Small Brains Considered - 14

Hmmm ...

I. Near Term Cognition

The world's oldest-known burial site (Homo naledi) was recently found in South Africa.

Some anthropologists say it challenges current hypotheses of human evolution:

"With curved fingers and toes, tool-wielding hands and feet made for walking, the species discovered by Dr Berger had already up-ended the notion that our evolutionary path was a straight line." 

(ibid, cf. Netflix). Another essence of the discourse about this discovery (they had small brains) is not as important (in terms of cognitive evolution) in the Homo lineage, as was previously thought.

In a Toxins of Power post another factor was considered, in terms of other issues perhaps more important than mere brain size:

"First, as a contemplative example, imagine that human brain synapses have wireless modules, in addition to the chemical, molecular modules which facilitate communication.

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A closer look at the known chemical, molecular communications, as well as the hypothetical wireless communications that take place in the brain, at synapses, is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: chemical-molecular & wireless signals

The Figure 2 graphic shows the traditional, comparatively slow molecular, chemical communications within the human brain synapse, as well as the hypothesized practically instant communication by wireless, photon signals which are also sent and received in the same synapses in the human brain.

Some cognition in the human brain takes place far too fast and too efficiently for it to be a system composed solely of waiting for slow chemical transfers to take place at synapses.

Therefore, the hypothesis goes, there is also electromagnetic wireless communication which takes place at the speed of light (because the components of that communication, photons, only travel at the speed of light).

If bacteria and viruses can do some wireless communication for efficiency and immediacy, human brain cells must handle at least the most urgent communication in the same or similar wireless fashion don't you think?"

(A New Potential Source for Toxins of Power: Wireless Signals). In other words the speed of brain signals composed of photons traveling at the speed of light would have a larger impact on cognition than would molecules floating through liquids from one synapse to another.

This same concept applies in cases where photons travel from seawater through space into tidewater glacier ice rather than slowly floating there through liquid currents (Quantum Oceanography - 3).

But I digress.

Living humans are "Homo sapiens sapiens" while humans that lived long ago are "Homo sapiens" (Britannica), but both are said to do funerals for their dead.

According to palaeontologist Lee Berger, the newly discovered Homo naledi of about 200,000 or so years ago not only had funerals for their deceased, they also placed in their graves what was thought to be tools alongside (or within the hands) of the deceased bodies.

This was hypothesized to mean that they had an "afterlife" in their thinking, and placed things in the graves to assist the deceased in that afterlife.

The Egyptians also did that:

"Egyptian religious doctrines included three afterlife ideologies: belief in an underworld, eternal life, and rebirth of the soul."

(Wikipedia).  To me, this adds some insight to the hypothesis that technology (e.g. making stone tools and even placing them in Homo naledi graves) was an aspect of early mysticism related to technocracy:

"Technocracy itself is an immortality ideology that, although it is coupled with materialism, has as part of its makeup an element of the magical and a belief that new tools and innovations provide solutions to both the small day-to-day problems of life and the larger problems of human happiness and mortality. Technology is entrancing, and, functionally, technologists become creators of magic and the wizards of today, claiming the same authority over technology that doctors claim over human health or shamans over the cursed. This has always been so, going back to ancestral peoples who learned to use fire, tools, wind, and wheels. Even in subsistence societies, technology has a greater impact on a variety of sociological variables than do supernatural or religious beliefs (Nolan and Lenski 1996)."

(The Machine Religion). It seems logical to realize that there are atomic and subatomic factors involved in the genetics of cognition.

II. Genetics of Cognition

Some of the Homo naledi discovery scientists mentioned that cognition is impacted by genetics in the sense that an "afterlife concept" is handed down through genes.

But, other scientists don't like that "cop out" (On The Origin of Genieology).

Anyway, recently Dredd Blog has been looking at the atomic similarities in the atoms in DNA and RNA which are surprising to say the least (Pangenome 2, 3).

Looking deeper than "it's in your genes" means "it's in your atoms", so, to get down I recently processed 2,712,308 rows of viral nucleotides in my SQL database.

To make it easier to comprehend I converted each nucleotide into its atomic composition, and printed the results in an HTML table.

The table below shows how many of each atom type, atom count, and its percent are in the genomes.

Incidentally, that also closely matches the percentage realm of the Pangenome series (Pangenome 2, 3).

These two tables show DNA/RNA (data link1, link2 from both shallow and deep depths) from viruses in the oceans:

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Table: DNA 1

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Nucleotide count: 980,135,044

Atom	Atom Count	Percent
Carbon	4,645,810,984	32.16
Hydrogen	5,138,703,457	35.57
Nitrogen	3,676,862,037	25.45
Oxygen	985,822,717	6.82
Totals	14,447,199,195	100.00

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Table: DNA 2

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Nucleotide count: 2,343,714,209

Atom	Atom Count	Percent
Carbon	326,195,125,469	32.50
Hydrogen	353,454,048,980	35.21
Nitrogen	259,710,340,488	25.87
Oxygen	64,438,199,400	6.42
Totals	1,003,797,714,337	100.00

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Which brings up the concept of when, how, and why did atoms become genes and brains, a concept which includes (If Cosmology Is "Off," How Can Biology Be "On?").

III. Cosmological Cognition

That is why I have advocated for an "Abiology" degree in universities, in addition to the current "Biology" degree:

"Dr Clarke said: “There are a lot of fundamental questions about the origins of life and many people think they are questions about biology. But for life to have evolved, you have to have a moment when non-living things become living – everything up to that point is chemistry.”
...
“Our cells, and the cells of all organisms, are composed of molecular machines. These machines are built of component parts, each of which contributes a partial function or structural element to the machine. How such sophisticated, multi-component machines could evolve has been somewhat mysterious, and highly controversial.” Professor Lithgow said.
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Many cellular processes are carried out by molecular ‘machines’ — assemblies of multiple differentiated proteins that physically interact to execute biological functions ... Our experiments show that increased complexity in an essential molecular machine evolved because of simple, high-probability evolutionary processes, without the apparent evolution of novel functions. They point to a plausible mechanism for the evolution of complexity in other multi-paralogue protein complexes.
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The most complex molecular machines are found within cells.
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Writing in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the team from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences show how they studied the molecular machine known as the 'type II bacterial secretion system', which is responsible for delivering potent toxins from bacteria such as enterotoxigenic E.coli and Vibrio cholerae into an infected individual.

Professor Richard Pickersgill, who led the research, said: "Bacterial secretion systems deliver disease causing toxins into host tissue. If we can understand how these machines work, then we can work out how it they might be stopped."

(Putting A Face On Machine Mutation - 3). Most of time since the hypothetical big bang has been during the time of the physical machine age, which was way before the biological age.

IMO, leaving 'Abiology' out of any evolutionary history of cognition is majoring in the minors.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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