The evolutionary biology of reading - and of sign language

Forget all this creationist blather about how hard it is to make a retina. The much more interesting challenge to evolution is that humans can read. Of course, as we'll see below, it's probably not going to be that much of a challenge ...

The evolutionary history of reading has interested since my undergraduate neuropsychobiology class in 1981. Translating visual input into perceived sound, or even directly into the mysterious connections that are the basis of thought and what-we-call-consciousness -- it's tough to imagine where that came from. It seems like a kludge of the first order, something that ties together very disaparate systems. Hardly surprising then that a significant portion of humanity are unable to read well, even with above average IQs.

My best guess was that it had something to do with sign language, and that maybe we "signed" before we could speak well, so signing language and spoken language evolved together. It was natural then to "read", reusing visual parsing and mapping subsystems that evolved contemporaneously with spoken language. [There's nothing original here btw. All those people who trained chimps to do sign language in the 1970s must have been thinking along the same lines.]

So given my interest, it's neat to read that new progress has been made in sorting out how we read (at least how we read phonetic languages!). Emphases mine:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Controversial Theory Linking Reading Ability to Specific Brain Region Gets a Boost
April 20, 2006
Controversial Theory Linking Reading Ability to Specific Brain Region Gets a Boost

More than a century ago, a French neurologist suggested that a specific region of the brain processes the visual images of words. Without it, he postulated, people cannot read except by laboriously recognizing letter after letter, rather than whole words. Yet humans have only been able to read for several thousand years--perhaps not enough time for such a trait to evolve, some scientists have argued. New research, however, supports the idea that reading does rely on a localized set of neurons.

Previous imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) showed that a small region buried deep in the left rear of the brain lit up with activity when subjects read, or recognized words, as opposed to perceiving other objects, such as faces or tools. Victims of stroke with damage in this region often reported reading difficulty. But because stroke damage in these patients was never confined to this region alone and imaging studies can only demonstrate correlation, not causation, controversy persisted.

Neurologist Laurent Cohen of the Hopital de la Salpetriere and his colleagues received a rare opportunity to explore this hole in scientific understanding when a 46-year-old epileptic came to them for treatment. His chronic seizures indicated that a small portion of his brain--roughly contiguous with the so-called visual word-form area--should be removed.

Prior to removing the damaged section, the scientists performed a series of tests on the man, including a wide array of reading challenges and the temporary placement of electrodes in his brain. He proved normal in all regards, including his ability to quickly recognize words no matter how many letters they contained.

But two weeks after the operation, though cured of his epilepsy, the patient complained of difficulty reading and tests showed that his ability to comprehend longer words had slowed by half. Even six months later, he needed roughly an additional 100 milliseconds for each additional letter to recognize a word.

The finding seems to support the contention that this region of the brain is critical to reading, but it does not answer questions as to how it developed. "One possibility is that the [visual word-form area] performs a visual processing function that predisposed it to being co-opted for reading," Alex Martin of the National Institute of Mental Health writes in a commentary accompanying the paper in today's Neuron. Nevertheless, the French team has provided more evidence that this region is critical to your ability to read this article.

This sure sounds like it supports the sign language theory. There's no way this evolved in the past 1000 years; Native Americans can learn to read and they only started about two hundred years ago. It had to be a subsystem that evolved long ago for a different purpose.

The theory that sign language and spoken language co-evolved is stronger than ever ...





















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More than a century ago, a French neurologist suggested that a specific region of the brain processes the visual images of words. Without it, he postulated, people cannot read except by laboriously recognizing letter after letter, rather than whole words. Yet humans have only been able to read for several thousand years--perhaps not enough time for such a trait to evolve, some scientists have argued. New research, however, supports the idea that reading doe"

Iranian bomb: Krauthamer and the cost of havoc problem.

The March 31st issue of Time Magazine included an essay by Charles Krauthamer. The essay is now behind a paywall, but a blog search found this excerpt (from a neoconservative-type web site). Emphases mine.

Clear and Present:

Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World

... We're now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power.

We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran's newest rulers. Then again, we don't understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant 'Death to America'—and Denmark(!)—and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.

This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new—medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects—but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.

That is why Iran's arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for 'those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink ... as if a hand was holding them there and it opened their eyes to receive' his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution's raison d'etre is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?

Krauthamer starts the article by quoting Richard Feynman. The rumbling you hear is my old professor (ok, so I went to two of his Physics-X lectures ...) approaching a relativistic spin rate. Insults to the honored dead aside, let me deconstruct the essay as such:

• Fanaticism is not new, but the falling cost of havoc means it has a new significance for the survival of humanity.
• Iran's leader is a religious zealot who wants to bring on the end-time (elsewhere in the same issue it's noted that he now has strong support among the young for a nuclear program, albeit perhaps not for the end-time).
• Iran must be stopped, with a strong implication that military action will be required.

For the sake of discussion let's assume that President Ahmadinejad is indeed an apocalyptic madman. True, Saddam was accused of this as well and was found to actually quite calculating and not inclined to suicide. (Alas for us all, Saddam was no better at such calculations than were Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney). True, Bush has been accused of this and he's probably not suicidal. No matter, let's assume it's really true of Ahmadinejad.

What can and should we do in this case? I'd say, not damned much. Bush has dug a deep hole for us. Thanks to Bush Iran is stronger than ever, and US actions in Iraq have enormously strengthened Ahmadinejad's political base. Thanks to Bush the US has no credibility to push for sanctions, and no international support for any serious action. Probably the best we can do is horse trade to get China to take the lead on this, doing whatever they can do to slow things down. (Putin seems as blind and incompetent as Bush.)

Could we nuke Iran and solve the problem? Maybe their bomb would be delayed a few years, but probably not much more than that. In the meantime there'd be enormous sympathy for Iran, and in many circles there'd be support for an anonymous counter-strike against the US. Incidentally, this idea of nuking Iran is morally repugnant.

So, what can we do? We delay, retreat, appease and hope for a miracle. Voting the GOP out of the house this year, and the presidency in 2008, might help a bit.

Anyone who voted to reelect Bush is at least partly responsible for this mess. Competence matters, rationalism matters, thinking matters.

Minnesota GOP Platform: Protect creationism

Gotta love the MN GOP. PZ Myers picked this out of their platform:

Pharyngula: Good ol' MnGOP

Protecting educators from disciplinary action for including discussion of creation science, adopting science standards that acknowledge the scientific controversies pertaining to the theory of evolution.

Discussing birth control too? I didn't think so. Only creationism gets special protection. What a bunch.

Civil liberties protection officer?

Normally it's obvious that anything the Bush administration does is bad. This is unusual in that it's not obviously in which way it's bad:

WSJ.com - New U.S. Post Aims to Guard Public's Privacy:

Alex Joel ... named as the first civil-liberties protection officer for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence...

... 'There is no silver-bullet answer,' he says of balancing privacy and national security. 'There are actually a lot of silver BBs and if you put enough of those together in a coherent way, wrap it with good policy, procedures and training, then you can have the same impact as a silver bullet.'

Experience mandates we assume this is somehow covertly bad, even if we can't figure out how it's bad. It does remind me of the several good cybersecurity appointees -- all of whom quite within months of taking office.

Still, by the standards of our government, this is good in a not-so-obviously-bad way.

Outsourcing the grunt work of a web article

I wonder how many workers today privately outsource tedious tasks like this:

Philip Greenspun's Weblog

... I estimated that it would take me 10 hours to assemble these data by clicking around at Amazon. It is a bit more involved than you'd think because for many of these items, Amazon requires you to 'add item to cart to see price'. Anyway, I put the project up on www.rentacoder.com and a guy from Pakistan did the job in two days for $10. He made only a couple of mistakes."

This is where huge productivity boosts can arise. Good to see a real-world example of what's long been theoretical.

A corporation I know of recently implemented a Dilbertian "educational" program on corporate security. Important topic, horrendous delivery and evaluation mechanism. Next time they do something like that employees may be tempted to outsource the process of doing the training and taking the exam ...

Neuregulin: Monster gene of madness

Neuregulin is a massive and complex gene that produces six proteins in the brain. Protein four is found to be over-expressed in some schizophrenic patients, possibly due to a point mutation in a regulatory gene.

Schizophrenia as Misstep by Giant Gene - New York Times

... Neuregulin is one of about 10 genes so far linked to schizophrenia ... It is one of the largest genes in the human genome, sprawling over some 1,125,000 units of DNA, and it generates at least six types of protein ...

... the variant stretch of DNA ... linked to schizophrenia does not lie in the neuregulin gene itself but just upstream of it, meaning that it presumably affects not the actual proteins produced by the gene but the way the gene is controlled.

... the first component of the transcript that makes the Type 4 proteins lies at the very beginning of the neuregulin gene and closest to the upstream genetic segment that is statistically linked to schizophrenia.

The researchers found that people who inherited two versions of the variant segment, one from each parent, were producing 50 percent more of neuregulin's Type 4 protein than those who inherited one or no copies.

... The role of neuregulin's Type 4 proteins is unknown, but they may be involved in making neurons migrate, a property of great importance when the brain is being constructed.

Dr. Law said that the variant segment linked to schizophrenia had a single DNA unit change at the center of one of the binding sites recognized by the transcription factors that control the gene. Loss of the binding site presumably upsets the regulation of the gene, causing too much of the Type 4 protein to be generated, she said.

Having slightly more than usual of a single protein may seem a very subtle derangement for so devastating a disease, but subtlety is to be expected, Dr. Weinberger said. "We know that all mental illnesses are about very subtle aspects of the wiring biases. They are about how you process complicated environmental stimuli, not about how you walk down the street.

It's extremely difficult to make a functioning brain. Autism, schizophrenia, mental retardation, all are felt to be related to possibly minor defects in brain development. Given how hard it is to make the brain work "out of the box", I'd bet there are a vast array of corrective processes that take place until the brain matures -- at age 25 or so in men, earlier in women. Some of the disorders we see may represent partial failures, and partial successes, of repair processes. (ie. sacrificing the mirror neuron network to support the primary neuron network ...)

Windows Vista: a disaster

Microsoft in the past few years has become the gang that can't shoot straight. For a time I thought they were faking it. Surely this ruthless bunch of cut-throat morals-be-damned competitors couldn't have become ineffective. I remember back when they ran the rags, playing PC Magazine and its ilk like violins. They were pirates then, and unfortunately successful.

Lately it's seemed that they were moving away from being pirates, and also from being effective. (Thank heaven, given the fruits of their success.) Thurott, a former Microsoft-groupie who's become a real journalist over the past few years believes things are very bad indeed.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista February 2006 CTP (Build 5308/5342) Review, Part 5: Where Vista Fails

... For Windows, specifically, the situation is dire. As I've noted in the past, the Windows Division retains, as employees of the software giant have told me, the last vestiges of the bad, old Microsoft. This is the Microsoft that ran roughshod over competitors in order to gain market share at any cost. The Microsoft that forgot about customers in its blind zeal to harm competitors....

... So what went wrong? What didn't go wrong? When Bill Gates revealed in mid-2003 that he was returning to his roots, so to speak, and spending half of his time on what was then still called Longhorn, we should have seen the warning signs. Sadly, Gates, too, is part of the Bad Microsoft, a vestige of the past who should have had the class to either formally step down from the company or at least play just an honorary role, not step up his involvement and get his hands dirty with the next Windows version. If blame is to be assessed, we must start with Gates. He has guided--or, through lack of leadership--failed to guide the development of Microsoft's most prized asset. He has driven it into the ground.

Promises were made. Excitement was generated. None of it, as it turns out, was worth a damn. From a technical standpoint, the version of Windows Vista we will receive is a sad shell of its former self, a shadow. One might still call it a major Windows release. I will, for various reasons. The kernel was rewritten. The graphics subsystem is substantially improved, if a little obviously modeled after that in Mac OS X. Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials.

Shame on you, Microsoft. Shame on you, but not just for not doing better. We expect you to copy Apple, just as Apple (and Linux) in its turn copies you. But we do not and should not expect to be promised the world, only to be given a warmed over copy of Mac OS X Tiger in return. Windows Vista is a disappointment. There is no way to sugarcoat that very real truth.

No great loss. When I replace my last PC with a Mac, I'll run either XP or Win2K in the virtualizer for the few apps I need, including Microsoft Access, Visio and my old version of Quicken. Every week or so I'll boot Windows, otherwise I'll do very well without. Vista is irrelevant and unwanted.

Fresh organs from China: kill to order

We've known for years that China harvested organs from condemned prisoners. I, like many others, expected this practice to be monetized. I didn't anticipate this practice, though in retrospect it's obvious:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Involuntary Organ Donors

Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society's ethics committee, told the BBC that the speed of matching donors and patients, sometimes as little as a week, implied prisoners were being selected before execution.

In other words the prisoners are kept alive until their organs are needed, then they are killed. Sort of like cooking lobster.

Maybe there's still time to reconsider those Olympics? Not that the US is in any position to point fingers, Bush has reduced our reputation to the national equivalent of "psychotic pedophile".

Earth out of balance: Al Gore

America chose George Bush. I hope God will help America ...

A Campaign Gore Can't Lose
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 18, 2006; A19

Boring Al Gore has made a movie...

... You will see the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from space of what the ice caps looked like once and what they look like now and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be underwater.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a cinematic version of the lecture that Gore has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming.

... You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him.

But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma.

... Gore insists his presidential aspirations are behind him. "I think there are other ways to serve," he told me. No doubt. But on paper, he is the near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008. Among other things, he won the popular vote in 2000. He opposed going to war in Iraq, but he supported the Persian Gulf War -- right both times. He is smart, experienced and, despite the false caricatures, a man versed in the new technologies -- especially the Internet. He is much more a person of the 21st century than most of the other potential candidates. Trouble is, a campaign is not a film. Gore could be a great president. First, though, he has to be a good candidate...

I recall reading Tipper Gore was adamant that Al not run, but that his daughter wanted him to try it. If he made a go, I'd guess he'd run as an intellectual populist - a most unusual combination.

Lieutenant General Neubold: On Iraq and Rumsfeld

This is one of the articles by the dissenting generals -- the few who speak out: TIME Magazine -- Why Iraq Was a Mistake

Read the whole thing. He paid a price to write this, it deserves to be read in the original.

What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results.

The "alienation of allies" is the charge that's often forgotten, I think it was the most senseless error. I remember watching Rumsfeld and his minions mocking our potential allies before the invasion, and deciding then that he was a fool.

I wonder what Neubold means by "failure of other agencies"? Is he referring to the CIA? The State Department? Really, we need a journalist to follow-up on that mysterious phrase ...

The anti-heroism of passive resistance to the Holocaust

French gendarmes sent 4000 children under age 12 to die at Auschwitz -- apparently the Germans didn't even particularly request them. The French have as much unexamined history as we Americans have (Germans have been obliged to examine their history more closely).

No great surprise there, simply another instance of the reeking evil that infests humanity. This is more novel:

France during the second world war | Not a good time to be hungry | Economist.com

... What is remarkable, though, as Mr Vinen points out in this eminently balanced book, is that nearly 80% of the Jews in France survived the war. Hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers, postmen, priests and petty bureaucrats preferred turning a blind eye when there was a new face in town rather than alerting German authorities. Faint praise, perhaps, but this passive resistance helped save over a quarter of a million lives.

This is not heroism, but it is a sort of goodness. Many people would have to choose the path of least activity for it to work. I wonder too, how often some occupying German would decline to follow-up on the occasional report from the hinterland...

We must always remember. It could certainly happen here.

Quantum biology

Aeons ago, my biophysical chemistry lectures used to speculate about electron flows along the double helix. Now the hot topic is quantum tunneling of protons catalyzing biological reactions:

Biochemistry | Evolving enzymes | Economist.com

IMAGINE hitting a tennis ball against a wall. Time after time, the ball bounces back. But, just occasionally, the ball disappears only to reappear on the other side of the wall. The wall is solid; no bricks are missing. It sounds surreal, but in the weird world of quantum mechanics such occurrences, involving very small objects over very short distances, are an everyday effect known as quantum tunnelling.

Whether such an effect could account for odd behaviour at larger sizes and distances has long been the subject of debate... The answer, reported in this week's issue of Science, is that enzymes also exploit this quantum-mechanical loophole.

The researchers, based at the University of Manchester and the University of Bristol, both in Britain, studied a compound called tryptamine ... an enzyme called aromatic amine dehydrogenase (AADH) removes hydrogen from tryptamine.

Hydrogen, the simplest atom, consists of a single proton encircled by a single electron. As electrons are point-like, their quantum mechanical behaviour is well known. But protons are far bigger, and the idea that they might be able to quantum tunnel is more controversial. Yet the AADH catalyses the breakage of the otherwise very stable, carbon-hydrogen bond at ambient temperatures, a feat that would appear to be impossible.

... the British researchers raise the possibility that short-range tunnelling in enzymes might be the result of evolutionary pressure...

Well, if it does happen, what would it arise from other than evolutionary pressures? That last sentence is an odd exception to a well done article.

It all seems very improbable, but if it is physically possible, then I suppose natural selection would come up with a solution. Maybe this is what was going on during that vast period of time between the cooling of the earth and the rise of the organism -- perhaps "solving" the puzzle of quantum catalysis is a much harder problem than going from a bacteria to a naked ape.

There's a historical angle. I dimly recall that Schrodinger and some colleagues speculated about a quasi-mystical quantum mechanical "spark" to life and consciousness; some more recent books have continued the trend. Ineffable quantum phenomemon is the geek alternative to the Soul. It would be amusing if this turned out to be, in some sense, true.

But can I trust The Economist on this? They recently wrote an article on GeneDupe's plan to create living versions of mythological monsters:

PAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home...

I didn't blog on that one as I simply figured The Economist had been duped by some whacko; indeed I barely skimmed it. Alas, this week they revealed, through the title above a letter to the editor, that I ought to have thought about what the letters in the name PAOLO FRIL could also spell. Really, they are not trustworthy.

PS. If enzymes really can quantum tunnel protons, there will be some novel industrial applications of the technique. It would not be the first time the 'blind watchmaker' has taught we sighted watchmakers.

PPS. My second son promises that when he grows up, he will bring mythical monsters to life and resurrect beasts long extinct. Heck, maybe he'll do me too ...

America the big: my seating proposal

The good news is thatlast year my travel duties declined. The bad news is that I lost elite status. Now I fly cargo, where conditions are rugged. Today I was in the aisle seat. Not bad, but the very agreeable gentleman in the window seat weighed well over 350 lbs, and the guy in the middle was probably in the upper 200s. I sat somewhat sideways.

The world's getting bigger, and there's no miracle cure is sight. Of course catastrophic economic collapse from mismanagement, plague and global climate change may alleviate this problem, but for now we're "stuck" with it. It's not fair to punish the big people -- nobody outside of the NFL chooses to weight 300 lbs. The best evidence we have suggests most humans cannot control their weight.

So here's my solution -- another example of why we need government. Mandate that airlines provide a free extra seat for everyone enrolled in the 'fly-big' program. Enrollment is optional, but the benefit is obvious. A discrete abdominal measurement is all that's required, and the traveler gets special status. Nothing need be said, it simply happens that they always have an open middle seat by them. Ticket prices go up a bit, but since it's mandated there's no competitive disadvantage. A win-win situation, and well worth a few extra bucks a ticket.

Return of the Kings

Pharyngula writes:

Exxon CEO Lee Raymond's salary is $190,915.

Per day.

Bush - he can't even cut taxes

Bush's single claim to fame is "tax cutter". He can't even do that properly:

With Tax Break Expired, Middle Class Faces a Greater Burden for 2006 - New York Times

...The A.M.T. will cost Americans who earn $50,000 to $200,000 nearly $13 billion more next April. That is about how much people who earn more than $1 million will save because of the break on investment income like dividends and capital gains. Both figures were provided by the Tax Policy Center, which is a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.

It's as though Bush were running an IQ test on his voters. So far they're failing.

Ironically the AMT somewhat resembles the tax reform we need. It removes a lot of exemptions, if it were the only tax our returns would be simpler.