Brain expansion while developing broad immunity (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 11, 2020, 19:11 (1416 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: As for the many hominin/homo varieties in different climates, as I stated before, as they interbred, they provided/ developed naturally different beneficial attributes to the final sapiens species.

dhw: How God did it, if I remember rightly, was by personally twiddling the genomes of all the hominins and homos. “Developed naturally”? Are you then saying that your God provided them with an autonomous mechanism that enabled them to develop different attributes? Or are you going to tell us that he twiddled every genome with “instructions” to develop the attributes which presumably he would then transfer to H. sapiens when he eventually got round to directly designing/twiddling the only species of homo he wanted to design/twiddle?

DAVID: Fully explained before. I'll give an example from the Denisovans who gave us the ability to live at high altitude, as they had the ability to adapt to it. Neanderthals gave us improved immunity from the abilities they had. In my view God gave all earlier branches adaptation abilities which all proceeded to supply humans benefits as they interbred with earlier forms.

dhw: You don’t need to give us examples. I asked whether “developed naturally” meant God provided them with an autonomous mechanism to develop their attributes, or personally dabbled each one.

Support for how interbreeding advanced broad immunity and other attributes:

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-denisovan-dna-immune-modern-day.html

"More than 120,000 novel human genetic variations that affect large regions of DNA have been discovered, some of which are linked to immune response, disease susceptibility or digestion. Scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute identified these changes affecting multiple bases of DNA, known as structural variations, in a study of the most diverse worldwide populations examined to date. This included variations in medically-important genes in populations from Papua New Guinea that were inherited from Denisovan ancestors.

"The resource, published today in Cell, adds new regions of sequence to the human reference genome, the world standard for all of human genetics, which is nevertheless incomplete. These previously-unknown variations in medically-important genes, which could affect the efficacy of medical treatments in certain populations, will be a valuable resource for the field of precision medicine around the globe.

***

"The sequences were compared to the human reference genome to create a catalogue of structural variations, over three quarters of which were previously unknown. The team then investigated how common these structural variations are in each of the 54 populations, and which of them were inherited from Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors.

"Among the 126,018 structural variations discovered were medically-important variations inherited from Denisovan ancestors in Oceanian populations from Papua New Guinea and nearby, including a high-frequency deletion in the AQR gene that plays a role in detection of viruses and regulation of antiviral immune response.

***

"'This is a very valuable study showing the importance of structural variation of the human genome in the genetic diversity of humans around the world. The work supports the concept that some human adaptations to different environments are due to the loss or gain of whole genes, or parts of genes. Structural variation can be challenging to find, and this study also provides a well-founded structural variation reference set which will serve as an important springboard for future studies.'"

Comment: dhw has questioned why so many pre-human varieties appeared during evolution. The answer is obvious. The varied experience by all the different populations combined many helpful genes into the sapiens genome.