Sunspots 802

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: A Christianity Today writer argues that telling churches to close, because of COVID, is not persecution..

Ethics: The Daily Mail reports that one of the medications administered to President Trump was developed from an aborted fetus. The company does not consider the product to be from an aborted fetus. ScienceMag, an important scientific journal explains further, and says that aborted fetal cells were not used. Gizmodo discusses the situation. It's complicated.

Health: Gizmodo reports on studies about how long the COVID virus lasts, on device screens. Too long.

Politics: The Washington Post has what appears to be an accurate and unbiased page on where Trump and Biden stand on several issues.

FiveThirtyEight reports that nobody really knows why crime becomes more, or less, common.

FiveThirtyEight also discusses how the reputation of the Supreme Court has dropped in recent years.

Science: Gizmodo reports that a couple of dozen planets, orbiting other stars, seem to be well suited for life.

Gizmodo also reports on a water-loving species of mouse from Africa.

Gizmodo also reports that the US Department of Agriculture killed over a million wild animals last year.

Gizmodo also reports on a poisonous caterpillar, found in Virginia.

And Gizmodo reports on tool use by ants.

Science Alert reports on evidence that the artery structure in our arms is evolving.

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

Thanks for looking!

 

A gene change and racial differences

The New York Times reports that a change in a single gene seems to be responsible for some of the characteristics of East Asian people. These people are Han Chinese, Japanese, Thais, and others, including Native Americans, who descended from East Asian peoples. The gene is EDAR.

One thing that the researchers did was to use mice, which also have a form of the EDAR gene. Researchers produced mice with the gene altered as it is in East Asian peoples. The mice had changes in their hair, fat deposits, sweat glands, and mammary gland sizes, corresponding to how East Asian peoples differ from others.

If you are interested in more, read the New York Times article. The original reports require a paid subscription, as far as I can tell.

If humans descended from apes, why are there still apes?

"If humans descended from apes, why are there still apes?"

I have seen this question, or one much like it, on Facebook, a couple of times in the last few days. I doubt that the person posting that really expects an answer, of any kind. It's (I suppose) a rhetorical flourish. However, here's an answer.

No serious biologist believes that humans descended from chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas or orangutans. Most scientists believe that these great apes, and humans, had a common ancestor. It is possible that they are wrong, and that humans were specially created by God. I'll not consider that any further in this post, because the statement I'm responding to is really saying this: "OK, Mr. Scientist. You believe that humans descended from apes. How can that be possible, since apes are still around?"

I'll respond with this question: "If cell phones descended from land line phones, how come there are still land line phones?" Granted, of course, that phones don't descend from anything, but are manufactured, and that all analogies are less than perfect, it still is relevant to the original question.

In the first place, we can see the "common ancestor" again. Both cell phones, and land line phones, have evolved since the first cell phones were introduced. (See here for the Wikipedia article on the history of mobile phones, which were first introduced in the 1940s) The common ancestor is not around any more.

Second, different types of phones are in existence because there is, or has been, a market for them. Land lines are usually cheaper than cell phone service. Most people can't use their cell phones for connecting their computers to the Internet, and, for example, downloading large application programs. Our land line works well for that. On the other hand, there are many things you can do with a cell phone, even a non-smart phone, that are impossible with a land line. For example, if your land line stops working, you can use your cell phone to inform your land line carrier of the problem.

What does this have to do with apes and humans? Biologists believe that, for a new species to arise, it must occupy an ecological niche. What is an ecological niche? It's where the species lives, and how it obtains its energy. For animals, where it lives, and what it eats. Presumably primitive humans, either created specially by God, or coming from some ancestral form, were able to take advantage of ways of living that other creatures were not, most likely by being able to construct or occupy dwellings of various kinds, and by being able to cultivate crops and to domesticate animals. So they survived as a species. But there are other ecological niches, still occupied by the great apes, that humans don't fill, or don't fill very well, such as living on less than 200 species of plants, on the cold and cloudy slopes of mountains in Africa, as the Mountain Gorilla does. As long as there are available ecological niches, which humans are poorly equipped to occupy, we can expect the great apes to continue to exist. (Unless we hunt them to extinction.) This is true whether or not we share a common ancestor with them. There are good reasons for the continued existence of humans, and of great apes. Similarly, land lines and cell phones both exist because there are good reasons for their existence -- there are niches for both of them. In both cases, the arrival of a new entity did not mean that an older one would cease to exist.

Another response is this. "If dogs descended from wolves, why are there still wolves?" (As far as I know, all biologists, including those who believe that humans were specially created on an earth which is only a few thousand years old, believe that dogs descended from wolves.) The answer is similar to the telephone story. Dogs exist because there is an ecological niche, however artificial, available to them. So do wolves, in a different ecological niche. Clearly dogs have evolved into many different breeds or races, mostly under the direction of dog breeders. But dogs which seem to be much like wolves still exist. Most likely, wolves, themselves, have changed in small ways over the last several thousand years, so that they, also, are not identical with the wolf-dog common ancestor, or ancestors. But there are still wolves, and there are still dog breeds which most likely gave rise to newer breeds. The arrival of dogs didn't mean that wolves would immediately go extinct.

I hope that this answers the question. Thanks for reading.

Some news about human skin color

A recent report on National Public Radio details new findings in the genetics of human skin color. (The report is in text form, but the page has a link to an audio report, which is a little over seven minutes long. Robert Krulwich, science correspondent, is always interesting to listen to.)

Krulwich interviewed Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist. She believes that human skin color has changed, within groups of humans isolated from each other, because of selection, as such groups migrated North or South. Dark skin color, caused by deposits of melanin in the skin, tends to protect people from excess Ultraviolet light, which may cause skin cancer, and groups who have historically lived near the equator have darker skin than those who have lived further North. On the other hand, having lighter skin allows the person to absorb enough UV light to assist them in manufacturing sufficient vitamin D.

All of this was reasonably well understood before Jablonski's findings. Her research indicates, in addition, that many human lineages have migrated, and, in as little as one or two hundred generations, have changed their skin color from light to dark, or the reverse. For example, the Indians (of Asia), according to Jablonski, are now dark-skinned, but were not always -- they lived further North, and were lighter-skinned. Jablonski believes that humans originated in Africa, where they had darker skins.

Interesting. Thanks for reading.