Ancient DNA and Intelligence

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Luigi
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Ancient DNA and Intelligence

Postby Luigi » Sun Jun 23, 2019 5:52 pm



TL;DR: Just as society changed genes in matters like lactose digestion, it also changed alleles associated with intelligence. Living in complex societies for many generations makes folks smarter.
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Edge Guerrero
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Mon Jun 24, 2019 2:09 pm

- The same happens with other animals and insects.
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Joe Mama
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Postby Joe Mama » Tue Jun 25, 2019 11:28 am

Luigi wrote:Living in complex societies for many generations makes folks smarter.


It goes back to the age old advise that our grandparents (and our parents) kept trying to drill into our heads.

Don't hang out with dummies

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Shinkicker
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Postby Shinkicker » Tue Jun 25, 2019 12:00 pm

Smarter is subjective.

Our ancestors were starting families and making their own way as teenagers. They became productive members of society.

Kids stay under the umbrella forever now and don't give a shit about society.

Disclaimer: I'm a little bitter right now. My sixteen year old says he doesn't want to work at a fast food restaurant. He put 2 applications of his choice in elsewhere and waited all summer for the call. Yet he still wants me to pay for his dates. Grrrr

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Edge Guerrero
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:33 pm

Animals' brain activity 'syncs' during social interactions

Date: June 20, 2019
Source: Cell Press

Summary: Egyptian fruit bats and mice, respectively, can 'sync' brainwaves in social situations. The synchronization of neural activity in the brains of human conversation partners has been shown previously, as a result of one person picking up social cues from the other and modulating their own behavior based on those cues. These studies suggest that something similar occurs when animals engage in natural social interactions.

Two papers publishing June 20 in the journal Cell show that Egyptian fruit bats and mice, respectively, can "sync" brainwaves in social situations. The synchronization of neural activity in the brains of human conversation partners has been shown previously, as a result of one person picking up social cues from the other and modulating their own behavior based on those cues. These studies now suggest that something similar occurs when animals engage in natural social interactions and find that some aspects of the animals' social behavior can be predicted based on neural observations.

"Animal models are really important for being able to study brain phenomena at levels that we can't normally access in humans," says Michael Yartsev of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of one of the papers. "Because bats are extremely social and naturally live in highly complex social environments, they are a great model for tackling important scientific questions about social behavior and the neural mechanisms underlying it."

"If you think of the brain like a black box that receives input and gives some kind of output in response, studying social interactions is like trying to understand how the output of one box provides input to another, and how those two boxes work together and create a loop," says Weizhe Hong of the Departments of Biological Chemistry and Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of the other paper. "Our research in mice allows us to peer inside these black boxes and get a better look at the internal machinery."

Previous studies showing how neural activity in humans becomes synchronized during social interactions have used technologies like fMRI and EEG, which look at brain activity with relatively coarse spatial and temporal resolutions. These studies found that when two people interact, structures in their brain simultaneously decode and respond to signals from the other person.

Because the new studies looked at neural activity at a level of detail that is difficult to obtain in humans, they could explore the detailed neural mechanism underlying this phenomenon.

The Berkeley team monitored the bats for sessions of about 100 minutes each as they engaged in a wide range of natural social interactions, such as grooming, mating, and fighting. The bats were filmed with high-speed cameras, and their specific behaviors and interactions were carefully characterized.

As this was happening, the scientists were using a technology called wireless electrophysiology to simultaneously record the brain activity in the bats' frontal cortices across a wide range of neural signals, ranging from brain oscillations to individual neurons and local neural populations. They saw that the brains of different bats became highly correlated and that this correlation was most pronounced in the high-frequency range of brain oscillations. Furthermore, the correlation between the brains of individual bats extended across multiple timescales of social interactions, ranging from seconds to hours. Remarkably, by looking at the level of correlation, they could predict whether the bats would initiate social interactions or not.

The UCLA team took a different tack. They used a device called a miniaturized microendoscope to monitor the brain activities of mice during social situations. These tiny devices, which weigh only two grams, are fitted on the mice and allow the researchers to monitor the activity of hundreds of neurons at the same time in both animals. They saw that mice also exhibit interbrain correlations in natural social interactions where animals freely interact with each other. Moreover, the access to thousands of individual neurons gave them an unprecedented view of both animals' decision-making processes and revealed that interbrain correlation emerges from different sets of neurons that encode one's own behavior and behavior of the social partner.

Social interactions are often nested within the context of a dominance hierarchy. By imaging two mice in a competitive social interaction, they discovered that behavior of the dominant animal drives synchrony more strongly than behavior of the subordinate animal. Remarkably, they also found that the level of correlation between two brains predicts how mice will respond to each other's behavior as well as the dominance relationships that develop between them.

"Natural social interactions are complex," says Wujie Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in Yartsev's lab and first author of the fruit bat paper. "It is important to embrace this complexity in order to understand real-life social interactions at the neural level."

"We know that social interactions are altered in many mental diseases in human, including autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia," says Lyle Kingsbury, a graduate student in Hong's lab and first author of the mouse paper. "Developing a genetically tractable model system opens up the possibility of exploring how interbrain synchrony is disrupted in people with these conditions and may provide novel information about possible interventions."

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190620153538.htm
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Edge Guerrero
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:41 pm

Joe Mama wrote:
Luigi wrote:Living in complex societies for many generations makes folks smarter.


It goes back to the age old advise that our grandparents (and our parents) kept trying to drill into our heads.

Don't hang out with dummies


- My former neighbor still thinks, and acts like a Pauly Shore character, Its like he is stuck in his teens forever, acting like a stereotypical pothead, from a comedy movie from the 90s.

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Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.

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Luigi
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Postby Luigi » Wed Jun 26, 2019 3:15 am

Shinkicker wrote:Smarter is subjective.

Our ancestors were starting families and making their own way as teenagers. They became productive members of society.

Kids stay under the umbrella forever now and don't give a shit about society.

Disclaimer: I'm a little bitter right now. My sixteen year old says he doesn't want to work at a fast food restaurant. He put 2 applications of his choice in elsewhere and waited all summer for the call. Yet he still wants me to pay for his dates. Grrrr

Ya they mention the polygenic score starts to decrease again in the mid 1800s. The future is going to be some weird mix of dysgenic tards and genetically engineered geniuses.
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Luigi
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Postby Luigi » Wed Jun 26, 2019 3:18 am

He does another video narrowing the focus from Europe down to Greece, and compares the Neolithic, bronze age, and modern samples. Unfortunately we don't have any samples from the Hellenic/Imperial age.
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Edge Guerrero
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Wed Jun 26, 2019 12:48 pm

Luigi wrote: Ya they mention the polyvalent score starts to decrease again in the mid 1800s. The future is going to be some weird mix of dysgenic tards and genetically engineered geniuses.



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Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.

I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain


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