Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmrfrmrf | Hacker News Reader

This article is needlessly sensational and has waaaaay too many misleading "chicken and egg" statements. The evolution of the uterus came prior to the evolution of the human embryo, so to say that the uterus "needs" to protect the body against the embryo is untrue; in reality, it was the embryo that needed to adapt itself to its environment.

It's these kind of articles that cause misunderstandings about how evolution actually works. If we, the HN community, are interested in furthering our knowledge bases, we need to stop falling for these pseudo-intelligent reskinned BuzzFeed articles.

View on HN

This is faulty reasoning. To think that the female reproductive system developed prior to the fetus (in order to pave way for nurturing of the embryo) is implying evolution is a purpose-driven, goal-oriented process - a line of reasoning not too far from "intelligent design".

Not to mention the egg-chicken dichotomy is absurd. There was neither a "first chicken" nor a "first egg".

Single celled protists first developed sexual reproduction about 2 billion years ago as a means of producing genetically variable offsprings. It may be assumed both the offspring and the reproductive machinery of the parents developed concomitantly as life was making a shift from uni-cellularity toward multi-cellularity.

As for mammals (which includes us humans), the placenta, which serves as an important barrier between the mother and the fetus (only letting nutrition pass through), is of viral origin. Placental syncytiotrophoblasts SCT-1, SCT-2 proteins are derived from endogenous retroviruses. Our genome is full of fossils of viral DNA - accumulated over several millions of years. If these viruses had not apt-get install-ed biological chroot jails, we would not have been born at all.. (obviously some other modes of reproduction may have been developed)

Carl Zimmer has some interesting write-ups on this topic:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/02/14/mammals-ma...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html

For those interested in evolution of sexual reproduction and "viro-biome", I recommend Carl Zimmer's Planet of Viruses and Matt Ridley's Red Queen.

I agree the article is a bit sensationalist. Look at it in this way: had it been a boring, academic, science-journaly piece, many of us wouldn't have waded through the article at all... Obviously the target audience for that article (and the site) are general science-buffs and not only embryologists or molecular biologists. Personally I think some dramatisation (to make the content more appealing to general audience) is acceptable - so long as the subject matter doesn't deviate too much from reality.

PS: apologies for my broken english :)

PPS: Re: the chicken & egg question - the egg came first because reptilians laid eggs. Chickens, and birds in general, are descendants of dinosaurs.

I said female reproductive system for a very specific reason; the uterus may not have come before the embryo, but the cloaca certainly did.

The author, Suzanne Sadedin, doesn't fit the typical profile of a Buzzfeed writer: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~suzannes/

Also, if your assertion is that this article (which I admit I found fascinating) causes misunderstandings about evolution then your counter statement - "in reality, it was the embryo that needed to adapt itself to its environment" - is guilty of even greater oversimplification.

While I agree with the chicken and egg statements, I think the sensationalism is a Good Thing in this instance. The language of the article and the way the information is presented gives way to some good discussion points and thought projects. If you simply wanted more "facts" and "knowledge" of human reproduction, go read Wikipedia.

These kind of articles don't cause misunderstandings, people interpreting the language as fact, do. So long as the reader understands the language in the article, I see no problems with it. Nothing in the article states that the presented information is beyond theory. It's a discussion of those theories with supporting science thrown in where necessary to drive further questions and discussion.

Can you help me better understand your post? What I got out of it was "so long as the readers understand it's not actually true, it's ok" but I'm not convinced this is the intended interpretation.

A theoretical discussion, such as the article's, isn't trying to nail down true or false. The discussion is rooted in and follows established truths along the way to explore potential new possibilities. This is what theorizing is. If we simply sat around discussing facts and non-facts we'd never get anywhere with discovery.

A question such as "What's true and what's false?" does not prompt for knowledge expanding discussion. We want to ask things like:

* What exists as scientific fact now?

* Is what exists now provable by scientific method or is it still in theory stage?

* What seems likely and/or possible as the next steps?

* Can we test anything in the resulting discussion with scientific method to prove them?

I've read a lot of these, but it usually feels more like we're glossing over Aesop's fables with a veneer of evolutionary theory. It's interesting to read about what happens, but all the suspect explanations in the story detract from it for me.

If we think of the pragmatic and plausible theoretical model probability space for possible models that graph the change over time of the mean biological biogenesis pattern of homo Sapiens, we will find mathematical utility in using the functions in Branching Theory and Lexographic Fractal Permutation (Collation) Algorithms... Which essentially modularize and computationally compress the process of evaluating the distinct (clustered) networks in the lexograph...thus providing the capability to evaluate, compare, and communicate... The logically referenced data in the hypothetical, theoretical, and observational/proven possibility space...in a more efficient, albeit, approximate methodology.

It seems that what you really wanted to do is to criticize the narrative of the story. But you end up criticizing the factual truth of the story. Those are two different things.

Just because the words chosen to describe this piece of biology invoke a certain association between words, does not mean what they describe isn't happening. The science of conflicts within what appears to be cooperation is sound, well-proven science.

The problem with these evolutionary biology stories is that narrative always implies as if this "conflict" is somehow conciously driven. That problem is mostly caused by human language, that is not well equipped to talk about conflict without implying some drive.

The author of this article could have put more effort in toning down the conflict tone, perhaps. I don't think that would have been really necessary, but that would qualify as goor criticism. But the facts are what they are.

In grad school (mathematical biology / evolutionary genetics / adaptive speciation) we would refer to articles like this as filled with "just so stories" [0]. The descriptions aren't really based on experimental results, or really strongly evidential; they're stories that happen to explain some of the evidence.

[0] this relates to Kipling -- stories like "How the camel got its hump". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories

I haven't read the article yet, but I know what you're talking about. Articles and documentaries almost always discuss natural selection as if there were intention. Even if they demonstrate that they know what they're talking about, they go on to use inaccurate language unsuitable for conveying filtered variance.

I have basically no knowledge on this topic, but my initial reaction before I even read your post was exactly that - there are quite a lot of "chicken and egg" scenarios brought up.

Some of the stuff made sense, some of it was (potentially) fascinating, some of it was quite dubious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com