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Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

news.flinders.edu.au

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Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#61

Post by [deleted] »

fleischhauf wrote: post #9
dghughes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because it increases overall blood supply But that's what I want explained why is more blood beneficial for a person's forearm? I don't feel like I am lacking blood flow during my daily tasks in life. Can "extra arm artery mutant guy" out-compete me in a specific task so critical it means his genes are more likely survive than mine are?

Replacement makes sense, your friend with extra artery will survive in case of a critical surgery and might have another kid while you'd die with no extra kid. Does not need to happen to you but on average. Your friend with better bloodflow might also have a stronger erection and therefore on average more kids (pulling this out of my ass obviously). You dont need to have any obvious disadvantages, on average it might…

[deleted]

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#62

Post by dwohnitmok »

danieltillett wrote: post #49
tyre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a limited pool of funding, how would you decide? If a committee, how would they be chosen, guarding against bias, etc.

This problem has been solved long ago. Screen all grant applications to weed out the flawed approaches (the bottom 25%) and then run a lottery on the remaining. If there is nothing to game, the gaming stops.

Apart from the issue of grant stuffing, I have a strong suspicion that 25% is an extremely low number and even among those grant applications that pass obvious flaws there is still an extremely large variance in quality.

To put it another way, imagine if a strategy for funding software development was to take every piece of software that compiled and then randomly choose among them to fund. This seems like it's ripe for exploitaton and hard to fund meaningful software development (especially coherent ecosystems).

Similar dynamics would probably be at play for research.

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#63

Post by learc83 »

Retric wrote: post #43
yarg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it also impact fertility?

Heart disease can impact cognitive function, fertility, economic status, etc well before death.

Yes, but the vast majority of people who die from heart disease don’t develop it until they are older. Which is why it’s misleading to talk about it being America’s #2 cause of death when discussing evolutionary pressure.

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#64

Post by Ericson2314 »

ffhhj wrote: post #52
Ericson2314 wrote: post #16

> Humans haven’t developed mutations or superpowers just yet, but a new study shows our species is still evolving in unique ways and changes in natural selection could be the major reason. Ewwww. Why is university press the worst? If we are still evolving and this isn't just about genetic recombination then by definition mutations are involved. Also the publicist writes > This evolutionary trend will continue in thos…

"Evolutionary intertia"? Evolution is change, and inertia is the resistance to change... it makes no sense anyway.

So I'm totally making this up but if interia is about the rate of change being the same, I can imagine a population bottleneck forcing more change as the remaining population finds a niche.

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#65

Post by Izkata »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #16

> Humans haven’t developed mutations or superpowers just yet, but a new study shows our species is still evolving in unique ways and changes in natural selection could be the major reason. Ewwww. Why is university press the worst? If we are still evolving and this isn't just about genetic recombination then by definition mutations are involved. Also the publicist writes > This evolutionary trend will continue in thos…

> Ewwww. Why is university press the worst? If we are still evolving and this isn't just about genetic recombination then by definition mutations are involved.

The use of "superpowers" alongside it indicates they're referring to pop culture mutations (in the sense of the X-Men).

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#66

Post by lopmotr »

fs_tab wrote: post #58
lopmotr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like we're on a terrible path with this absence of evolutionary pressure. What's happening to all the babies who survive today that would have died in childbirth had they been born at any time in human history before 100 years ago? Since infant mortality was so high, it must have been an close battle for evolution to keep it under control. Now the brakes are off and whatever mutations were regularly killing…

Those are valid points. However, immunization has virtually eradicated entire families of diseases with serious, life-altering side effects. I would argue that the short-term benefits outweigh the potential long-term consequences in this case, especially if we continue to vaccinate children against these diseases. That being said, I think it's far more likely that genetic conditions and predispositions to disease wil…

Yea, it's not obvious whether we should be sacrificing people today to maybe save future people, especially if we can genetically engineer it all away. But our ancestors (or rather the humans that weren't our ancestors) were certainly sacrificed for our benefit.

I don't think we'll evolve our way out of genetic diseases or we would have already. Rather, it seems like we'll degenerate into higher rates of them without ongoing selection pressure keeping the rate low.

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#67

Post by trhway »

iheartblocks wrote: post #2

This seems rather dubious to me; what selection pressure exists that's increasing fitness for people with three arteries? The fact that it's progressing so rapidly suggests that this is either bad data, or environmental changes

from wikipedia:

>It runs with the median nerve and supplies the same structures as that nerve.

so, may be it affects dexterity (or ability to sustain it). That would be a huge boon in our industrial and post industrial society. May be it decreases load on the other 2 arteries and thus again improves some aspects of blood flow supply in the arms and/or to the palms. Also the dexterity seems to be a major factor in early brain development, kind of feedback loop. It may also just correlate with/manifest some overall characteristic (say "branch-ness") of the blood vessel system which say provides better blood flow to the body and/or brain.

It also may be just a characteristic prevalent in some ethnicity or region, and the last 1-2 centuries there has been a lot of people moving/mixing, and if it is a dominant allele then it would explain such a fast spread.

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#68

Post by ip26 »

pfdietz wrote: post #39
heeen2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There doesn't need to be selection pressure for a mutation to spread, it just needs to be no disadvantage to develop it

With no selection pressure a gene will not from 10% to 30% in a few generations. That requires a tremendous selective advantage.

Well, or it just needs to be a dominant gene.

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#69

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

danieltillett wrote: post #40
mci wrote: post #28

I have procured a PDF of the paper. Ctrl+F race finds nothing in it. The authors treat e.g. these results equivalently: * Adachi, B. (1928) Das Arteriensystem der Japaner. Kyoto, Japan (8.00%) * Kodama, K. (2000) Arteries of the upper limb. Tokyo, Japan (8.2%) * Henneberg, M. and George, B.J. (1992a) High incidence of the median artery of the forearm in a sample of recent South African cadavers (27.10%) * Cheruiyot,…

But this hypothesis is not going to get you sexy headlines and your next grant funded. If we don’t fix the problems with grant funding and the resulting imperative to publish or perish we are going to kill science.

Nothing says science needs to progress linearly. Also, sometimes you gotta make the public think lame stuff is magic in an ELI5 way to get them to have a positive opinion on it so that when the government funds these things, people aren't up in arms that millions are spent on that as opposed to lowering their property taxes.

Like Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black: "A person is smart; people are dumb panicky animals."

Re: Forearm artery reveals human evolution continues?

#70

Post by Retric »

learc83 wrote: post #63
Retric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heart disease can impact cognitive function, fertility, economic status, etc well before death.

Yes, but the vast majority of people who die from heart disease don’t develop it until they are older. Which is why it’s misleading to talk about it being America’s #2 cause of death when discussing evolutionary pressure.

Heart disease starts at a young age. Mentioning deaths is relevant to demonstrate how common it is, not that the only impact is death.
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