How Did Humans Come to Be Smarter than Apes?

Humans display significant differences in behaviour and mental aptitude from their closest relatives -- the great apes. How did those differences come about? Could a similar branching off take place in the near future, with the arrival of a new species that can make monkeys out of men?

Changing a single base, or DNA letter, is likely to have a limited effect because such mutations alter only a single gene. But large duplications containing 20,000 bases or more, such as the ones mapped in the new study, may contain more than one gene or parts of genes and regulatory regions.

Doubling, tripling or quadrupling the number of copies of a piece of DNA in the genome can potentially increase activity of genes contained in the chunks by a corresponding amount. A duplication might contain some parts of a gene, but not all of it, which could change the gene’s function. And duplications might contain control panels for genes, Gerstein says. Copying those control panels, in full or in part, and inserting them somewhere else in the genome could change the activity of genes adjacent to the insertion point.

Duplications don’t appear to happen randomly, the researchers found. Most duplications occurred next to more ancient duplications, creating hot spots in the genome susceptible to copying and rearranging....

About 20 percent of the duplications identified in the study are found only in humans. Most of the replicated chunks contain genes with unknown function, so the next step of the project is to figure out how the duplications happen and how the genes inside them contribute to making humans human. _ScienceNews

Genomic "hotspots" are analogous to the volcanic "hotspots" responsible for creating the Hawaiian Islands, and other island chains. The question is whether these genomic hotspots are still active, percolating the foundations for an even newer species that is to man as men are to apes? In any event, understanding the power of gene duplications will help to understand more of the powerful forces underlying evolution.

Such speculation is highly politically incorrect, since if the mind is not careful it may stray to the heretical topics of IQ and EF differences between population groups, and differences in measured IQ on different continents and parts of continents of the world. Such differences may suggest nascent speciation attempts that were ongoing thousands of years in the past.

Unfortunately, such self-censorship of the sciences in the western world is leading to the acceptance of the most absurd theories (imminent anthropogenic climate catastrophe) and an out of hand rejection of the study of promising avenues of research (reasons for differences in group intelligence and aptitudes). Refusing to study these things only assures that we will remain stuck in the present rut of ignorance.