Researchers “very shocked” by recent new genes that form distinctly human brain

_{Denyse O'Leary

October 19, 2011

Human evolution, News}

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File:Gray726-Brodman-prefrontal.svg — from Gray's Anatomy, the prefrontal cortex

In “New Genes, New Brain” (The Scientist , October 19, 2011), Cristina Luiggi reports,

The evolution of the human brain may have been driven by a group of novel genes that arose fairly recently in primate evolution.

A bevy of genes known to be active during human fetal and infant development first appeared at the same time that the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain associated with human intelligence and personality—took shape in primates, a new study published yesterday (October 18) in PLoS Biology found. The timing suggests that the new genes may have been intimately tied to the evolution of the human brain.

Previous research focused on older genes conserved across the animal kingdom, looking at new genes is hoped to provide insight. Like:

“We were very shocked that there were that many new genes that were upregulated in this part of the brain,” said Long, who added that he was also taken aback by synchronicity of the origin of the genes and the development of novel brain structures. It seems that around the same time that the neocortex and the prefrontal cortex arose, and then expanded in humans, a large collection of genes also popped up.

That’s something the old genes were never going to tell researchers.

It feels like a rollout of some kind, no?

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Comments

Well, you could read the paper :) http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001179?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+plosbiology%2FNewArticles+%28Ambra+-+Biology+New+Articles%29 It's really interesting. Incidentally, the authors talk about both "young genes" (genes unique to primates) and "human-specific genes", some of both of which they find upregulated in PFC during human development. They also show that the number of new genes separating our nearest relations are roughly similar - 318 between Rhesus monkey and orangutan, 72 expressed in PFC; 372 between orangutan and chimp, 72 expressed in PFC; and 280 between chimp and human, 54 expressed in PFC. It's a really interesting paper, not exactly "another bad day for Darwinism"! It actually tests specific Darwinian hypotheses!Elizabeth Liddle_{October 20, 2011
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That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself?
~G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was ThursdayClive Hayden_{October 19, 2011
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Shocked?? I'm shocked that they're shocked. Really, you had to go to a lab to find out that humans are different?ThoughtSpark_{October 19, 2011
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GilDodgen: "Something else is going on — something powerful, creative, and with purpose." ==== You mean other than a Gerald Joyce 'Master Chef' chemical cocktail soup experiment ???Eocene_{October 19, 2011
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The massively profound discontinuity between humans (especially the human mind and brain) and all other life forms should be obvious to anyone with even minimal reasoning power. The notion that this discontinuity is the result of randomly produced gene disparity is irrational and superbly unsupported by any concrete evidence, only Alice-in-Wonderland fantastic speculation. Something else is going on -- something powerful, creative, and with purpose.GilDodgen_{October 19, 2011
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Careful there, young in that figure means primate-specific, not human specific.DrREC_{October 19, 2011
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"Such a pattern is consistent with the hourglass model recently observed in zebrafish, where the oldest genes are transcribed in the phylotypic stage (supposedly the stage of ancient evolutionary origin) and younger genes are expressed in the more divergent ontogenic stages [40]." Oops. I do hope there is a follow-up paper on the 'de novo' genes. Data on whether these actually are real genes is pretty light: "Such a trend continues into the hominoid lineages with 198 genes upregulated in PFC (Figure 6). Up to 54 of them were human-specific, i.e. they originated after human lineage diverged from the other hominoids. Although these 198 genes have been subject to less experimental investigations, expression of 33 genes in fetal or infant brain was demonstrated by UniGene EST data (Table 3), four of which have been confirmed to encode proteins, as revealed by Pride peptide data [27]." From their tables, searching the chimp genome for a few of the de-novo genes turned up some nearly identical matches, particularly for ARL17. I'd bet a few are genuine de novo genes. I'd bet some aren't.DrREC_{October 19, 2011
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This is really something!!!,,,bornagain77_{October 19, 2011
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Let's not forget this PaV;
A bevy of genes known to be active during human fetal and infant development first appeared at the same time that the prefrontal cortex
These are not 'newly added' unique ORFan genes, on top of existing genes, since many are expressed early in development prior to the expression of 'older genes': notes:
Age doesn't matter: New genes are as essential as ancient ones - December 2010 Excerpt: "A new gene is as essential as any other gene; the importance of a gene is independent of its age," said Manyuan Long, PhD, Professor of Ecology & Evolution and senior author of the paper. "New genes are no longer just vinegar, they are now equally likely to be butter and bread. We were shocked." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101216142523.htm
Moreover the 'anomaly' of unique ORFan genes is found in every new genome sequenced:
Widespread ORFan Genes Challenge Common Descent – Paul Nelson – video with references http://www.vimeo.com/17135166 Genomes of similar species - Cornelius Hunter PhD. Excerpt: Different variants of the Escherichia coli bacteria, for instance, each have hundreds of unique genes. And some of these genes have been found to have important functions, such as helping to construct proteins. [8] Massive genetic differences were also found between different fruit fly species. The fruit fly is one of the most intensely researched organisms and in recent years a systematic study of the genomes of a dozen different species was undertaken. Evolutionists were surprised to find novel features in the genomes of each of these different fruit fly species. Thousands of genes showed up missing in many of the species, and some genes showed up in only a single species. [9] As one science writer put it, “an astonishing 12 per cent of recently evolved genes in fruit flies appear to have evolved from scratch.” [10] These so-called novel genes would have had to have evolved over a few million years—a time period previously considered to allow only for minor genetic changes. [11,12] ,,, etc.. etc… http://www.darwinspredictions.com/#_4.2_Genomes_of
etc.. etc.. etc..bornagain77_{October 19, 2011
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And worse still:
We found these genes are scattered across the whole genome, demonstrating that they are generated by many independent events (Figure S5). Moreover, based on chromosomal coordinates, we pooled neighboring genes into clusters if they share the same age and transcriptional bias. Given two distance cutoffs (100,000 bases and 1 million bases), young transcriptional clusters continue to be more often expressed in the fetal brain compared to old transcriptional clusters.
. . . these genes are scattered across the whole genome, demonstrating that they are generated by many independent events. Kind of like what a computer programmer might do in developing an updated version of his software!PaV_{October 19, 2011
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It gets even worse for Darwinism: From the PLoS article, author's summary:
Our data reveal that evolutionary change in the development of the human brain happened at the protein level by gene origination and also via evolution of regulatory networks, as intimated by the enrichment of primate-specific transcriptional regulators in our dataset.
All you Darwinists out there: give up the ghost! Please!PaV_{October 19, 2011
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BornAgain77: I just saw your additional post. You know, Darwinism is just an absolute affront to reason. The numbers we're talking about here in de novo generation of genes is simply mind-boggling long. And now we need 54 of them. They accuse us of being creationists. Well, I'm Catholic---just like Ken Miller. What they're really accusing us of is not being impartial, of having an agenda, and of thus not being able to follow where the evidence leads. Well, who's guilty of that?!! When will they give up the ghost?PaV_{October 19, 2011
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Here's some more:
The researchers also determined that the majority of these new genes underwent strong positive selection in humans, further supporting the hypothesis that the genes contributed to the evolution of important functions in the brain. “All of this is circumstantial evidence that supports this more broad idea that these new genes have something interesting to say about primate-specific or human-specific brain function,” Vallender said.
Every Darwinian description needs a translation. So, when they say "the majority of these new genes underwent strong positive selection in humans", what they really mean is that these new genes are "highly conserved"; which means they're almost identical across populations (if not completely identical)---testimony to their evident importance. So, not only do we have 54 new genes expressed in the pre-frontal cortex, but they don't allow any substitutions (effectively ruling out neutral drift); and all this in 5-7 million years. I tell you, that NS+RV is really something (And let's not even talk about evo-devo here, because we're not dealing with Hox genes; we're dealing with de novo genes. And evo-devo is simply about shifting around gene expression patterns. It says nothing at all about the de novo development of genes) Any intellectually honest Darwinist should, based on this evidence alone, abandon the theory.PaV_{October 19, 2011
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This is from the above cited article:
Finally, 54 of the 280 genes found to be unique to humans were also highly expressed in the developing prefrontal cortex, which grew considerably in humans after the human chimpanzee lineages broke off around 5 to 7 million years ago. (The human prefrontal cortex is six times larger than the chimpanzee’s.)
From: "Induced gene expression in human brain after the split from chimpanzee"
In summary, our analysis has provided statistical evidence to show that after the split of humans and chimpanzees, the change of expression pattern in the human brain was more dramatic than that in the chimpanzee [5]. Moreover, we have shown that these changes in the human brain involved induction (increased gene expression) much more frequently than repression. This pattern is not observed in chimpanzee brain, nor in the liver of humans or chimpanzees. The enhanced expression of genes in the human brain since the split from chimpanzees could be important in the emergence of human beings, and certainly deserves further investigation. [Jianying Gu and Xun Gu, 2003)
I suppose all these neutral mutations were just right there when they were needed. And, of course, in 5 to 7 million years, NS could have done, what? Well, per a recently cited article, two authors took exception to Behe's characterizations in EoE, and said that it would only take 31.6 million years to fixate two amino acid substitutions in a mammalian population. But, of course, if you believe in magic, anything is possible.PaV_{October 19, 2011
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Notes:
Could Chance Arrange the Code for (Just) One Gene? "our minds cannot grasp such an extremely small probability as that involved in the accidental arranging of even one gene (10^-236)." http://www.creationsafaris.com/epoi_c10.htm Dr. Sanford calculates it would take 12 million years to “fix” a single base pair mutation into a population. He further calculates that to create a gene with 1000 base pairs, it would take 12 million x 1000 or 12 billion years. This is obviously too slow to support the creation of the human genome containing 3 billion base pairs. http://www.detectingtruth.com/?p=66 Waiting Longer for Two Mutations - Michael J. Behe Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that 'for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years' (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless "using their model" gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model. http://www.discovery.org/a/9461 “Darwin’s theory is easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science." Granville Sewell - Professor Of Mathematics - University Of Texas - El Paso God by the Numbers - Charles Edward White Excerpt: "Even if we limit the number of necessary mutations to 1,000 and argue that half of these mutations are beneficial, the odds against getting 1,000 beneficial mutations in the proper order is 2^1000. Expressed in decimal form, this number is about 10^301. 10^301 mutations is a number far beyond the capacity of the universe to generate. Even if every particle in the universe mutated at the fastest possible rate and had done so since the Big Bang, there still would not be enough mutations." http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/march/26.44.html?start=2 Study Reports a Whopping "23% of Our Genome" Contradicts Standard Human-Ape Evolutionary Phylogeny - Casey Luskin - June 2011 Excerpt: For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This encompasses genes and exons to the same extent as intergenic regions. We conclude that about 1/3 of our genes started to evolve as human-specific lineages before the differentiation of human, chimps, and gorillas took place. (of note; 1/3 of our genes is equal to about 7000 genes that we do not share with chimpanzees) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/study_reports_a_whopping_23_of047041.html Indeed, math is not kind to Darwinism in the least when considering the probability of humans 'randomly' evolving: In Barrow and Tippler's book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, they list ten steps necessary in the course of human evolution, each of which, is so improbable that if left to happen by chance alone, the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have incinerated the earth. They estimate that the odds of the evolution (by chance) of the human genome is somewhere between 4 to the negative 180th power, to the 110,000th power, and 4 to the negative 360th power, to the 110,000th power. Therefore, if evolution did occur, it literally would have been a miracle and evidence for the existence of God. William Lane Craig William Lane Craig - If Human Evolution Did Occur It Was A Miracle - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUxm8dXLRpA Along that same line: Darwin and the Mathematicians - David Berlinski “The formation within geological time of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.” Kurt Gödel, was a preeminent mathematician who is considered one of the greatest to have ever lived.! http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/11/darwin_and_the_mathematicians.html Stephen Meyer - Functional Proteins And Information For Body Plans - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4050681 Phillips, Craig & Dean - Open the Eyes of My Heart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwToU_wfj8s
bornagain77_{October 19, 2011
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Maybe Nick Matzke can explain to us how these new genes came about through Darwinian processes in an absolutely short period of time. Another day; another bad day for Darwinism!PaV_{October 19, 2011
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Lab experiments - several million dollars Thoroughly equipped Lab in which to conduct proper experiments- 10's of millions of dollars Scientists being 'very shocked' that the findings severely compromise the gradual appearance of humans by neo-Darwinian processes - pricelessbornagain77_{October 19, 2011
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