Co-evolution Of Humans Research Articles

The Role of CagA in the Gastric Biology of Helicobacter pylori.

See related article by Blaser et al., [Cancer Res 1995;55:2111–5][1] . Visit the Cancer Research 75th Anniversary [timeline][2]. Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) was discovered in 1983 by the Australian scientists Warren and Marshall as a gastric pathogen, causing peptic ulcer disease. In 2005,

Altruism in wolves explains the coevolution of dogs and wolves

The date of historical domestication of dogs has been pushed back to between 15,000–30,000 years ago (estimates vary), a time when hunter-gatherer societies predominated in northern Europe and central Asia. We present insights from evolutionary behavioural ecology suggesting that wolves may have been “tricked” by their social evolution into contributing to the success of prehistoric human families or tribes. Four different wolves (one observed in great detail, as reported in recent book) that were raised by human families exhibited cooperative behaviours that protected their human “pack members.” Such hereditary altruistic behaviours may have been transferred by descent to the first dogs, which helped our ancestors hunt large animals and fight against other human tribes and wild carnivores. We hypothesize that the first need in domestication was for less aggressive wolf behaviour, within the wolf and human coevolution of the cooperative family or tribe that used wolves to increase their competitive fitness advantages.

Bootstrapping the applied ontology practice: Ontology communities, then and now

After more than two decades since the interdisciplinary field of ontology emerged for information science, it is now poised to make a huge impact. The ontological approach aims at making intended meaning explicit and computable. By enabling better human-machine understanding across complex socio-technical chains, ontologies are facilitating the vision of co-evolution of humans and their tools. Applying ontology requires a very broad spectrum of disciplines and skills, and is therefore best tackled not by individuals, but by communities of people working collaboratively. This position paper attempts to trace the brief history of ontology communities from the author's vantage point, identifying some of the key dates and key players (mostly familiar names, but some unsung heroes as well) that have made things happen for the field of applied ontology. Inspired by Doug Engelbart's bootstrap strategy, the author has developed and operated (until his recent retirement) a virtual collaborative environment (CIM3.net), on which some ontology communities (such as Ontolog and Ontology Summit) have thrived. Observing that the funding and career opportunities have changed for the better in the past few years, the author reflects on how the ontology communities of practice might leverage what they have built so far, and take applied ontology into an even better future.

The immunological balance between host and parasite in malaria.

Coevolution of humans and malaria parasites has generated an intricate balance between the immune system of the host and virulence factors of the parasite, equilibrating maximal parasite transmission with limited host damage. Focusing on the blood stage of the disease, we discuss how the balance between anti-parasite immunity versus immunomodulatory and evasion mechanisms of the parasite may result in parasite clearance or chronic infection without major symptoms, whereas imbalances characterized by excessive parasite growth, exaggerated immune reactions or a combination of both cause severe pathology and death, which is detrimental for both parasite and host. A thorough understanding of the immunological balance of malaria and its relation to other physiological balances in the body is of crucial importance for developing effective interventions to reduce malaria-related morbidity and to diminish fatal outcomes due to severe complications. Therefore, we discuss in this review the detailed mechanisms of anti-malarial immunity, parasite virulence factors including immune evasion mechanisms and pathogenesis. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive classification of malaria complications according to the different types of imbalances.

Time scale interactions and the coevolution of humans and water

We present a coevolutionary view of hydrologic systems, revolving around feedbacks between environmental and social processes operating across different time scales. This brings to the fore an emphasis on emergent phenomena in changing water systems, such as the levee effect, adaptation to change, system lock-in, and system collapse due to resource depletion. Changing human values play a key role in the emergence of these phenomena and should therefore be considered as internal to the system. Guidance is provided for the framing and modeling of these phenomena to test alternative hypotheses about how they arose. A plurality of coevolutionary models, from stylized to comprehensive system-of-system models, may assist strategic water management for long time scales through facilitating stakeholder participation, exploring the possibility space of alternative futures, and helping to synthesize the observed dynamics in a wide range of case studies. Future research opportunities lie in exploring emergent phenomena arising from time scale interactions through historical, comparative, and process studies of human-water feedbacks.

The fluid coevolution of humans and technologies

Abstract In this era of terabytes and big data, the field of digital culture and art is witnessing an emergence of dystopian lines of criticism denouncing new forms of programmed governmentality and ubiquitous surveillance, placing societies, lifestyles and the human psyche under the control of algorithms. These criticisms are so negative because they start from a belief of human autonomy from technology. To examine the other side of this argument, this article aims to discuss the coevolution of humans and technology. To accomplish this aim, the article is based on the writings and practice of the artist and theorist Roy Ascott, in whose work can be found the most original and significant conceptual sources for the defence of this thesis.

Meat traditions. The co-evolution of humans and meat

The debate on the future of meat centres on recent environmental, economical, ethical, and health issues, whereas historical dimensions are all too often overlooked. The fiery discussions are nevertheless affected by an underlying legacy of “meat traditions” and accompanying hunting, slaughtering, eating, and sharing activities, rituals, and rites. Eating meat is a biocultural activity. Therefore, a closer inspection of the evolutionary, collective, and semiotic aspects of meat in human societies is required. This study ventures such an exploration based on a heuristic model inspired by Maslow's pyramid of needs, distinguishing between physiological, security, community, value, and holistic levels. Besides the potential relevance of an innate craving, it is argued that meat has interfered with the development of fundamental human characteristics, both as a physical and conceptual resource. This relates, amongst others, to elements of gender differentiation, cooperation and reciprocity, social stratification and power, religion, cultural expression, and identity. As such, meat traditions provide a basis for evolutionary and long-term social processes, on which more recent and shallow courses of action are superposed, affecting contemporary behaviour. Several research questions were identified to further explore and anticipate the impact of meat on human populations and their societal and economic functioning.

A conceptual socio-hydrological model of the co-evolution of humans and water: case study of the Tarim River basin, western China

Abstract. The complex interactions and feedbacks between humans and water are critically important issues but remain poorly understood in the newly proposed discipline of socio-hydrology (Sivapalan et al., 2012). An exploratory model with the appropriate level of simplification can be valuable for improving our understanding of the co-evolution and self-organization of socio-hydrological systems driven by interactions and feedbacks operating at different scales. In this study, a simplified conceptual socio-hydrological model based on logistic growth curves is developed for the Tarim River basin in western China and is used to illustrate the explanatory power of such a co-evolutionary model. The study area is the main stream of the Tarim River, which is divided into two modeling units. The socio-hydrological system is composed of four sub-systems, i.e., the hydrological, ecological, economic, and social sub-systems. In each modeling unit, the hydrological equation focusing on water balance is coupled to the other three evolutionary equations to represent the dynamics of the social sub-system (denoted by population), the economic sub-system (denoted by irrigated crop area ratio), and the ecological sub-system (denoted by natural vegetation cover), each of which is expressed in terms of a logistic growth curve. Four feedback loops are identified to represent the complex interactions among different sub-systems and different spatial units, of which two are inner loops occurring within each separate unit and the other two are outer loops linking the two modeling units. The feedback mechanisms are incorporated into the constitutive relations for model parameters, i.e., the colonization and mortality rates in the logistic growth curves that are jointly determined by the state variables of all sub-systems. The co-evolution of the Tarim socio-hydrological system is then analyzed with this conceptual model to gain insights into the overall system dynamics and its sensitivity to the external drivers and internal system variables. The results show a costly pendulum swing between a balanced distribution of socio-economic and natural ecologic resources among the upper and lower reaches and a highly skewed distribution towards the upper reach. This evolution is principally driven by the attitudinal changes occurring within water resources management policies that reflect the evolving community awareness of society to concerns regarding the ecology and environment.

Modeling the potential impact of host population survival on the evolution of M. tuberculosis latency.

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease with a peculiar feature: Upon infection with the causative agent, Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (MTB), most hosts enter a latent state during which no transmission of MTB to new hosts occurs. Only a fraction of latently infected hosts develop TB disease and can potentially infect new hosts. At first glance, this seems like a waste of transmission potential and therefore an evolutionary suboptimal strategy for MTB. It might be that the human immune response keeps MTB in check in most hosts, thereby preventing it from achieving its evolutionary optimum. Another possible explanation is that long latency and progression to disease in only a fraction of hosts are evolutionary beneficial to MTB by allowing it to persist better in small host populations. Given that MTB has co-evolved with human hosts for millenia or longer, it likely encountered small host populations for a large share of its evolutionary history and had to evolve strategies of persistence. Here, we use a mathematical model to show that indeed, MTB persistence is optimal for an intermediate duration of latency and level of activation. The predicted optimal level of activation is above the observed value, suggesting that human co-evolution has lead to host immunity, which keeps MTB below its evolutionary optimum.

Socio-hydrologic perspectives of the co-evolution of humans and water in the Tarim River basin, Western China: the Taiji–Tire model

Abstract. This paper presents a historical socio-hydrological analysis of the Tarim River basin (TRB), Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in Western China, from the time of the opening of the Silk Road to the present. The analysis is aimed at exploring the historical co-evolution of coupled human–water systems and at identifying common patterns or organizing principles underpinning socio-hydrological systems (SHS). As a self-organized entity, the evolution of the human–water system in the Tarim Basin reached stable states for long periods of time, but then was punctuated by sudden shifts due to internal or external disturbances. In this study, we discuss three stable periods (i.e., natural, human exploitation, and degradation and recovery) and the transitions in between during the past 2000 years. During the "natural" stage that existed pre-18th century, with small-scale human society and sound environment, evolution of the SHS was mainly driven by natural environmental changes such as river channel migration and climate change. During the human exploitation stage, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, it experienced rapid population growth, massive land reclamation and fast socio-economic development, and humans became the principal players of system evolution. By the 1970s, the Tarim Basin had evolved into a new regime with a vulnerable eco-hydrological system seemingly populated beyond its carrying capacity, and a human society that began to suffer from serious water shortages, land salinization and desertification. With intensified deterioration of river health and increased recognition of unsustainability of traditional development patterns, human intervention and recovery measures have since been adopted. As a result, the basin has shown a reverse regime shift towards some healing of the environmental damage. Based on our analysis within TRB and a common theory of social development, four general types of SHSs are defined according to their characteristic spatio-temporal variations of historical co-evolution, including primitive agricultural, traditional agricultural, industrial agricultural, and urban SHSs. These co-evolutionary changes have been explained in the paper in terms of the Taiji–Tire model, a refinement of a special concept in Chinese philosophy, relating to the co-evolution of a system because of interactions among its components.

Can Iron Supplementation be Reconciled with Benefits and Risks in Areas Hyperendemic for Malaria?

Malaria is associated with about a million fatalities annually, largely among young children in zones of intense malarial transmission. The last thing needed would be measures that might increase the severity of clinical malaria. Thus, the finding in a field trial on Pemba Island, Tanzania, that routine oral iron supplementation produced adverse effects in iron-sufficient subjects had a ripple effect throughout the international public health community; it has effectively paralyzed efforts to redress iron-deficiency anemia in malaria-endemic regions. From a Hippocratic perspective, we consider the de facto moratorium on oral supplementation in such circumstance as a prudent interim measure. Public health programs to combat iron-deficiency anemia cannot be denied indefinitely to malaria-endemic populations, but the universal campaigns of iron provision cannot simply resume in the manner of the past. Contemporary biological and epidemiological understanding of the coevolution of humans and their pathogens should be able to provide guidance within the context of the essential and harmful aspects of iron. From these evolutionary standpoints, we identify a series of unresolved dilemmas. Toward a way forward, we highlight the pros and cons, as well as possible directions toward short-term strengthening, within three domains: tailored oral iron compounds, iron administration targeted only to iron-deficient individuals through screening, and prudent use of antimalarial prophylaxis. Although the tension between the essentiality of iron for humans and its role in pathogen virulence looms through every consideration, this recognition is a starting point toward the weighing of appropriate options balancing benefits and safety.

Hemoglobinopathies: Slicing the Gordian Knot of Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Pathogenesis

Plasmodium falciparum malaria kills over 500,000 children every year and has been a scourge of humans for millennia. Owing to the co-evolution of humans and P. falciparum parasites, the human genome is imprinted with polymorphisms that not only confer innate resistance to falciparum malaria, but also cause hemoglobinopathies. These genetic traits—including hemoglobin S (HbS), hemoglobin C (HbC), and α-thalassemia—are the most common monogenic human disorders and can confer remarkable degrees of protection from severe, life-threatening falciparum malaria in African children: the risk is reduced 70% by homozygous HbC and 90% by heterozygous HbS (sickle-cell trait). Importantly, this protection is principally present for severe disease and largely absent for P. falciparum infection, suggesting that these hemoglobinopathies specifically neutralize the parasite's in vivo mechanisms of pathogenesis. These hemoglobin variants thus represent a “natural experiment” to identify the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which P. falciparum produces clinical morbidity, which remain partially obscured due to the complexity of interactions between this parasite and its human host. Multiple lines of evidence support a restriction of parasite growth by various hemoglobinopathies, and recent data suggest this phenomenon may result from host microRNA interference with parasite metabolism. Multiple hemoglobinopathies mitigate the pathogenic potential of parasites by interfering with the export of P. falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1) to the surface of the host red blood cell. Few studies have investigated their effects upon the activation of the innate and adaptive immune systems, although recent murine studies suggest a role for heme oxygenase-1 in protection. Ultimately, the identification of mechanisms of protection and pathogenesis can inform future therapeutics and preventive measures. Hemoglobinopathies slice the “Gordian knot” of host and parasite interactions to confer malaria protection, and offer a translational model to identify the most critical mechanisms of P. falciparum pathogenesis.

The ‘Global Phylogeny’ and its Historical Legacy: A Critical Review of a Unified Theory of Human Biological and Linguistic Co-Evolution

In a critical review of late twentieth-century gene-culture co-evolutionary models labelled as ‘global phylogeny’, the authors present evidence for the long legacy of co-evolutionary theories in European-based thinking, highlighting that (1) ideas of social and cultural evolution preceded the idea of biological evolution, (2) linguistics played a dominant role in the formation of a unified theory of human co-evolution, and (3) that co-evolutionary thinking was only possible due to perpetuated and renewed transdisciplinary reticulations between scholars of different disciplines—especially within the integrative framework of the ‘humanid’ and the ‘hominid’ branches of anthropology.

Biology and freedom: An emergent stakeholder imperative

This article offers a critical assessment of a recent report by the U.S. “Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (2010)”. The critique particularly notes that the principles, recommendations, language and scope of the report are all in profound tension with investor capitalism and hypercompetitive global business strategy. They are, however, quite consistent with an alternative stakeholder “model” of management and governance. Several implications of this political point are developed. These include the near-total overlap of business ethics, politics and economics, as well as the (classically) pragmatic notion that the products of the synthetic biology industry will eventually co-create their own ethics, or future-ethics. The commission's report also recommended urgent “ethics education”, essentially the deployment of a program based upon top-down ethical principles and moral theories. An alternative view, however, sees that the main focus of any such education should be upon the science and practice of DNA sequencing and synthesis in the wider context of human co-evolution with technology.

Dangerous Margins: Recovering the Stem Cells of the Psyche

The dual problem addressed here is the increasing egocentric individualism in the Western world and the blind avoidance of facing the ecological crisis. This article uses ecosystemic thinking to explore the margins of our collective predicament. It posits a critical phase transition in the co-evolution of humans and the other-than-human world that constellates a rite of passage. While telling a story, it utilises story as both the conveyor of past constraints and the creative medium of transformation. This transformation entails loosening our attachment to conscious control and judgement and instead re-visioning problems as adaptations to an emergent paradigm including the need for self-regulation. The story entails an evolutionary trajectory that revisits our marginalised dangerous potency and challenges us to a reciprocal relationship with the other-than-human. It draws implications for both psychotherapeutic practice and for our responsibility to the ecosystems of our planet. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

P(r)ose of Pain

P(r)ose of Pain

Acquired immune heterogeneity and its sources in human helminth infection.

SUMMARYSimilarities in the immunobiology of different parasitic worm infections indicate that co-evolution of humans and helminths has shaped a common anti-helminth immune response. However, recent in vitro and immuno-epidemiological studies highlight fundamental differences and plasticity within host-helminth interactions. The ‘trade-off’ between immunity and immunopathology inherent in host immune responses occurs on a background of genetic polymorphism, variable exposure patterns and infection history. For the parasite, variation in life-cycle and antigen expression can influence the effector responses directed against them. This is particularly apparent when comparing gastrointestinal and tissue-dwelling helminths. Furthermore, insights into the impact of anti-helminthic treatment and co-infection on acquired immunity suggest that immune heterogeneity arises not from hosts and parasites in isolation, but also from the environment in which immune responses develop. Large-scale differences observed in the epidemiology of human helminthiases are a product of complex host-parasite-environment interactions which, given potential for exposure to parasite antigens in utero, can arise even before a parasite interacts with its human host. This review summarizes key differences identified in human acquired immune responses to nematode and trematode infections of public health importance and explores the factors contributing to these variations.

The human protein coevolution network

Coevolution maintains interactions between phenotypic traits through the process of reciprocal natural selection. Detecting molecular coevolution can expose functional interactions between molecules in the cell, generating insights into biological processes, pathways, and the networks of interactions important for cellular function. Prediction of interaction partners from different protein families exploits the property that interacting proteins can follow similar patterns and relative rates of evolution. Current methods for detecting coevolution based on the similarity of phylogenetic trees or evolutionary distance matrices have, however, been limited by requiring coevolution over the entire evolutionary history considered and are inaccurate in the presence of paralogous copies. We present a novel method for determining coevolving protein partners by finding the largest common submatrix in a given pair of distance matrices, with the size of the largest common submatrix measuring the strength of coevolution. This approach permits us to consider matrices of different size and scale, to find lineage-specific coevolution, and to predict multiple interaction partners. We used MatrixMatchMaker to predict protein-protein interactions in the human genome. We show that proteins that are known to interact physically are more strongly coevolving than proteins that simply belong to the same biochemical pathway. The human coevolution network is highly connected, suggesting many more protein-protein interactions than are currently known from high-throughput and other experimental evidence. These most strongly coevolving proteins suggest interactions that have been maintained over long periods of evolutionary time, and that are thus likely to be of fundamental importance to cellular function.

Embodied texts, embodied subjects: an overview of N. Katherine Hayles

Working on the intersections of science and literature, N. Katherine Hayles, who has postgraduate degrees in both chemistry and literature, has always been concerned with combining the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities. Her work engages with literary and scientific texts with equal rigour, understanding both as struggling with the representational medium of language to create the world they see. Her early work focused on the implications of relativity theory for the relationship between observer and world; more recently, she has considered the future of narrative and reading in a digital age. Throughout, she has explored the importance of medium to our understanding of narrative form and to our conceptualisations of the human subject. She is important to sf studies because of her emphasis on the mutual co-evolution of humans and machines: we engineer machines but our interactions with them simultaneously re-engineer what it means to be human. Her work on the posthuman could be usefully extended to the many robots, cyborgs, AIs and transgenic subjects found in sf film and television, and her work on the media-specific analysis required for electronic narratives suggests provocative ways for thinking about the increasing use of digital technologies in film and television.In The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century (1984), Hayles considers relativity theory and modernist narrative, applying 'field theory' to fiction by Robert Pirsig, D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon. Field theory attempts to grasp the dynamic relationship between parts and the whole. It requires us to take seriously the Einsteinian principle that the laws of physics can be observed only relative to the position of the observer, and thus the observer is necessarily a part of the system observed rather than an abstract and universally neutral position. Hayles struggles with metaphors to convey a notion of field theory (the 'cosmic web', a 'cosmic dance', a 'network of events', an 'energy field'), each of which implies a reality with no detachable, enduring or unchanging parts. Composed not of particles but of events constantly in motion, the field is rendered dynamic by interactions that are simultaneously affecting each other. The observer is an integral participant in its harmonious, rhythmic patterns. Hayles uses the 'field' as a way to approach what in other contexts would be called poststructuralist semiotics. For her, it helps us to see that language is necessarily a part of the system (the world) it describes, and its refusal to separate subject from object thus enables us to recognise that language constructs rather than describes reality.Hayles encourages us to see her chosen writers' experiments with narrative (and the entanglement of reader and writer, text and world) as part of a larger cultural shift that was also shaping the sciences' understanding of our relationship to the world. She does not argue for causal connections between the similar ideas emerging in physics and in structuralist and poststructuralist linguists. Rather, these parallels are evidence of a cultural moment in which new ways of thinking about the relationship between the observer and the observed transformed both disciplines. Hayles' discussion finds in both post-Newtonian science and postmodern criticism a move beyond the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy and an acknowledgement of the self-referentiality of language. While the modern novel explores 'the relation between the teller and the tale', contemporary physics explores 'the relation between the observer and the observed system' (41). By positing such parallels, Hayles pushes science toward recognising that language, too, is part of the observed system and hence the insights of literary analysis are relevant to our understanding of how science operates in the world; simultaneously, she pushes literary studies toward a greater engagement with the material ways that science and technology shape conceptions of the world and hence our interactions with it and our selves. …

Battle of the Genomes: The Struggle for Survival in a Microbial World

Although this book’s title promises the excitement of a 21st-century computer game, the cover photograph of Robert Koch in 1883 provides a better clue to the contents. The general plan is a survey of 20th-century genetics, illustrated by insights into human coevolution with microbial pathogens. Early chapters focus on familiar examples, including G6PD deficiency and sickle cell trait as adaptations to malaria, as evidence for pathogen-driven natural selection. Later chapters discuss more recent research findings, varying from female preference for the scent of males with dissimilar human leukocyte antigen types to the role of human CFTR membrane protein in infection with Salmonella Typhi. All of these are such good stories that science writer Matt Ridley included briefer versions in Chapter 9 of his popular book Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1). Battle of the Genomes: The Struggle for Survival in a Microbial World discusses in some detail how catastrophic epidemics of cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox could explain the emergence of certain common human genetic mutations. Some of these mutations are deleterious; for example, CFTR ΔF508, which reduces the risk for typhoid, causes cystic fibrosis in persons who inherit 2 copies. Other mutations are beneficial, such as CCR5 Δ32, which may have protected carriers from smallpox and now reduces the risk for HIV infection. In general, the author’s review of the evidence for and against these hypotheses, which remain speculative, is evenhanded and up-to-date. His accounts of the human and social effects of epidemic diseases and the origins of public health are full of lively anecdotes and colorful detail. Interspersed throughout are personal asides, clinical pearls, and lengthy tutorials on basic science topics, such as DNA replication and gene splicing. Although this book is far more information dense than are popular books for the lay public, its many shortcomings in terms of organization, depth, and documentation (including surprisingly few references) diminish its value to scholarly readers. More than anything else, it resembles an intellectually inspired but somewhat disorganized professor’s medical school lecture, which would probably be more fun to hear in person than to read. Meanwhile, those who are interested in a 21st-century account of the battle of the genomes may want to wait. Rapid advances in genomic science and technology are opening the way to better understanding of biology, evolution, and medicine, but the full integration of these disciplines is still at a relatively early stage. The idea that genes of 1 species can influence whole ecosystems, described by Richard Dawkins in 1982 as the “extended phenotype” (2), is only now giving rise to new perspectives on community genetics (3).