MentalPolyphonics
Smash monogamy.
Growing and nursing a giant liger is a large investment for a mommy tigress. But the daddy lion is very pleased that his mate invests so much in their offspring. There’s a cool theory that genome imprinting is mostly used to achieve a balance between the paternal goal of investment in his children and the maternal goal of living to have another child (often with another father). Rather than an aggressive growth gene being bred out of the population, a gene evolves that counters it using imprinting.
In humans, the Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes are caused by defects in a particular gene on the paternal and maternal chromosomes, respectively. Prader-Willi infants avoid breastfeeding and sleep a lot; around the age of weaning, they gain an insatiable appetite and interest in finding food (ie: do their own foraging and aren’t picky). Angelman children act extremely happy, getting greater emotional investment from their parents than their whiny siblings.
By far the biggest investment in growing a human fetus is the brain tissue, so we can assume that genome imprinting will turn out to be the cause of some neurological disorders…
I thought this set a good overview. Also: there is very little...
Autism is the Opposite of Schizophrenia | MentalPolyphonics
on April 29, 2009 at 2:24 pm
[...] been written by an autistic). So guess what the proposed cause of this spectrum of disorders is? Gnome imprinting: your mom’s genes are trying to make you schizophrenic and your dad’s genes are trying [...]