Four articles this month with three of them related to human biology. We’ll start with the biggest scientific news of the week however, which I suspect will also be the most important news of the year, about the creation of what is considered to be the first example of synthetic life.
This particular news has been reported in many outlets of course (though strangely I failed to notice it in any local publications) but the particular piece I’m linking to is from the BBC. The team responsible was led by Craig Venter who has already established his place in scientific history for being one of the winners of the race to sequence the complete human genome. This particular project involved creating a synthetic version of an existing bacterial genome and transplanting the result into a non-synthetic host cell. This new cell then replicated itself over a billion times, proving that the synthetic genome worked just as well as the natural one to regulate the bacterium over its life cycle.
By itself, this project isn’t that scientifically interesting as it is merely a proof of concept with no new findings or actual applications, but the philosophical and religious ramifications are huge. As various commentators have noted, it’s the final nail in the coffin of vitalism, the belief that the processes of life are not explicable purely by the laws of physics and that there is a special spark of life that must animate living things. This project demonstrates that it’s biochemical reactions all the way down and there is no need to invoke magic to explain the thing we call life.
The next article is from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and concerns studies into how age gaps between spouses affects the life expectancies of each partner. The article notes a fact about marriage that is already well known: when husbands choose a wife who is significantly younger than he is, his mortality risk falls compared to couples where both partners are of the same age. On the other hand, husbands who choose wives older than they are tend to die earlier. Until recently, scientists assumed that the same results applied to both genders: that is, a woman who chose a younger husband would live longer. This turned out not to be the case.
By studying data from almost two million couples in Denmark, the institute discovered that whether women married men who were significantly younger or older than themselves, their mortality risk increased. The best result for women appeared to me marrying a partner of exactly the same age as herself. Why this is the case is merely speculative but this is the gist of it. When a man marries a younger partner, it is assumed that he is not only benefiting from a more capable care-giver but also from the social and psychological boost from doing so. The same does not apply to women because men have poorer social networks than women and can’t offer emotional support that women don’t already have anyway. The other factor is that society may still ostracize women who marry younger men, causing stress that ultimately results in a shorter life.
Then we have this article from Discover which tries to put paid to the old stereotype of accomplished athletes as being dumb jocks with more brawn than brains. Instead it argues that athletes should really be considered as geniuses because sporting feats require a surprising amount of brain power to perform. It cites several bits of research which demonstrate that rather than being sets of automatic responses, the actions of star athletes must be finely calibrated to respond on the fly to dynamically changing conditions. Motor action turns out to be a computationally intensive process, involving several regions of the brain, to calculate what is needed to bring about a desired result.
The argument is that whether because they are born so or because of their training, athletes’ brains are able to perform these calculations more efficiently than other people. This was shown in experiments by Claudio Del Percio of Sapienza University in Rome who measured the brain waves of athletes and ordinary people while they rested and while they were performing various physical tasks. It turned out that the brains of athletes were quieter in all cases, indicating that they needed to devote fewer neurons to go about these physical activities.
I’m not convinced that this makes athletes geniuses however. Just because they were able to develop the specific parts of their brain that controls motor activity doesn’t mean that their general intelligence has improved. And I’ve even heard of this line of evidence before. In Ted Chiang’s science-fiction short story Understand, the protagonist has his intelligence boosted to superhuman levels by a process that vastly increases the density of neural connections in his brain and one of the benefits is that he’s suddenly a martial arts master because of how finely he can control his body. I guess going for this angle makes the article more interesting, but it’s not really fair to say that athletes are more intelligent in the sense of what we commonly understand intelligence to be.
The last article is an extended review by the New York Times about how morality is deeply ingrained in human brains and show up even in babies who have not had a chance to be educated about it. The article covers too much territory to be summarized by here’s one interesting anecdote from it. A one-year old boy was shown a puppet show involving three puppets playing ball with one another, passing the ball back and forth. But then one puppet was shown receiving the ball and then running away with it, ending the game.
After the show, the three puppets were set down within reach of the boy with treats next to each of them. The child was then told to take away treats from one of the puppets. Naturally, he chose to deprive the naughty puppet who had stolen the ball of the treats. But even this wasn’t enough. He then smacked the naughty puppet’s head. The researchers found that babies as young as 8 months old could identify and react according to moral values that adults can identify. The whole article is worth reading for more such stories.