McNair Research Project
A Revised View of Thought and Language:
On Olfactory Conditions and Genetic Signaling in Non-Human Primates (2010)
Nathaniel Bobbitt
McNair Report 2010 Portland State University
Abstract
This project models sensory reception through the evolutionary disjunction between scent-marking primates (Prosimii) with an olfactory awareness and color reception in Catarrhini primates. Combinatorial encoding in olfactory receptors represents a cognitive architecture that revises the ricochet effect as language conveys thought and thought relays language. Accordingly, the chemical ecology in vertebrates represents an alternative to natural language through chemical signals. Olfactory reception suggests a biological machine and warrants further analysis. Meta-analysis in this study utilizes corpus analysis and visualization of comparative genomics. Several methods underlie this inquiry: 1. cross sectional analysis of voluminous research, 2. multifaceted model of keyword analysis, 3. linguistic analysis and bioinformatics converge to suggest morphological, genetic, and cellular evidence. Observation of evolutionary evidence maps contours in a biological landscape. Such contoured cross-sections report on evolution without resorting to the historical and ancestral search typical of cladistics. Analysis of an evolutionary record in primates requires navigating across mutations for effect (exaptations) or unlikely pairings of function and speciation. Amphibian genomics in the Xenopus group represent a significant evolutionary research model. Xenopus embryo data supports a practical option in evolutionary research focusing on in situ experimentation rather than massive DNA sequence analysis. Furthermore, recent primate research offer genomic drift, pseudogenes, and copy number variation for evolutionary research. These experimental criteria point beyond structural transcriptional matrices. In evolutionary research mutations synonymous with the central dogma in genetics may support only a special case. The next steps in olfactory experimentation may advance in situ and gene ontologies derived from this meta-analysis.
Keywords: evolution, overlapping cognitive architectures, mirror neurons, olfactory receptors, biological machines, chemical ecology, cladistics, primate genomics, xenopus genomics, genomic drift, pseudogenes, copy number variation