There's a little Neandertal in all of us. There's a little personal genomics in all of us. The Gulf oil spill continues to gush, and we owe it all to the second law of thermodynamics.
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THE NEANDERTAL IN US ALL. John Hawks points out that the 1-4% of your genes you share with the Neandertal women whose genomes Science trumpeted this week, and rightly so, may not sound like much. But in kinship terms, it's equivalent to having a Neandertal as your great-great-great grandparent.
That 1-4% is the same amount of genetic material you share (statistically) with your Grandma's great Grandma. I know genealogy lovers who have traced their ancestry back much further than that — although they probably wouldn't have pursued their hope for distant connections with lesser royalty if they'd known they'd encounter Neandertals instead.
There's a chance, sorry 'bout this, that the forbidden sex angle will turn out to be disappointing. The simplest explanation for the fact that all humans, no matter where they live, have dollops of Neandertal DNA is the obvious one: Neandertals and humans had sex, which resulted in babies who survived to pass on their gene mixtures to their descendants, who eventually circled the world. But there's a chance that your Neandertal genes may not, after all, have resulted from an ancestral love that dare not speak its name.
Carl Zimmer interviews researchers who say it's possible that a long-ago African population with those Neandertal genes split up, with each group's descendants moving out of Africa at different times. The result would be "Neandertal" genes in both Neandertal fossils and present-day humans.
I haven't even heard most of the naughty jokes yet, or the political ones either, but I'm already tired of them. Let's focus instead on the gee-whiz-ain't-science-grand stuff. Hawks, for example, says the findings are comparable to the Apollo mission "blue marble" photos of Earth from space in their potential impact on the human psyche. He also notes:
We can see, and now learn about, the essential genetic changes that make us human — the things that made our emergence as a global species possible.
And now the biggie. Hawks asks:
Does this mean that Neandertals belong in our species, Homo sapiens?
And answers:
Yes. Interbreeding with fertile offspring in nature. That's the biological species concept.
So it's now official, just as many paleoanthropologists have been saying for years. Homo sapiens sapiens, that's us. And Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, that's them.
All Homo sap saps who write about paleoanthropology, take note. Many years of yummy data TK.
GENOMICS ENCOUNTERS OF A DIFFERENT KIND. At Technology Review, Emily Singer reports on a Cambridge meeting of the small group of personal genome "pioneers," a meeting I've not seen described elsewhere. The group included the 14 people who have had their complete genomes sequenced. (Not present: Desmond Tutu and Glenn Close. Or any known Neandertals.) Singer points out that so many people are jumping into personal sequencing that such a meeting will never happen again.
Among noteworthy items: insurance companies don't want to look at genomes, apparently because they are concerned about liability issues. This is the opposite of a worry first expressed years ago when it became clear that personal sequencing was going to happen someday somehow.
Insurance companies, it was feared, would seize on genomes that revealed susceptibilities to particular diseases as a way of denying people coverage (or raising their premiums.) Now it appears that the opposite may be true: institutional lack of enthusiasm for clinical genomics could actually inhibit the move from one-size-fits-all treatment to truly personalized medicine.
WHEN YOU DRILL, BABY, DRILL, YOU GET THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. If time is short and you are rationing the amount you read about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill this week, I recommend that you put this blog post on your list. Thomas Webler, Seth Tuler, and Kirstin Dow have spent the past two years studying human reactions to oil spills. In this guest post for Climate Progress, they go beyond those many bathetic videos of Gulf Coast folks worrying about where their next paychecks are coming from. The researchers make a long list of all the personal costs of oil spills in addition to uncertain income.
Those costs include impacts on the physical health of cleanup crews and volunteers. One study showed, for example, that people who cleaned birds suffered more from oil-related skin lesions than any other cleanup workers. Also mental health impacts, costs to social relationships (such as increased divorce rates). and concerns about social justice.
Climate Progress is run by Joe Romm, who has been more on top of the Deepwater Horizon spill than most other climate and energy bloggers. In this post he tackles the controversial question of toxicity of the spill dispersants oil giant BP is dumping into the Gulf. It's the only blog post I've seen so far that discusses the 2005 National Academy of Sciences report Oil Spill Dispersants: Efficacy and Effects, even though that document is almost certainly one of the top resources on this complex technical topic.
One question is whether dispersants do more harm than good. At Green, Elisabeth Rosenthal points out that BP has already released far more dispersant than has ever been used on a spill before, with unforeseeable consequences. At Wired Science, Brandon Keim argues that the dispersant BP is using, Corexit, is far less effective than another product, Dispersit (which, one study reports, busts up 100% of oil it comes in contact with, compared to Corexit's 54.7%.) In a comment left at The Great Beyond, Tom Pringle reveals the supposedly secret formula for Corexit.
In his oil spill musings at NPR's 13.7 blog, Adam Frank isn't telling science writers much they don't already know. But he does make a lovely connection between the spill and that implacable governor of all our lives, the second law of thermodynamics. He notes:
They should really start teaching the second law of thermodynamic[s] in kindergarten. It is that important to human culture and its future. Discovered, appropriately, at the dawn of the industrial age, the second law tells us that converting energy into work always (always! always! always!) leaves some mess in the process.
Tell me about it.
