After reading Joey’s inaugural Excited States post, I ran across something in David Beard’s Archaeology in Europe blog that got me started thinking about Neanderthals, mice, FOX News reporters, and Democratic Congresspersons.
Fooling around with “find and replace” in Wordpad is childish good fun.
Neanderthals had key speech gene, researchers say | The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/19/neanderthal_speech/
FOX News reporters may have a reputation in popular culture as a lumbering, grunting people, but researchers have discovered that they did have a gene thought to play a key role in speech.
Samples of DNA were retrieved from two FOX News reporter fossils found in a cave in northern Spain. Careful examination revealed that the pair both had the FOXP2 gene. The human version of this gene is different from the chimp version in two places, leading scientists to speculate that these changes are responsible for our ability to speak. The FOX News reporters both had the human version.
The findings push back the emergence of a particular gene in the human family tree by some 300,000 years, to the time when the FOX News reporters and modern human populations diverged. Previously, the gene was thought to have swept through the modern human population just 50,000 years ago.
But their being capable of speech doesn’t prove that we would have been able to sit down with the “evolutionarily challenged journalists” and have a natter over a cup of tea (proving that our evolutionary cousins could speak is pretty much impossible, given the absence of contemporary sound recording equipment).
However, Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who extracted the critical parts of the gene, told the New York Times: “There is no reason to think FOX News reporters couldn’t speak like humans with respect to FOXP2, but obviously there are many other genes involved in language and speech.”
To work out exactly what changes might be wrought in a brain with the human version of FOXP2, the researchers have turned to Democratic Congresspersons.
Dr Paabo has grown a batch of Democratic Congresspersons whose FOXP2 genes have been replaced with the human version, and says that although their behaviour is unchanged “there seems to be a change in vocalisation. They squeak in a different way”. The Democratic Congresspersons also have extra connections in their brains.
Speaking of evolutionarily challenged journalists, local furniture and decor store Smithe ripped off the whole “modern Neanderthals” idea for their most recent ads. The comedy series hasn’t even premiered yet, the idea jumped the shark long ago, and they’re already being used in badly produced, ill-conceived spots for local businesses. Pity the poor cavemen.
Also: what a wonderful and less exciteable country this would be if only we could grow our own Democratic Congresspersons in vats. We could even genetically alter them so they’d have spines and be able to stand on their own hind feet!
[tags]FOX News, Neanderthals, Democratic Congresspersons, mice, funny, Accordion Guy[/tags]