[lingtalks] CHD Seminar: FRIDAY - Ajit Varki

[Katie Wagner]

The Center for Human Development Presents

Ajit Varki
UCSD
Departments of Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Medicine

Friday, November 14th
12-1pm (discussion 1-1:40pm)
room 003 in the Cognitive Science Building


“Exploring Human Uniqueness: A Transdisciplinary Approach"

“Anthropogeny” (explaining the origin of humans), is a scientific  
pursuit undertaken from many directions and perspectives, with  
specialists in each discipline tending to see the answers through the  
lens of their own expertise. One obvious approach is to compare the  
genomics and genetics of humans with our closest evolutionary cousins  
the so-called “great apes” (who are now correctly reclassified  
along with humans as hominids).  The recent sequencing of multiple  
primate genomes has opened the door to a systemic approach to this  
issue. While sequence differences between the human and chimpanzee  
genomes are confirmed to be the predicted ∼1% in areas that can be  
precisely aligned, another 1.5% unique to each species was also  
discovered, making the actual difference between the two genomes ∼4%.  
In our own work we have utilized these genomic resources as well as a  
candidate gene approach, to uncover multiple genetic differences in  
sialic acid biology between humans and other hominids, which have  
multiple implications for human evolution, biology and disease.
Chances of success in anthropogeny are greatly increased by a  
transdisciplinary approach that eschews artificial barriers created by  
scientific disciplines. Given also the theme of this lecture series, I  
will spend the rest of my time talking about this broader approach to  
anthropogeny, which requires consideration of both genomes and  
phenomes, and their interactions with environment and culture.   
Rejecting the artificial and unproductive ‘nature versus nurture”  
dichotomy that has long slowed progress, I will consider genome  
interactions with environment, behavior and culture, finally  
speculating that aspects of human uniqueness arose because of a  
primate evolutionary trend towards increasing and irreversible  
dependence on learned behaviors and culture — perhaps relaxing  
allowable thresholds for large-scale genomic diversity. Thus, cultural  
buffering of genomic changes may have allowed hominid genomes to  
partially escape Darwinian selection and to avoid the need for the  
final phase of the Baldwin effect, in which learned behaviors of value  
to a species eventually become hard-wired in their genomes.  This is  
turn could help explicate Wallace’s Conundrum, which questions how  
conventional natural selection alone could account for the evolution  
of human mind.

Everyone is welcome.

Speaker list and papers are available at http://www.chd.ucsd.edu/seminar/f08sched.shtml

For any questions about the seminar contact Katie at kgwagner at psy.ucsd.edu




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