity of mankind.  What both were saying is that our strength lies not in our uniformity, but in our various talents, our different abilities, our divergent insights.

When the temptation is to retreat into our bunkers and shoot anyone within sight who is slightly different, who speaks a different language, wears different clothes, or worships at a different altar, learning again that our strength and survival lies in embracing our differences might help save us once again.

In today’s fractious and globalized world in which we rub so closely together, perhaps the lessons of these two men are more needed than ever before.