john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Slate

  • Bio-engineering, climate change, and the zombie apocalypse

    Tue, 2012-03-20 20:13 -- John Hawks

    I have an article in Slate, where I riff on last week's silly suggestion to "bio-engineer humans" to stop climate change: "Can Bioengineers Make Human Beings More Sustainable?"

    My take: The experiment has already been done!

    When the climate warmed by several degrees around 8,000 B.C., it must have seemed at first like a wonderful dream. The glaciers melted. The human population grew and grew. There were more people than ever before, using a broader range of resources and eating a broader range of foods, and they invented beautiful and complex cultures.

    That's when these people of the early Holocene did something truly bizarre. They reacted to all this climate change by engineering a new, more sustainable ecology. And they began to foster mutant children who would flourish in an alternate, globally warmed future.

    Here's what I find interesting: Bioethicists suggest totalitarian-sounding approaches to genetic change. But with lactase persistence and amylase duplications, nature took a different course:

    When it comes to cutting meat, natural selection has acted more like an entrepreneur than a eugenicist. Instead of giving us an aversion to meat, it lures us away from meat by offering a milkshake sweetened with corn syrup.

    Of course, that just makes the population grow faster. Only one way to really solve this problem, and yes, my essay goes there...

    Tags: 
    Slate
    genetic engineering
    ethics
    climate change
    Hawks sightings

  • Chimpanzee power

    Wed, 2009-02-25 21:51 -- John Hawks

    I have a little article in Slate today: "How Strong is a Chimpanzee?"

    Last Friday, I noticed a lot of talking-head-type animal trainers claiming that chimpanzees were more than 5 times stronger than people. That just didn't seem right to me. Chimps are strong, and they have a number of anatomical features that give their muscles more mechanical advantage than ours for certain actions. But 5 times is an awful lot. It would imply some pretty massive changes in muscle histology or metabolism in the human lineage.

    Well, it turned out that the story was a lot more interesting than a simple blog post. It goes back to one man's attempts in the 1920's to get chimpanzees to pull on a scale. John Bauman isn't widely remembered today, but he wrote a book of evolution and philosophy called, "Out of the Valley of the Forgotten, or From Trinil to New York." Bauman got two chimps to pull more weight than his students on the football team. Kroeber, Hooton, and other classic textbook writers picked up the story, but not always pick the subsequent work that showed chimpanzees' strength to be much less extreme.

    The study of muscle tissue in chimpanzees and other hominoids continues, and today there are some interesting genetic results that point to fairly rapid evolution of muscle metabolism in the human lineage. More than any time since the 1960's, anthropologists are developing more knowledge about why human muscles differ from our closest relatives.

    Tags: 
    Hawks sightings
    Slate
    chimpanzees
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.