First language gene discovered

BBC News ^ | 14 Aug 2002 | Helen Briggs

[gcruse]

Coming to a pet store witin our lifetimes..
. Bio-engineered talking pets.

Comic strip in today's paper:

Customer:  I'm bringing this talking parrot back.
                 It doesn't talk.  It just goes,
                 "Squawk, squawk!"

Store owner:  That's how parrots talk!
 

[Billthedrill]

It doesn't say, but I'd bet the location of this gene is on the X chromosome, which is why women have twice as many of them...

Ducking and running for cover...

[gcruse]

Possibly my favorite Far Side cartoon

Love struck dog picking up his girlfriend at
the door before going on a date:

"Gosh, Daisy, you look pretty.
  And whatever you rolled around
  in sure does stink!"

[DWSUWF]

"...One clue as to what animals might talk about: consider what they seem to understand of speech already..."

I'm pretty sure that at least some dogs are a hell of a lot smarter than we often give them credit for being.

And I'm completely sure that the best of them would be capable of more cogent conversation than some people are.

[Junior]

I can just picture coming home to an empty house, and my dog sitting in the middle of the living room floor saying, "Gee, boss, these nice men came and they petted me and they fed me and they took all your stuff!"

[Junior]

If the mutation in question made either survival, or the likelihood of having children, significantly greater, then it is almost certain that we would all by now have inherited this mutation.

How did Robin Williams put it in Dead Poet Society? "Why was language invented? To woo women?"

[forsnax5]

Each individual has many ancestors. You have two parents, 4 grandparents, and 2^N ancestors N-generations removed. With N > 33 (33 generations back), 2^N (the number of ancestors N generations removed) is larger than the total number of humans currently alive.

There is an article on the Atlantic Monthly site about this very concept. The URL is http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/olson.htm

An excerpt:

Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors.

Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn't considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race—or of no one at all.