Monthly Archives: May 2021

Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't), by Alex Bezzerides Hanover Square Press hide caption

Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (Or Don't), by Alex Bezzerides

We humans have been evolving for millions of years and as any good biologist will tell you in response to pressures in our environment, we are evolving still.

So how come our bodies are so flawed? Why does sharp vision so often elude us, for instance? Why do our backs hurt so frequently?

The theme of Alex Bezzerides' Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don't) is that we experience these and other embodied challenges teeth that require braces, feet that acquire bunions, knees that blow out not despite of evolution, but because of it. We are animals, and animals' early evolution in the ocean, and our primate lineage's transition from the trees to the ground, continue to affect how our bodies function and break down even today.

A biologist at Lewis-Clark State College who specializes in anatomy and evolution, Bezzerides has written a fantastic, informative book, a home run on his first try (he makes a point of noting his first-time author status in the Acknowledgments). Never did I expect to praise prose like, "The human foot... is made up of a whole gob of bones" but Bezzerides makes it work. He never condescends to his readers. Instead he mixes the technical anatomical stuff we need to know with vivid examples and humorous phrases.

We can grasp the main idea Bezzerides wants to get across by focusing on eyes and backs.

Our eyes evolved originally in the ocean, where ancestral vertebrates dwelled and needed to see underwater. Around 375 million years ago, when they ventured to land, their eyes were already 100 million years old. Gradually, eyes in this lineage became land-adapted, but these organs have retained fluids and, as a result, never achieved the type of light refraction that would result in consistent sharpness of image on land. Light travels more slowly through water than it does through air, but to our advantage in modern times, even more slowly through glass. "Many of us take advantage of this fact by placing glass in front of our eyes to compensate for the imperfect job our corneas and lenses do in bending the light."

Bezzerides offers nifty evolutionary explanations too for why we can distinguish more shades of green than any other color, and why our night vision is poor. He clarifies that it's not only our evolution that makes for vision troubles today, but also our current behavior. Most of us spend way too much time in spaces that lack natural light. "Children who spend greater chunks of their day outside have a lesser risk of developing myopia than children who spend their days inside," he writes. Kids don't even have to be doing healthy things out there, it turns out, because it's the light and not the activity that makes the difference.

Back trouble, the leading cause of disability globally, is directly traceable to primates' leaving the trees for open areas more than 4 million years ago, Bezzerides notes. The move to the forest floor was "a pressure cooker" that caused human ancestors' center of gravity to shift. For the first time, a primate could balance on only two feet; the human spine is shaped quite differently from that of our ape cousins', with curves that cause a "precarious" structure. For example, "The inward, or lordotic, lumbar curve needs to be far enough inward to place the position of the spine under the head and to get the center of gravity above the hips," Bezzerides writes. Back pain, and even intervertebral disc pain, happens all too readily with slight misalignments.

Cultural factors come into play with backs just as much as eyes. People whose work requires them to lift heavy objects may be at higher risk, and those who work hard to maintain core-body strength may offset the worst of back pain. But, Bezzerides warns, for almost all of us, back pain is in the cards.

Thanks a lot, evolution.

If I were meeting with the author to hash out evolutionary issues as scientists like to do, I would ask him a few questions. Why cite that old theory suggesting that monogamy evolved early in the human line by way of males provisioning females? Monogamy isn't even that common an arrangement today, and females past or present are unlikely to be quite so helpless. How come it's "slightly uncomfortable" to think of our ancestors mating with Neanderthals? And hey, that slap at sheep in the brain section? They're smarter than you think, an important point for analyzing comparative mammalian intelligence.

More concerning, the chapters on reproduction are uneven. It's jarring to see four questions grouped together, about why we're prone to choking; why infertility is widespread; why so many people need braces; and why females menstruate. Which one of these things is not like the other? Menstruation isn't a risk or medical condition. Bezzerides refers to "significant blood loss, significant iron loss, and a significantly lousy few days every month." Yet not everyone's experience with menstruation is so lousy just as the process of childbirth, challenging as it is, doesn't always involve "screaming and trauma."

Bezzerides taught me some cool new science when explaining what's called spontaneous decidualization, a change in the uterine lining. Unlike in other animals, that lining in humans changes not in response to pregnancy but instead in preparation for pregnancy. The reason, more complicated than I can explain fully here, has to do with fetal burrowing into the womb, a type of maternal-fetal conflict that is more elaborated in humans.

Yet another example of that unevenness I mentioned in continuing to explore reproduction he replicates without question the old myth of sperm making a "perilous trip" so that "only the strongest, fittest sperm" fight their way to an egg. As anthropologist Robert Martin puts it, "Convincing evidence has instead revealed that human sperm are passively transported over considerable distances while travelling through the womb and up the oviducts. So much for Olympic-style racing sperm!"

I still say this book is a home run. Perfection is no more necessary in order to be grateful that a book was written than it is to experience appreciation for the human body with all its flaws. I recommend Evolution Gone Wrong highly to anyone wishing to grasp the mix of biological and cultural forces at work on our anatomy today.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. Her seventh book, Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild, was published in March. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape

Read more:

Book Review: 'Evolution Gone Wrong' Helps Answer Why Human Bodies Are Flawed - NPR

Networking Is Key to Healthcare Communication

With local area network speeds reaching up to 10/100 gigabits per second and over 400Gbps in the data center, the IT industry has long evolved from the 10-megabit-per-second connections that would be too slow to support the size of modern-day digitized files. Many clinical diagnostics have gone digital, and that means easier sharing capability. Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) are an example of this. With more data generated and shared, whether by clinicians or patients, networks need to be increasingly robust, scalable, resilient, fault-tolerant and secure.

Digital communications were once limited to emails, text messages or alerts from routers or email servers. With the advent of PACS, telemetry waveforms, EHRs, cloud-based storage portals, private blockchain and other network-based security tools, healthcare is generating far more data than any other industry.

MORE FROM HEALTHTECH:VA, Air Force test out 5G in hospital settings.

Even with the advent of newer technologies, devices such as video cameras have also evolved to support a greater number of use cases than simple on-premises security. The number of use cases supporting video streaming in real time include centrally managed patient monitoring, in which fall reduction programs are implemented; surgical monitoring for teaching or collaborative operative care; safety programs that guard against baby abduction risk and support Alzheimers patient containment; and monitoring of drug dispensing areas.

Clinical compliance and efficacy can also be monitored. For example, handwashing, personal protective equipment use and patient treatment protocols can be monitored using real-time video for optimal risk reduction practices or collaborative efforts all of which require an increasing amount of network bandwidth as well as a simple way to manage it all securely.

Any network-bound device is at risk of being targeted by ransomware. Today, there are a few options for integrating anti-ransomware software within a smart network interface card, or SmartNIC, which helps redirect and block threats. Data processing units on SmartNICs are taking CPU burdens and processing packet inspections at wire speed.

In a smart hospital strategy, there seems to be no limit to the number of devices possible, whether wireless or wired. And with new technology manufacturers wanting to jump on the smart hospital bandwagon, the number of devices on an organizations network will continue to grow. Its no wonder healthcare facilities are the second-most energy-intensive operations after food stores, and healthcare executives are constantly looking for ways to reduce operational costs.

LEARN MORE:Why healthcare organizations need an effective incident response plan.

Today, smart energy/grid network management systems offer feature-rich and customizable industry protocols that can manage a healthcare facilitys smart energy devices while also managing the communication network connecting them.

The number of nodes continues to grow on any given network, and while traditional wireless connectivity hovers around 150Mbps to 900Mbps, service providers are increasingly making 5G available for healthcare environments whose walls are heavily nested with CAT 6, 7 or 8 cable (and in some cases, older CAT 5). Be it copper or fiber, theyre simply running out of room. According to HealthAffairs, 5G has the unique potential to contribute to preventative care by leveraging high speeds for data transmission to increase the ubiquity of sensor data, which in turn would facilitate patient access to hospital-like monitoring at [patients] homes.

Link:

How the Evolution of Networking Infrastructure Supports Smart Hospitals - HealthTech Magazine

Fungal symbiosis with early land plants

Hundreds of millions of years ago, evolved descendants of aquatic plants began showing up on dry land. These newly terrestrialized species had to deal with increased ultraviolet light exposure, desiccation, and less accessible nutrients. Rich et al. show how mutualist fungi may have helped these nascent plant lineages with adaptation to their newly challenging environment (see the Perspective by Bouwmeester). Genetic and metabolic analysis of a liverwort as a representative of such plants suggests that the mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi may have been a feature of these most early land plants.

Science, abg0929, this issue p. 864; see also abi8016, p. 789

Symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) improves plant nutrition in most land plants, and its contribution to the colonization of land by plants has been hypothesized. Here, we identify a conserved transcriptomic response to AMF among land plants, including the activation of lipid metabolism. Using gain of function, we show the transfer of lipids from the liverwort Marchantia paleacea to AMF and its direct regulation by the transcription factor WRINKLED (WRI). Arbuscules, the nutrient-exchange structures, were not formed in loss-of-function wri mutants in M. paleacea, leading to aborted mutualism. Our results show the orthology of the symbiotic transfer of lipids across land plants and demonstrate that mutualism with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi was present in the most recent ancestor of land plants 450 million years ago.

Link:

Lipid exchanges drove the evolution of mutualism during plant terrestrialization - Science Magazine

There is a mystery in human evolution. As we progressed from knuckle-walking to striding, from swinging from branches to throwing rocks and then spears, surely our tools developed in parallel. Right?

Put backwards, many assume that inferences can be made about our evolutionary state going by our industry. Right?

Well, theres a snag. What does it mean that stone choppers, among the earliest tools, persisted for around two million years, and stone Acheulean hand axes for over a million years? The upscale Levallois-style tools were also used for hundreds of thousands of years. Did our evolution stagnate in that time?

It did not. Evolution is the nature of all things, but in thrall to neophilia (love of the new), and we tend to view human evolution through the prism of physical and mental change. Leaving the trees for the savanna necessitated physical and mental changes. Among other things, we grew: were about a third bigger than our australopithecine predecessors. Now, Dr. Meir Finkel and Prof. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University offer a paradigm-changing interpretation, published in Science Direct (Anthropology) of the stasis in these basic tools in the context of our continuing development.

As long as the animal environment remained stable, so did the tools we used to obtain these animals (to eat). If anything, this stability provided safe ground for technological and behavioral innovations, Barkai and Finkel write.

After Gaza, an Israeli-Palestinian struggle for identity: Aluf Benn, Noa Landau and Anshel Pfeffer

The paradigm says these are problems in innovation, that the hominids didnt innovate [during that time], for whatever reasons. For instance, that Homo erectus didnt have sufficiently developed cognition, or that there were difficulties in innovation relating to social aspects. We say the opposite! Finkel explains to Haaretz. There wasnt a problem with innovation: it was conservatism by choice. Innovation has a price.

The myxozoan and the mosaic

Thinking on evolution in general has been changing. For example, we tended to simplistically perceive evolution as a roughly linear procession from primitive to complex. But evolution is broader than that. Take the delight that is myxozoans: microscopic parasitic jellyfish that evolved backwards, from sublime to slime. They evolved from proper multicellular animals to single-celled ones, or a few cells; and one went so far backwards as to even lose its genes for breathing.

Yet these tiny parasites are remarkably successful, infesting what seems to be all species of fish and seafood, in all the oceans except possibly the Antarctic. They even made it onto land, alone among the cnidarians. Myxozoans thrive in the duck and the frog and a strictly land animal: the shrew.

Also, the rationale of evolution may be fairly clear but scientists are still arguing over the process fits and starts? Huge leaps? Other? All the above? Either way, paleontology has helped to enrich the debate with the concept of mosaic evolution (aka modular evolution), which posits that some body parts will change without simultaneous changes in other parts.

Mosaic evolution is key to the theory Barkai and Finkel propound: that technological persistency like the hand ax remaining unchanged over a million years was because their hominin users enjoyed stability of their prey, namely mega-fauna (big animals). As in, specific technologies were associated with specific animal types. It wasnt broke so they didnt fix it.

In the interim, while the hand ax persisted, we made great strides. Vast strides. The stability of mega-fauna and of the toolkit used to hunt them over a vast stretch of time gave early humans space to innovate, Finkel and Barkai explain.

We could depend on our trusty hand ax and chopper to predate on elephants and other mega-fauna, and meanwhile could monkey around with developing other technologies and tools which came in handy when the mega-fauna disappeared. At which point, in turn, we didnt need the trusty hand ax any more.

As humans shifted to smaller animals, new toolkits had to be adopted in order to better catch and process them. Once another change occurred in animal availability, a corresponding transformation took shape in the technological repertoire, and so on and so forth.

This approach could explain technological changes such as the replacement of hand axes by Levallois, to be replaced later by systematic blade production, Barkai and Finkel explain.

And absolutely, during those million-plus years of hand ax persistency, the very type of human being changed, starting with Homo erectus and ending with Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals in Europe. During those million-plus years, archaic humans learned how to use, and ultimately to sort of tame, fire. In that time they developed all sorts of hunting technologies, including maybe its hard to say when spear technology.

All that was within the period of the hand ax, Finkel says. There were vast advances, yet the hand ax remained stable. We realized its an anchor: a stable basis on top of which we can innovate. Conservatism by choice gives you energy security, caloric security, enabling innovation and invention in other areas.

Thus, the technological persistency itself can be seen as an adaptive strategy, Barkai and Finkel argue.

Enter the megalodon

In separate work, Miki Ben-Dor and Barkai have argued that hominins took a turn to carnivory with Homo erectus over two million years ago. Our bodies did evolve to handle a high-protein diet, but only so far. Eat too much lean meat and protein poisoning will ensue. So the other chief source of calories was fat, which we came to crave. Large animals have abundant avoirdupois, while small ones dont (as a rule).

Thus, we evolved to eat mega-fauna and ate them until they were no more. Only then did we have to adapt our tools to obtaining smaller, fleeter animals.

Drawing a parallel between technological and morphological persistency, Finkel and Barkai note that in animals, body design tends to persist as long as their food supply is stable. Morphological stasis over eons indicates that the animal has the wherewithal to survive in the changes of its environment but that doesnt mean its evolution ground to a halt.

Take sharks. Or horseshoe crabs, or the coelacanth living fossils one and all. They seem unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, suggesting that they didnt need to.

The great megalodon, the biggest of all sharks (as far as we know), seem to have dominated the seas from about 16 million to 2.6 million years ago shame we missed them. Their remarkable size remained static in that time, dear reader: possibly up to 25 meters (82 feet) in length. It has been posited that megalodons went extinct because the oceans cooled and/or because their favorite meal small- to medium-size baleen whales half their size vanished and were supplanted by gigantic baleen whales, too big for even the great and terrible Meg to cope with. Yet the discovery of megalodon mouth marks on fossil seal remains suggests that while basking in the security conferred by their morphological persistency, they may have expanded to new prey types. Namely, pinnipeds. They do say the starving will eat anything.

Take the humble lungfish, which evolved over about 75 million years, then seems to have remained in morphological stasis for 250 million years. Lungfish were old before dinosaurs were even a gleam in the eye of the Creator. Yet to this day the lungfish feeding mechanism has remained largely primitive, which Finkel and Barkai argue enabled them to amble on through the eons while evolving advanced abilities to survive in variable conditions.

Here is a video of what African lungfish do when their river turns into mud.

Turning to another fish, in February a team revealed that the coelacanth, which didnt go extinct 66 million years ago after all, gained 62 new genes in the last 10 million years ago. How? From other fish, via transposons, aka jumping genes.It looks pretty much the same, though. Morphological stasis did not mean genetic stasis, evidently. It is possible that over the eons, the coelacanth exploited its morphological stability to expand its feeding options.

Haaretz is not suggesting that archaic humans exchanged genes with fish or did anything untoward with fish. But the apparently unchanged exterior of the shark and coelecanth can be misleading. Obviously they did change, statistics obliges it; and even if they look like their primordial predecessors, they cant be the same.

The bottom line of the beasts is that morphological persistency, including body size and shape, is quite common in nature, Barkai and Finkel explain. This enables the animal to depend on a specific prey type, or habitat, while expanding its trophic horizons, and when the fecal matter hits the fan, they are prepared to adapt find a new prey, nocturnal feeding instead of diurnal, etc.

This piscine stasis brings us to the analogy drawn by Finkel and Barkai: that the lithic stasis, the unchanged appearance of tools, doesnt mean the humans didnt change in other ways. Their theory of mosaic evolution suggests that the early humans were happily and confidently hunting with their old-time tools while developing new behaviors and making other advances, which enabled them to cope when the mega-fauna disappeared and rendered their long-standing toolkit obsolete.

For further support, they go to the archaeological record to find examples of faunal stability matched with technological persistency; fish, even the great megalodon, will only take us so far.

The tale of the hand ax and the herbivore

The Olorgesailie Basin prehistoric site in the Kenyan section of the Rift Valley boasts the gamut of the Acheulean from 1.2 million to 500,000 years ago, and the Middle Stone Age span from about 322,000 to 300,000 years ago.

A separate paper showed a massive shift in the animals populating the Olorgesailie basin from the Acheulean to the Middle Stone Age. The change in fauna likely caused by the climate change associated with a period of heightened aridity starting 575,000 years ago is associated with a shift in technology.

Hand ax persistency during the Acheulean, in this case, is directly correlated with faunal stability, as mega-herbivores, and in particular elephants, are present throughout the pre-500,000 sequence alongside hand axes, Finkel and Barkai write. But both the hand axes and giant herbivores disappeared there following the environmental and climatic conditions that prevailed in the region from 400,000 years onward.

In the Levant, meanwhile, elephants also disappeared about 400,000 years ago, forcing the local hominins to find some other source of meat and fat. They went for fallow deer, it seems, resulting in technological persistency of the tools needed to hunt, skin and butcher deer: blades and flakes. In fact, as Barkai and Finkel point out, the blades and flake technologies were developed while hand axes were still in broad use: Hand axes might have served as an anchor, allowing early humans to test and practice new technological developments that would later play a crucial role in their adaptation to dependency on smaller game, they explain.

They also bring examples of much more recent technological persistency as a function of game persistency from Sri Lanka and Brazil.

And thus, Meir Finkel and Ran Barkai propose a unifying theory of biological and human evolution, in which a biological or technological trait will persist as long as the main caloric source persists. If theres an elephant, we need the appropriate tools to hunt the elephant. And when the elephant is gone, we need the tools appropriate to hunting a deer, and when theyre gone, to catching the rabbit and so on. Safe in this stable zone, we had the opportunity to innovate without risking our lives in the process, producing a mosaic evolution pattern.

For Finkel, who came to archaeology after a military career, its obvious. In both early humanity and the army, one doesnt innovate for no reason, he explains. You could starve or lose the war. You innovate cautiously. Conservatism is a very successful strategy neophiliacs ignore the fact that conservatism works.

Link:

Israeli archaeologists resolve ages-old evolutionary conundrum: Enter the elephant and the hand ax - Haaretz

KIRKLAND, Wash., May 26, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RightBound, the technology company that created the first autonomous sales prospecting engine, announced today that it has raised $12 million in funding, led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from IBI Tech Fund and Operator Collective. RightBound brings a new paradigm for B2B sales, addressing what has become an impossible complexity in the prospecting process, transforming manual routines such as company research, prospect selection and multi-channel outreach into a data-driven, AI-based autonomous process.

RightBound is the start of a whole new evolution and category of sales development, said Aravind Avi Bharadwaj at Innovation Endeavors, who led the Series A round. Other solutions in this space are more like guidance or workflow tools; RightBound actually drives the prospecting process for you. It takes the power of AI to a whole new level of optimization and results. Its like the difference between a navigation system and an autonomous vehicle. RightBound has the potential to fuel the sales efforts of every B2B business, from traditional industries to high-growth startups.

Todays outbound sales teams are forced to invest significant time on repetitive prospecting routines - including account research, list building, and outreach orchestration - instead of focusing on 1:1 interactions with relevant prospects. RightBound automatically completes the manual account research on the reps behalf, conducts personalized outreach to prospects across multiple channels, and connects teams with relevant, engaged buyers. With continuous optimization per every target account and individual prospect, RightBound helps to increase their average conversions from target account to qualified meeting from the industry standard of 0.5% - 1% to 1.9%, a notable improvement. Within 1-4 months of implementing RightBound, customers see between 100% and 300% ROI in terms of deals closed from leads sourced and engaged by the RightBound machine. See customer video here.

During the months of widespread work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic, sales development reps have discovered that most common practices for engaging prospects no longer apply. Office phones became obsolete, traditional work hours shifted and sending gifts to their office is no longer an option. Since RightBound is constantly learning their prospects behavior, and adjusts the playbook on the fly, it was a game changer for many sales development representative (SDR) teams and enabled them to recover and grow their performance during these times.

RightBound is bringing a completely new approach to sales prospecting that provides autonomous optimization for outbound sales for the first time, said Ran Oelgiesser, co-founder and CEO of RightBound. No machine could or should replace humans in B2B sales conversations. But its time for sales teams to step up and benefit from AI to its full extent when it comes to automation and optimization of research, targeting and customized outreach beyond whats humanly possible.

RightBound boosts the performance of sales teams in multiple ways. The RightBound machine connects with Salesforce, SalesLoft, Outreach.io and Hubspot. Sales teams still work on their prospects in those platforms, but they no longer do the heavy lifting and manual work, and instead can focus on building relationships with personalized effort for fewer, warmer, engaged prospects. Over time, the RightBound machine learns and gets better to continuously optimize its targeting and outreach.

Along with lead investor Innovation Endeavors, the financing round included new investments from Operator Collective, and additional investments from lead seed investor IBI Tech Fund, existing angel investors Zach Weinberg, Nat Turner, and Gil Shklarski.

Founded by Ran Oelgiesser and Rotem Dafni, RightBound currently has 20 full-time employees on the team and intends to double its headcount by 2022, hiring for new positions in the U.S. and Israel. With offices in Kirkland, Washington, Tel Aviv, Israel, and employees in Arizona, Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina, the company has been growing its revenues 100% per quarter for the past year.

About RightBound RightBound is the next evolution of outbound sales development. With the power of AI and machine learning, RightBounds technology helps automate and optimize the sales development process, engaging in cold outreach, collecting data on prospects, eliminating time-consuming manual cadences, and freeing up the sales development team to do more of what people do best. RightBound customers have achieved 20-40% increases in outbound sales results and 100% ROI within 3 months of implementation. To learn more visit RightBound.com

Media Contact for RightBound:

Carolyn Adams, BlueRun PR847-867-3005carolyn@bluerunpr.com

More here:

RightBound Raises $12M to Drive Next Evolution of Sales - GlobeNewswire