Why did Humans lose their Tails?

 A new study published on February 28th, 2024 in the journal Nature has identified the specific genetic mutation responsible for ancestral humans and apes losing their tails around 25 million years ago.

The Tailless Ancestor Mystery

While monkeys possess tails, an ancestor species that humans share with apes underwent a key genetic divergence resulting in tail loss over the course of evolution. However, the actual genetic drivers behind this dramatic physiological change were unknown until now.

Serendipitous Discovery

The study’s lead author Bo Xia, currently with the Broad Institute, got intrigued by the evolutionary puzzle after injuring his own tailbone. Along with teams from New York University (NYU) Langone Health and Applied Bioinformatics Labs, his curiosity-driven investigation pinpointed unique jumping gene activity that deactivated the tail-growth gene TBXT.

The Role of Jumping Genes

Over generations, DNA accumulates changes enabling species adaptation through evolution. The study found older repetitive genetic sequences called Alu elements that jumped into strategic introns of the TBXT gene.

Introns are non-coding DNA portions that get sliced out before the gene sequence is converted into proteins. The intron-inserting DNA ‘jumping genes’ disrupted normal protein formation by the tail-regulating TBXT gene.

This genetic mutation was spotted in apes but not monkeys, coinciding with ancestral tail disappearance in the former group after both diverged from a common monkey group ancestor.

Alternative Splicing and Multiple Proteins

The Alu element insertion caused the TBXT gene to undergo alternative splicing and generate multiple proteins variants instead of one form coded by monkeys. This indicates more complex downstream impacts compared to straightforward gene disabling.

Researchers confirmed through lab experiments that inserting the exact Alu sequences into mice TBXT gene also led to truncated tails in mice besides increasing risk of spinal defects.

Evolutionary Significance

The study illustrates how small non-coding DNA changes can profoundly reshape physiology over thousands of generations to enable evolutionary adaptation.

Loss of stabilizing tails may have enabled ancestral apes to adopt bipedal motion crucial for later human development. The mutation likely occurred randomly without an initial adaptive benefit.

However, it conferred survival value once interplay between taillessness and walking upright offered mobility advantages within forest habitats.

Future Impact

Beyond solving the longstanding tail evolutionary mystery, the pathbreaking discovery promises to accelerate genetics research on non-coding DNA and complex alternative gene splicing effects.

Intron sequences dismissed previously as ‘junk DNA’ now open up new appraisal of their hidden role in driving evolutionary changes to anatomy over time.

Deeper analysis can reveal if similar jumping gene insertions underlie other evolutionary divergences between ancestral primates and humans.

Conclusion

The study underscores how small-scale genetic changes can catalyze sweeping physiological adaptations central to a species’ evolutionary history. Shedding light on humanity’s tailless past sets the stage for fresh investigation into other attribute transformations during ancestral primate evolution over millions of years until modern humans emerged.

Caught in the net

 

Histories can be twisted, maligned, because we believe that which is given on a website, written in a manner that is unambiguous and spoon-fed to us, requiring no commitment from our end

When was the World Wide Web released to the public? Searching for an answer, I went to the only place that can provide me with an instant response — the World Wide Web. An NPR article informed me that it was created by Tim Berners-Lee and gifted to humanity on April 30, 1993, free of charge. By the end of the 1990s, this information web had covered the globe to such an extent that the post-90s generations don’t know of a time before the internet.

This one platform has revolutionised information access, learning, knowledge production and connectivity. And this has happened at a speed which is unfathomable. The number of technological developments that have aided, enhanced and accelerated these processes are mind-boggling. With Artificial Intelligence bursting onto the scene, things are only going to get even more unbelievable, literally and metaphorically. On an aside, it is philosophically valuable to consider Roger Penrose’s argument that Artificial Intelligence is a ‘misnomer’. That the computer can only ‘mimic’ intelligence. He argues that consciousness is not computation. Anyway, let me not wander.

Before you jump the gun and assume that this piece is about fake news, deep fakes, post-truth or the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, let me inform you that it is not. The drawbacks of not having the internet and the democratising role the medium has played are there for all of us to see, acknowledge and appreciate. Therefore, I am not going to dwell on the obvious. Neither am I going on a nostalgic rant on ‘the good old days’. But there are other questions about the pre-networked age that require consideration.

Let us begin with something as simple as thinking, a process that every human being engages in by default. To receive information, comprehend and make decisions is nearly automatic. The question before me is whether there was something different about the way we thought before the online network became a permanent fixture in our lives. Similar to how technology helped us reduce the time we spent on gathering, cooking and consuming food, the Cloud has greatly reduced the burden of remembering dates, times or exact events. Such information was given great importance in the past. Unfortunately, the lifting of this unnecessary weight has not meant that we engage earnestly with serious questions. The ease with which the Web provides us with answers somehow curtails the extent of our questioning.

The rapidity of search results and the way material is presented on and for the Web do not make us curious. Furthermore, the tone is more often than not, definitive. In other words, the internet has surreptitiously removed doubt from learning. Doubt is not distrust. It is a prerequisite for education. It is the opening that leads to further investigation. This does not happen by accident. It is part of knowledge creation. In the sharing of what we know, we embed the possibility of doubt, change and growth.

The virtual information highway largely functions in the opposite manner where you get more hits if you present an assured face. Your fingers itch to click the first possible link and people pay to place their links on top. It requires great effort to go past these innumerable layers of ‘surety’ to get to a place where learning is exciting; dare I even say true! This makes me consume in an unthinking manner. Questioning is stunted and people hold on to the programmed opinion they clicked on.

Hence, we should not be surprised that ‘educated’ folks fall prey to blatant lies. This problem did not begin with social media. The algorithms that nurtured cyberspace have always been designed to lessen the time used for assimilation. Speed in time spent on accessing a page and the way the information is presented are key to its success. The moment we foreground the paucity of time, urgency or the claim that we can do more productive things in those extra minutes that are needed to read, read again, think, read again and pause, we lose the ability to learn.

Is the internet a reality? Since creators, developers and participants are real people, we have to accept that the virtual universe is a part of a larger reality. But this agent has drastically reduced physical interactions. Childhood in the 1980s and 1990s entailed feeling the soil, being close to the trees, and meeting people in person. Today, it is all about video calls, playing games and learning via iPads and mobile phones. Parents say technology has made children smarter at an early age. I am no child psychologist, nor an educationist to counter such a claim confidently. Yet, I have to wonder about this smartness. Building the capacity to solve arithmetic or mathematical problems, or remembering things, or cleverness without empathy, love and care is not intelligence. I will argue that true intelligence is felt and every emotional connection is intelligent. When this is missing, humanity goes into hiding. Watching videos on YouTube or Instagram of the horrors that are unfolding in Palestine or Manipur will not make a person more empathetic. Love and compassion have to be learnt and shared physically, directly, without an intermediary.

If something does not exist on the Web, is it real? And, as an extension, is everything that happened before the virtual age and has not been digitised irrelevant? The first question may sound moot because we cannot imagine that there are people or things that do not find mention on the internet. The falsity of this belief stems from the fact that we trust it as a democratic space. The internet is a marketplace, a bazaar where everyone is selling. The fact that anyone can open a shop without paying rent does not imply equality. Social equations that govern our everyday interactions also control the internet. Hence, there are many unheard, wrongly represented and lost voices.

The imperative to give every­thing a digital avatar wipes out all that does not find space in this all-encompassing network. Innumerable cultures, stories and peoples are lost to posterity not only because we do not look beyond the infobahn but also because we have forgotten to remember from life experiences, from what we hear, see and learn in person. Even lived histories have to be virtualised. Histories can be easily twisted, maligned, because we only believe that which is given on a website, written in a manner that is unambiguous and spoon-fed to us, requiring no commitment from our end. Naysayers may argue that all this is hocus-pocus theorisation. That the website is merely the new avatar of the book. Books also spread lies and wipe out people. This is true. But a book required the writer to explain and demanded attention and time from the reader. The internet, on the other hand, celebrates loudness and preys on the lack of attention.

T.M. Krishna

The Telegraph: 1/03/24

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents

 

Vol. 59, Issue No. 9, 02 Mar, 2024

Editorials

Southern Discomfort

On the Global Risks Report 2024

From 25 Years Ago

From 25 Years Ago: How Many Aspirins to the Rupee?: Runaway Drug Prices

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: On ‘Welfarism’ vs ‘Radicalism’ in Planning

Commentary

The Shining Automobile Sector and Its Dark Underbelly

Nisha Srivastava

Implementation of the 13th Amendment and the Tamil Question in Sri Lanka

Anjani Devi, M Mayilvaganan

Incarcerated Women and Their Children in Indian Prisons - Shifting Perspectives

Stuti Shah

A Different Perspective to Better Negotiate Free Trade Agreements

Paritosh Jha, Deba Prasad Rath

COVID-19 Cuts in Sociology of South Asia

Dev Nath Pathak

Book Reviews

Women Framers of the Constitution - From Subjects to Sovereign Authors of the Nation

Varsha Upadhyay

Dadabhai Naoroji and the Making of Indian Liberalism

Somak Biswas

Insight

Dairy Cooperatives in India - A Review

Roopesh Kaushik

Special Articles

Employment Status of Digital Platform Workers - Approaches of Apex Courts

S C Srivastava

The Governance Conundrum - Power Centres in the Governance of Higher Education in Bihar

Sudhanshu Bhushan

Is Suspending Agricultural Futures Justified? - Empirical Findings and Implications

Kushankur Dey, Gaurav Gairola

Current Statistics

Current Statistics

Letters

P V Narasimha Rao and India’s Foreign Policy

Stefy V Joseph, Rishvanth Reddy Mucheli

Ageism, Euthanasia, and Crimes against the Elderly

Pyali Chatterjee

How we can avoid human-animal conflicts

 

Co-adaptation is a helpful technique to ensure that our wildlife is able to adapt to human activities and vice versa. One example is buildings on stilts to make them inaccessible to elephants

The visual of an elephant with a tracking collar barging into the safety of a gated house and trampling a person has gone viral and has exposed the elephant in the room, both literally and metaphorically. Human casualties are the most extreme and unfortunate outcomes of shared spaces between people and wildlife. Apart from human deaths, the costs of injuries, crop losses, economic damages, and opportunity costs pose a huge burden for families who share space with wild animals. Yet, despite being the most populous country in the world, we are still among the most biodiverse. So how are we able to balance the livelihood and food security of 140 crore people with our biodiversity conservation goals? Perhaps the answer lies in co-adaptation between people and wildlife.

Co-adaptation refers to the idea of people and animals modifying their own behaviour to navigate the presence of one another. In India, people have historically co-adapted with wildlife through various mechanisms, be it cultural, behavioural or societal. For instance, species such as elephants, tigers, snakes, and even crocodiles are an intricate part of our folklore, culture, and religion. Species such as leopards, wild pigs, and elephants have adapted to human-modified landscapes through anthropogenic food, shared habitats and/or learning to navigate human activities. For instance, despite the high pressures of development and land-use change, India still harbours 65 per cent of all wild Asian elephants with 75-80 per cent of their range being outside our national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

While human co-adaptation techniques have been largely successful historically, we reduced our dependency on such practices because elephants and leopards were hunted until they were on the brink of extinction prior to the enactment of the Indian Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. Now, due to successful conservation efforts, we may be able to adopt our earlier practices to prevent damages to life and property. For instance, buildings near the forests of north-eastern India were erected on stilts to serve the dual purpose to making them flood proof and to make them inaccessible to elephants. Over time, this was replaced by structures on the ground level that were easily exploited by elephants to access stored food. Crop losses in some areas were negotiated through beliefs that such losses are a blessing from gods and would promise a better harvest next year. The choice of crops was made such that it did not attract elephants. Either that, or local groups were mobilised to stand guard over crops like paddy during the harvest season. These measure were undertaken because wildlife species do not understand human-made boundaries and stop-gap solutions like unplanned capture-translocations are often counterproductive, like with the male elephant in Wayanad.

Kerala’s Wayanad and Idduki districts were in the news for a few human-animal conflicts — elephant swallowing a food bomb, damage to crops and property, and in the most extreme case, loss of human lives. The geographical location of Wayanad, surrounded by Protected Areas predisposes the region for a high overlap between people and wildlife such as elephants and tigers. Hence, proactive measures are required to prevent negative impacts of these species on people and vice-versa. Monitoring individual elephants for their behaviour is vital to preempt negative encounters. If a certain elephant regularly displays behaviour that may jeopardise human life, such animals need to be removed from that area. Management decisions such as monitoring, deterring, or capturing need to be based on individual animal behaviour and physiological condition (musth status for instance). Regular monitoring of elephants in Gudalur, for instance has highlighted that only a small proportion of them pose a threat to people even as the entire population often takes the blame.

Furthermore, data systems based on the analysis of trends and circumstances of negative encounters between people and elephants must be put in place to identify vulnerable groups of people and vulnerable locations. Once these facets have been identified, locally relevant and acceptable measures need to be put in place to prevent damage. The next important step would be to promote coordination between Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala with respect to sharing information on animal movement and real-time data on human casualties and economic losses. Joint operations and training for the forest departments would likely yield positive results to this end.

The media too plays a crucial role shaping public perception towards wildlife. While reports on damage due to conflicts feature prominently, news of co-adaptation between people and wildlife that results in more frequent but less intense interactions fail to garner attention and hence, is often ignored by people. Media can play a positive and proactive role in dissipating information in safer shared spaces on ways to minimise damage, as highlighted by the positive engagement between media personnel, forest department, local communities and conservation agencies in Mumbai, a city that shares its space with leopards. Other local stakeholders, be it local civil society groups or district administration can play pivotal roles in the management of negative interactions between people and wildlife. Sharing safety protocols, fast-tracking the installation of street lights and toilets and implementing early warning measures like public communication systems can help avert unfortunate incidents that jeopardise human lives and livelihoods. Overall, managing conflicts with wild animals needs a concerted and cross-sectoral approach that equitably involves all sections of society to find shared solutions that balance human safety and ecological security.

Written by Aritra Kshettry

Source: Indian Express, 2/03/24

Quote of the Day February 27, 2024

 

“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”
Kahlil Gibran

“प्रेम के बिना जीवन उस वृक्ष की भांति है जो फूल तथा फलों से रहित है।”
काहलिल जिब्रान

Krutrim- India’s first AI unicorn launches Chatbot

 Krutrim, an Artificial Intelligence start-up launched by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, has rolled out an AI chatbot in public beta, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

India’s first AI unicorn

The launch comes a month after Krutrim disclosed a $50-million financing at $1-billion valuation, to become the country’s first start-up unicorn in 2024. The company mentioned that it is the first AI unicorn in the country.

The chatbot, which has the same name as the company (Krutrim), was announced in December. It is the firm’s first product, which will be powered by its multilingual large language models (LLM), also called Krutrim.

Features of AI models

Krutrim unveiled its AI models in December last year. At the time, the start-up also showcased the AI chatbot. Krutrim’s AI models can understand over 20 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi. A higher and more sophisticated version, Krutrim Pro is anticipated to be available in Q4 FY24.

Krutrim’s ambitions

Krutrim, ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, will come in two sizes: a base model named Krutrim trained on 2 trillion tokens and unique datasets, and a larger, more complex model called Krutrim Pro, launching next quarter for advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.

Krutrim Pro, launching in Q4 FY24, will be multimodal in nature, which means it can understand and work with different formats, including text, audio, image, and video, at the same time. It will also have larger knowledge, advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.

Way Forward

The start-up is working on building AI infrastructure, developing indigenous data centres and aims to eventually get into server-computing, edge-computing, and super-computers. The start-up is also working on manufacturing AI-optimised silicon chips.

India’s Unicorns in 2023

In December 2023, Fintech company InCred has struck a valuation of over 1 billion dollars becoming the latest unicorn of the country. It is the second unicorn of the year after Zepto, the e-commerce app which delivers grocery. In 2023, only two companies managed to become unicorns.

Language Atlas of India

 Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), an autonomous body under the Union Culture Ministry, has proposed to conduct a linguistic survey across the country to create a ‘Language Atlas’ of India, a pan-India Language Mapping Project.

What is a Linguistic Survey?

A linguistic survey systematically documents and catalogs different languages spoken by people across regions and local dialects associated with them. It provides insights into language data.

Need for New Language Atlas of India

While Census provides high-level insights, India has not witnessed large scale dedicated survey mapping linguistic diversity at district level post the monumental Linguistic Survey of India undertaken before independence by British scholar George Grierson.

Nearly two decades since, the need for contemporary mapping to preserve and promote indigenous languages has arisen again considering the rich linguistic pluralism spanning 22 scheduled languages written in 13 different scripts plus hundreds of unlisted dialects at extinction risk.

Key Objectives

The proposed survey by IGNCA aims to enumerate how many languages are spoken and in which States and regions. It strives to create detailed linguistic maps across India highlighting language overlaps, usage dominated areas, dialect continuums and discontinuities through field studies in over 780 districts to evolve policy perspectives.

Importance of Documenting Linguistic Diversity

Language mapping would help better streamline governance-to-citizen communication, enrich cultural capital through appropriate policy interventions prioritizing vulnerable indigenous tongues and formally acknowledge micro language communities.

Proposed Modalities

IGNCA plans roping specialized linguistics institutions like Deccan College and utilizing latest technologies including AI alongside ground surveys for collating and analysing complex language data ultimately culminating in a multi layered national language atlas with search functionalities.
Systematically documenting fragile linguistic assets through district-level mapping would linguistically bind India’s extraordinary diversity more cohesively while adding hugely to scientific heritage.

IGNCA

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) is an autonomous institution under the Indian Ministry of Culture established in 1987 in memory of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Headquartered in New Delhi, IGNCA’s vision focuses on nurturing, preserving and promoting India’s cultural resources including heritage across arts, humanities, and science disciplines.
Key activities include academic research, exhibitions, training programs and grants supporting cultural endeavors. With centers across India, IGNCA undertakes projects like cataloging cultural assets through digital repositories and geospatial mapping thereby amplifying awareness regarding rich indigenous knowledge systems.