I've always assumed that the Ferengi are meant to be an anti-semitic caricature.

As for the North-west Europe thing. . . my black hair, brown eyes, and relatively dark complexion (I mean realtive to Irish people who look as if they've had a bag of flour thrown in their faces, to quote Spike Milligan) meant that I was always stopped by immigration police whenever the Belfast-Dublin train crossed that famous international border.

'What country are you from' they'd demand, in their charming rustic brogue.

By  D.J.P. O'Kane, at Tuesday, March 03, 2009 2:40:00 pm  

This has been claimed before; both Heinlein and James Blish wrote about it. (And, btw, it's one of the arguments of the social darwinists, and deserves a lot of suspicion for that reason.) Problem is, it doesn't seem to be true. It was recent scientific news: the human genome is actually extremely varied. (Link hard to find--sorry.) People are very puzzled by this.

BTW, it's unlikely that Gene Rodenberry would have allowed an anti-semitic caricature. What they seem to be is an anti-capitalist caricature.

By  randolph, at Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:19:00 pm  

That the human genome is extremely varied is no argument against the view that it isn't acquiring many new variations.

By  Ken, at Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:21:00 pm  

Of course human evolution must be over, watch any sci-fi flick and observe the phenomenon. (And language evolution has stopped also. :)

I read Steve's _In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny_ a few years back, and really enjoyed it.

(Will you be in Bradford at Eastercon, Ken?)

By  Johan A, at Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:31:00 pm  

Given the etymology of "Ferengi" (from the Arabic pronunciation of "Frank"), they seem to be a caricature of those same northern Europeans. Perhaps that explains the link to capitalism. . . .

By  Anonymous, at Tuesday, March 03, 2009 4:22:00 pm  

The depiction of non-human creatures who are obsessed with money as having big noses is . . . unfortunate.

By  D.J.P. O'Kane, at Tuesday, March 03, 2009 4:27:00 pm  

randolph said: "It was recent scientific news: the human genome is actually extremely varied. (Link hard to find--sorry.)"

There are two issues here, first the availability of new variation (for example by mutation); and second what we call "fixing" the variation, the process by which it spreads to the entire population.

The dynamics depend on the size of the population and mating systems.

In very small populations new variation is rare, but fixation can happen quickly, even at random (what we all genetic drift) In middle-sized populations natural selection is more important.

In very large populations there will be many new mutations. In humans, even if the mutation rate is falling the population is so large that just about every possible point mutation will turn up somewhere every generation. But each new mutation is very unlikely to become fixed. In a large population genetic drift is much less important and natural selection takes longer than it does in a small population. (to get technical the chance of any neutral variant of a gene becoming fixed in a population is exactly the same as the proportion of the population who have that gene, and the chance of any beneficial mutation becoming fixed is approximately equal to that multiplied by twice its selective advantage, but the time it takes can be huge. To get even more technical all these approximations depend on whether the population size is stable, shrinking, growing or cyclical, and on the mating system)

So what we end up with is a large population with a vast and growing amount of individual variation. New mutations are turning up all the time - and even if they weren't there is plenty of variation in the population already. Most rare mutations will die out. But there are billions of them (more than one each on average). So just at random some of them will increase in frequency in the population. Many of these mutations are slowly becoming more common. But it takes so long for any one new mutation to become fixed that none of them takes over. For a population the size of our species it could take billions of generations for a new mutation that is slightly beneficial to spread to the whole population.

Also: "People are very puzzled by this."

Not really. Its exactly what we'd expect. Fast evolution is more likely to happen in small isolated populations. Or in species that undergo crashes, population bottlenecks.

If we compare humans with other very populous species of mammal we find that we actually have quite a small amount of genetic variation, consistent with us having recently expanded hugely in population. Also that the variation between groups of humans is quite low, but variation within groups is unusually high. That is also compatible with a recent population explosion, coupled with the human tendency to interbreed between groups.

There has been a long slow change in the way biologists think about variation within species. Over more than a century we've moved from thinking of variation as a problem to be explained, to thinking of it as a phenomenon to be expected. Its part of the move from what Ernst Mayr called "essentialist" thinking to what he called "population" thinking. The old way imagined that each species had a basic type and that any deviation from that was unusual and unstable. The new way (which is really a consequence of the "new synthesis" of genetics and evolution in the first half of the twentieth century) tends to look on species as sets of individuals an expects differences between them.

By  Anonymous, at Wednesday, March 04, 2009 2:01:00 am  

No media of the lecture? No video, no audio? Ken, your notes left me wanting to hear the real thing.

By  Brian Dunbar, at Wednesday, March 04, 2009 2:25:00 am  

Now who would look at a Ferengi and immediately remark on his nose?

By  Michael, at Thursday, March 05, 2009 5:29:00 am  

Steve Jones may argue human evolution is over, but just over a year ago there was that report that contrary to expections (and dearly beloved sf myths) human evolution is actually supercharged over the past 5,000 years.

By  Anonymous, at Thursday, March 05, 2009 7:44:00 am  

The survival of people who in the past would otherwise have died isn't an instance of evolution ending. It's an instance of evolution in action.

If genes for, say, phenylketonuria, are increasing in our gene pool, that just _is_ evolution happening. We have a change in the environment, which leads to a change in the relative inclusive fitness of a particular gene, which in turn leads to a change in the distribution that gene within the wider population.

By  Matt, at Thursday, March 05, 2009 8:06:00 am  

Ken Brown: For a population the size of our species it could take billions of generations for a new mutation that is slightly beneficial to spread to the whole population.

Is that billions of human generations? Tens of billions of years?

By  Ken, at Thursday, March 05, 2009 9:02:00 am  

Johan, I do intend to go to Eastercon, yes.

By  Ken, at Thursday, March 05, 2009 9:03:00 am  

I need to pay more attention, right annoyed that Steve Jones was speaking here and I missed it. Bah humbug.

By  Anonymous, at Friday, March 06, 2009 4:21:00 pm  

Ken Brown is completely wrong, there are numerous examples coming out of the HapMap data showing genes that have been very strongly selected in relatively recent history and become essentially fixed within a few thousand years. The best example is lactose tolerance in Europeans, although there are other example involving skin colour and disease resistance.

I'd also have to respectfully disagree with Professor Jones about human evolution being over. Any decline in the mutation rate, which I'm very sceptical about for starters, is dwarfed by the amount of genetic variation being preserved by decreasing mortality and a growing population. A single novel beneficial allele is now much more likey to survive long enough to be acted upon by natural selection.

The "great big melting pot" idea about humanity is also much easier to sustain if you live in a cosmopolital western city like London, than in a rural third world village, or a growing megalopolis like Shanghai, Manila or Mumbai.

Disclaimer: I'm not a population geneticist, just a PCR monkey.

By  Lyndon, at Friday, March 06, 2009 9:45:00 pm  

John Hawks' response to Jones:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/selection/jones-evolution-stopping-2008.html

By  Anonymous, at Saturday, March 07, 2009 12:45:00 am  

I'd tend to agree about ecolution not being over. There is good reason to believe there has been significant evolutionery change in the Ashkenazi jewish & parsee populations over just over 1,000 years which is enormously fast.

If environment controls evolution our environment is changing faster than at any time.

Of course the thing about evolution is that it doesn't go in a predestined "upwards" direction. The evolutionary pressure is certainly favourable to all the genetic problems that used cause stillbirths & to alergies or general physical unfitness. If there is a gene for being so stupid you forget to take the pill that must be doing well.

By  neil craig, at Tuesday, March 10, 2009 4:17:00 pm  

Ken Brown said For a population the size of our species it could take billions of generations for a new mutation that is slightly beneficial to spread to the whole population.

Blogger Ken said: Is that billions of human generations? Tens of billions of years?

Yes, for a new variation to become entirely fixed (i.e. to the exclusion of all others) at random by genetic drift. Depending on all sorts of assumptions its probably about 4N(e) generations where N(e) is the "effective population size" which is always rather less than the real one because many individuals leave no children and a few leave very many.

There is a sensible-looking Wikipedia article on "effective population size" which has too many hard sums for me. We can estimate effective population size from genetic variation within populations and when we do it for humans we typically get very low estimates - almost always less than ten thousand. This is probably a clue that our population was tyat sort of size a few hundred generations ago, so had the genetic structure of a small population. But we then expanded very very fast and to some extent preserve the signature of that small-population structure in the new much larger one. (A sort of population genetic Big Bang leaving behind a kind of genetic background radiation [groan])

But now we have a very large population. As new allelles, new varieties of existing genes, arrive they usually die out but sometimes spread and become very common. But they can almost never take over completely. So you end up with a gradual increase in genetic diversity. That's what we would now expect - but a hundred years ago in the early days of population genetics they didn't, they had a tendency to look on mutations and diversity as oddities, or problems.

Blogger Lyndon said: Ken Brown is completely wrong, there are numerous examples coming out of the HapMap data showing genes that have been very strongly selected in relatively recent history and become essentially fixed within a few thousand years.

Of course, but that is strong selection, I was talking about neutral or nearly neutral variation. In general you would expect strongly selected loci to get less diverse in any population. But in a very large population weakly selected loci will get more diverse - which is different from a small population in which many alleles will be lost by genetic drift.

The best example is lactose tolerance in Europeans, although there are other example involving skin colour and disease resistance.

They are obviously subject to selection. So not what I was talking about, which is that there is no surprise (or no scientific surpise) in finding a lot of variation in human genes. (I get wary of phrases like "the human genome" because that seems to imply that there is only one) Anyway, none of those is remotely near fixation! Despite strong selection all these variants have only spread to a large minority of the human population, not all of it. So they are increasing genetic diversity. Like I said.

The "great big melting pot" idea about humanity is also much easier to sustain if you live in a cosmopolital western city like London, than in a rural third world village, or a growing megalopolis like Shanghai, Manila or Mumbai.

I'm not sure what you are saying here. From a cultural point of view I suspect that Mumbai is as diverse as anywhere and more cosmopolitan than most places. From a biological or genetic point of view the "great big melting pot" idea is just plain true. We really are all related to each other by recent kinship, all of us, all over the world. Quite closely more closely on average than chimpazees are despite their smaller population, probably even more closely than domestic cattle are. Yet we do have large and growing genetic diversity within rather than between populations. There really are no distinct biological races in the human species.

Disclaimer: I'm not a population geneticist, just a PCR monkey.

I'm not a population geneticist either, but I did manage to stay awake in the lectures. Even if I can't do the all hard sums :)

By  Anonymous, at Thursday, March 12, 2009 3:05:00 pm  

Thanks, Ken Brown - I didn't realise you meant by genetic drift. Time for me to read some more evolution books.

By  Ken, at Thursday, March 19, 2009 8:30:00 pm  

Reuiniting Gondwanaland is hopelessly utopian as typifies permananent evolution. We need evolution in one country: let's free Scotland from UK tectonic chauvanism and move it back to the Mediterranean from whence it came...

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