The Madness Gene

It looks like I beat The New Yorker to the punch with an article about the Neandertals, Denisovans, and the scientist Boss Pääbo. My post about species and a Siberian cave can be found on the left as an "Essential" and to the right as the the most popular post by clicks, and predates their recent "Sleeping with the Enemy" article, about the mixing of genetic material between the various human species, by eight months.

My post is a post that I enjoy, and their article is also quite good. There is a point they make that I hadn't gotten to yet. Conversations I've had over the years with friends about species, humanity, and our ape-ness, have tended to focus on the similarities between us and all members of the animal kingdom, things that link us the biosphere on this rock, while maybe ignoring the obvious differences between us and everything else. Those things, the obvious differences, are less striking if you're frame of reference is one of utility and scientific progression in a geologic time frame.

Focusing on those differences and pointing to them as proof that we have dominion over all things on the planet is, I believe, a destructive and incorrect position.

An idea that this article looks at, labeled as the "Madness Gene", came about while Pääbo was sequencing the genome of the Neandertal (which he's still doing): since the differences between the genomes of Sapiens and Neanderatls are very small, the idea that maybe that thing that makes us us and not the likes of Neandertal, Denisova, and Erectus, might be a specific gene.

One difference is easy to point to, and the difference leads to the name of the Madness Gene. Erectus, Denisova, Neandertal: all three of them colonized all parts of Europe and Asia like other mammal species--right up to the shore. Only Sapiens got into boats and sailed out into open ocean, without visible land in sight (this claim might be disputable).

Only after Sapiens showed up in places did those place's mega fauna quickly disappear. Denisovans and Neandertals lived is harmony, or at least relative peace, with each other, and the record shows that this ended when Sapiens joined their scenes. After having sex with them, and having kids that were assimilated into their Sapiens group, they were quickly ousted, either by force or by happenstance. (I've deliberately skipped the "hobbits" of Indonesian Flores.)

The Madness Gene...taking us to Australia and the Americas and Madagascar...taking us, ultimately, to the moon and even to the precipice of nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War.

Can this Madness Gene, if it's the real reason, help us with the global climate change crisis?