Neanderthal gene linked to increased pain sensitivity
nature.com
nature.com
Though the article says its about nerves, not brain stuff.
It would be more reasonable and compassionate to identify genetic risk factors so that the people in question could make more informed choices in their lives, but instead we must keep them (and ourselves) ignorant lest, somewhere in the dark, a reel of Triumph of the Will begins spinning all on its own.
One of the eras of extreme racial stereotyping happened when there was very little knowledge about the genetic science.
If there is a genetic component to opioid addiction then it would be extremely helpful to treat it with that knowledge.
I agree it's not, because it's not about research, but rather about science and "science" reporting as well as what ends up in the "news" ("researchers find the addiction gene"). That's why I said it is important to consider the magnitude before talking about it, not before researching it, because obviously you don't know the impact before the research is done.
I think the line to draw is that for it to be positive it should always be private, voluntary, independent from public policy and strictly for the purposes of improving medical outcomes.
Dangers, too. Legitimate pain patients already frequently have to drop through an onerous set of hoops for opiates, and the medical system isn't always good at teasing out "increased risk" from "unacceptable risk". (For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib, aka Vioxx)
Furthermore, in spite of the strong genetic evidence, especially for the cases for congenital pain insensitivity, it has also been hard for the industry to develop Nav1.7 inhibitors, but that could mostly be due to targeting specificity.
See whatever that effect is called where a hundred thousand people collaborate to make something great, and the single person at the top of the organization is given 100% of the credit.
If we replace the DNA in a human OVA with different DNA we get a different person. I conclude therefore, that DNA plays a role in who and what we are, the extent of which requires honest study.
[1] e.g. services 23andMe differentiating between English and Irish genes.
Posting form this position - Psychopharmacology and neuroscience research to post graduate level. I'm not keen to see a genetic explanation, i'm keen to see the results of research into this area because then we can discuss the extent biology plays a role in relation to socio-economical factors.
There is some research suggesting opiate addicts could be compensating for a dysregualted endogenous opiate system through substance abuse. There is similar work for dopamine with smoking. Looking at things this way could change the way interventions are offered and also potentially reduce stigma for some of those who have addictions.
Some interesting links that have likely already been shared on HN for both socio-economical and biological theories:
"Understanding the genetic architecture of OUD might provide clinically useful clues about its biology. However, to our knowledge, only a few risk variants have been identified by GWAS so far, and none has had clear external replication. Several factors contribute to this situation: (1) OUD is a complex psychiatric disease with relatively low heritability, and there is no single variant with a large effect size that can be detected in small cohorts"
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
Can anyone with domain knowledge chime in on this?
Is the sample set of genomes enough to suggest these mutations were prevalent in the neanderthal population? And even so, might they have had a completely different effect on neanderthal physiology?
It is actually thought that this could have contributed to their decline. Compare with modern day humans who explored the whole globe: some ancient dude even paddled his way to Australia! It's hard for a species that widespread to go extinct.
There is even renewed interest in finding American and/or Australian neanderthals and denisovans... As the known range has grown, those seem more plausible.
First, neanderthals were closely related to Denisovans. In Denisova cave itself, both neanderthals & denisovans were found and even a first generation hybrid. So.. you could call it a denisovan-neanderthal complex with various subpopulations over time and geography.
The altai neanderthals have been suggested as a subspecies/type... so there are differences there.
In europe and the middle east, there's a decent phenotypical distinction between early and late (classical) neanderthals. The earlier type was less distinctively neanderthal... kind of more sapien looking. Later populations developed that distinctively bony face.
..Sapiens too, probably. We descend mostly from a small population of sapiens, but that doesn't mean other populations didn't exist. They just don't have descendants.
For example, modern europeans have a relatively homogenous, low level of neanderthal DNA. At different points of history, certain populations could have ben 25% neanderthal... and genetically distinct from other groups.
This is all normal mammalian population dynamics. Modern Sapiens are the unusual ones. We went through a genetic bottleneck and lost a lot of diversity.
Due to the age of the genomes, C's deaminate and are recorded erroneously as T's. The solution is usually to throw out those sites from the sequencing results (which account for a large fraction of the genome in the garbage). By sequencing many different neanderthal individuals you can start to reconstruct some of those lost parts of the genome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA#Problems_and_error...
>Is the sample set of genomes enough to suggest these mutations were prevalent in the neanderthal population?
We aren't really at population scale genomics of neanderthals yet. We are still trying to piece together a truely high-quality reference genome (of one individual). Once that is complete, the next step is a population of about 100.
Based on the human genome, the chimpanzee genome, the neanderthal genome and the ancestrally reconstructed most recent common ancestor at each of the nodes in between, we can estimate allele frequencies within the different populations.
Let’s do the opposite of whatever that guy does.
That guy is moaning for months after fisticuffs with a lion. Let’s try a long stick instead.
That guy slept with girls of that tribe. And his parts burn like crazy. Let’s be monogamous.
That guy eats donuts all day, and every step is agony. Maybe veggies aren’t so bad.
Then there is pain that is all you can do to not jump off a cliff to end it. This, tends to change personal behavior.
Then there is pain that is slightly less then jump off a cliff. But it goes on for months, non stop, making every moment a horrible experience. This has a huge impact on all those around you. Some pity you, some try and help, some wish you would die already. Most avoid you.
Degree makes a massive difference. Wish it was otherwise.
I would think pro-social behaviors like that have a serious evolutionary advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
> Because feeling physical pain is vital for survival, CIP is an extremely dangerous condition.[1] It is common for people with the condition to die in childhood due to injuries or illnesses going unnoticed.
Pure speculation but it would be interesting if that was related to the apparent harshness and difficulty of life at the time. Perhaps it was something selected for survival.
Apparently they[we] did survive.
According to wikipedia Homo Sapiens have been around for 300 to 400 thousand years, while Neanderthals existed for 315 thousand to more than 800 thousand years.
In regards to Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals you just have to wait until Homo Sapiens goes extinct or has been around for a number of years that exceeds that of Neanderthals. Then you can conclude which species was better at surviving.
I could equally well state that humans are going to last 100 million years. Mackrel shark did, and it doesn't even possess any advanced technology.
Also, I don't agree that a conjecture has to be experimentally proven during your personal lifetime in oder to be falsifiable. E.g. that would make gravity waves unfalsifiable, since they were predicted by Einstein in 1916 but weren't observed until 2016; 61 years after his death.
Einstein's theories were falsifiable in multiple ways, with earliest confirming experiments in 1920s. Still, 61 years is within a lifetime. 10k years requires a time machine and makes your proposition pointless. As good as waiting for second coming to see if Bible's right.
> They didn't survive, so not sure what that says.
It says nothing because we cannot yet conclude that Homo Sapiens will survive for longer.
> Still, 61 years is within a lifetime. 10k years requires a time machine and makes your proposition pointless.
Interesting! So when does an experiment become pointless? When it takes a 100 years to prove? 200 years? 500 years? 1000 years?
> As good as waiting for second coming to see if Bible's right.
That's not the same. The second coming might never happen, Homo Sapiens will go extinct. In a million years, you can conclude which species survived the longest, but you'd probably still by waiting for the second coming.
They also never completely vanished; I have a number Neanderthal-specific alleles (more than most), as have pretty much all people of not exclusively subsaharan descent, and these alleles seem to have some pretty profound effects, some of them quite negative. That may be because these alleles evolved to work in concert with others that we haven't inherited, or for some other reason, but that would be quite valuable knowledge for a huge lot of people.
Besides, they're also a fascinating part of our collective history. They apparently had a unique and rich culture of their own; they are thought to have produced works of art before we even arrived in Europe[0] and they built pretty big structures out of stalagmites that appear to have no obvious practical purpose, in Bruniquel cave[1], about 176,000 years ago; by comparison, our ancestors seem to have started doing comparable things only ~60-50ka ago.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02357-8 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruniquel_Cave
Can you elaborate? What kind of effects?
Also, long term survival of a species has a lot more to do with luck than you'd think. e.g If cooling temperatures killed off their primary food source and forced them to migrate into human controlled territory where they didn't have experience, they'd be at a disadvantage. But if they lived in a temperature warming era, we may be having the opposite conversation right now. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a good summary of this hypothesis.
It sounds like they had to endure some damage:
I like the wikipedia quote: ' It has been remarked that Neanderthals showed a frequency of such injuries comparable to that of modern rodeo professionals, showing frequent contact with large, combative mammals. The pattern of fractures, along with the absence of throwing weapons, suggests that they may have hunted by leaping onto their prey and stabbing or even wrestling it to the ground.'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030544...
via
We're also apparently less sensitive to electrical pain than others, so can we call that a superpower?
0) https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an...
Also it's not necessarily the reception of pain itself that's different, as someone else said, but the perception or anticipation of it [1] that changes the degree of anesthetization required.
1) https://www.verywellhealth.com/do-redheads-really-need-more-...
[1] - https://theconversation.com/neanderthals-didnt-give-us-red-h...
Also, you have to be absurdly blind to the history of scientific racism to not understand that the stereotype of being less sensitive to pain has a historical origin in justifying abusing slaves by dehumanizing them.
Isn't that a truism? All humans are of African descent.
I had previously understood, that native domestic sub-Saharan Africans (i.e. those living on the continent, with clear African based heritage) did not have any Neanderthal DNA, as Neanderthals were further down the evolutionary line of the first emigration out of Africa, and were primarily European based. Therefore those with purely African genetic history would never had interbred with them.
Is this still true, or have I been walking around with a massive misunderstanding here?
As a footnote, We need to still be able to ask these questions without being afraid of the racism response. We are all different, we should embrace that and not let it affect scientific discussion or discovery.
- "modern Europeans and East Asians apparently inherited about 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals"
- "African individuals on average had [...] more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about [...] 0.3% of their genome."
So the article seems to confirm a 10x difference in Neanderthals DNA, which might be significant. It's also unclear what they mean by "Africans, did the same include, e.g. Egyptians of Greek descent?
Some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation
Yes, but that has nothing to do with Neanderthal interbreeding.
Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal DNA that other humans from outside of Africa because interbreeding occurred when we left Africa and met Neanderthals in Eurasia.
Based on that it is not crazy to formulate the hypothesis that any traits we may have inherited from Neanderthals might be less pronounced in sub-Saharan Africans, though obviously hypotheses are not facts and one has to be very prudent, and even more so when calling on racial stereotypes...
Comments like being "absurdly blind" are stupid. Are you going to discredit current science because of some loosely related historical events?
From the article:
> About 0.4% of participants in the UK Biobank, a genome database of half a million British people, who reported on their pain symptoms had one copy of the mutated gene. No one had two, like Neanderthals. Participants with the mutated version of the gene were about 7% more likely to report pain in their lives than were people without it.
About UK Biobank:
> The study is following about 500,000 volunteers in the UK, enrolled at ages from 40 to 69. Initial enrollment took place over four years from 2006, and the volunteers will be followed for at least 30 years thereafter.
I wonder if the same happens to younger people.
blind to the history
of scientific racism
Interestingly, the many slave rebellions of antiquity (and after) by and large did not seek to abolish slavery, only to switch who's a slave, and who's a slave holder.
If you know this, then you also know that these are not comparable forms of slavery. Romans (or whatever) did not treat their slaves as sub-humans.
I mean, that's pushing it. Obviously, their concept of slavery wasn't really based on ethnicity, and manumission was generally more common and socially acceptable than it was in American slavery. But the treatment of slaves in Ancient Rome was certainly inhuman by modern standards.
The Romans also had mechanisms to, in practice, suppress the political power of descendants of slaves; in practice almost all freedmen went into one of the urban tribes (the very wealthy could buy into a rural tribe), making their votes largely irrelevant, for instance. It's reasonable to view New World slavery as a special evil, but Roman slavery was Pretty Bad, too.
Those mechanisms sound a lot like present day gerrymandering[1][2] coupled with redlining[3][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpamjJtXqFI
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#Racial_segregation_i...