Coosa, I vote that you hijack away. The only quasi-scientific thing I have ever read about quantitative gene-mapping in animals was something that John Gribben, venturing away from his astro-physical and cosmological arena, co-wrote about 8 years ago. It seemed, even to my layman’s understanding, to be full of errors and inconsistencies. However, he reported on (then) current genetic analyses of animals that was leading to improved evolutionary trees and “quantifying” (based on genetic differences) when evolutionary divergences probably occurred. Can you say if there is 6%, or 10%, or 2% genetic difference between your cat varieties and they still can interbreed. (compared to the 6.7% difference between Neanderthals and Hss.) That is what I was questioning earlier.
Hope spring eternal! Both Mipsman and I would like, Coosa, to find some guidelines (percents) for determining when cross species breeding would produce viable young which would become fertile themselves. Then, I think, we would throw these numbers at each other like pies. Coosa, do you want to get involved in anything this sorted? Not sure? Pies would be chocolate cream. Now you are sure? Yes? Good.
Welcome aboard to Coosa and any others brave enough to join the fray!
Percents are comfortable for most of us, we can easily picture what 6% or 10% or 75% might be. We can plug those percents into some frame of reference and say: too much, too little, just right. Percents let us evaluate things that are different as in the cases of the animals mentioned in the previous posts.
While percents are handy, are they truly meaningful? We can construct a table comparing us to other animals and plants and give the percent sin ascending order and then we’d have what? It isn’t as if we can re-arrange the building blocks and make other things (Leggos).
Actually, I am hoping that there will be very correlation between % variability in mtDNA in related species and their ability to interbreed. Then I can, with a clear conscious, welcome back my Neanderthal cousins and any other archaic Hs to the family of man despite any more DNA studies.
I am wondering if these studies aren’t just some fiendish plot to deprive Neanderthals and other archaics of the right to vote, to fair housing and equality in schools.
I don’t believe it. Oklahomans and Arkansans have marked substantial progress in recent decades, and there’s little credible opposition (at this point) to welcoming them as auxilliary members of the human species.
DHR
I know this is a tangent but as we seem to be discussing the subject and you are apparently quite knowledgeable about the subject…per the cited link
below it seems to be possible to trace the genetic ancestory of individual African Americans back to a specific area of ancestory in Africa. How is this possible given the admixture of African Americans from different groups (assumedly with the strong possibility of being from different areas) inter-marrying over the last 200-300 years of residence in the US. How could any result be conclusive?
Boris:
I’m sorry you are clinging to these severely out-dated views of population, culture and language. Let me try to provide some more accurate perspectives. I apologize in advance for not providing all the citations I might, as I said most of my files are boxed up now as I prepare to move. But I am sure that I can provide enough for you not to read. So, why do I bother, as you asked? Sometimes I hope that some folks have open minds and maybe the research of the 1990s can replace the myths of the 1890s one day.
Let me start with the issue of lactose and populations: your comments show the problem of thinking in racial terms regarding ‘biological’ issues. The generalizations made are inaccurate and deceptive, leading to bad science, bad medicine and poor public policy. Now on African peoples who use milk products --I say products since some folks drink icky curdled milk, others mix milk in various states with blood etc.
I’m confining myself to guys who use bovine milk: most Sahelian (Southern steppes south of the Sahara) pastoralists do so to various degrees. To my knowledge these include but are not limited to: nomadic Fula (Fulani), Beja, nomadic Hausa, Tamacheq, I think Turkana folks, Songhai to my knowledge etc. Essentially the peoples who live above the infamous fly line and can keep cattle year round. Do note that cattle herding is attested to among the pre-Saharan peoples from a very early date, 10000 bc if memory serves me right, so they’ve had a good long time at this. The guys below the fly line can only keep resistant dwarf cattle and that seems to be ‘newer’
So it makes sense, folks living below the fly line(s) won’t for the most part have lactose tolerance selected. Now here is where the deception of racial thinking comes in --your ‘black kids’ comment: a goodly portion of African populations do keep cattle and have for a long time. Another portion, which probably as it so happens contributed the most to African American ancestry did not.
If your ‘black’ population mostly comes from the non-bovine milk using areas, then you’ll be duped into thinking “black” people in general tend to be lactose intolerant. Well, a closer look, with the realization that in fact Africans are the MOST heterogenous population tells you that this is not a supportable conclusion. Bad medicine, bad science, especially as there are non-Africans who also have lactose intolerance and those African populations which are tolerant. Basing medical conclusions on such over-generalization is neither accurate nor a good replacement for clear-headed analysis.
Rather like, sickle cell, you need to do tests and look closer at origins to the extent possible. I use sickle cell as an example because I am unaware of accurate materials on lactose tolerance distribution. Take a look at this sickle cell distribution map:
http://www.emory.edu/PEDS/SICKLE/tutorial/Sickle%20Cell/sld014.htm
You will note despite the common-place misperception sickle cell is a “black” genetic disease, that in fact sickle cell, in several flavors, occurs in “white” areas --due to environmental adaptation to fight malaria-- and many “black” areas do not have sickle cell. The popular ‘generalization’ made about this is nothing but a dangerously deceptive fallacy of composition. So, I hope that drink milk campaigns continue and that doctors use science and not logical fallacies to address issues like lactose intolerance or sickle cell.
Now, about the tribe issue: you probably will continue to use it, but I hope at least you’ll have some open mind about how inaccurate and empty the term is. Quite simply as commonly used in re Africa, and other regions, tribe is nothing more than a bad synonym for ethnic group or ethno-linguistic group or sometimes nation. Take the example of the Yoruba, often called a tribe by the ignorant: Yoruba is a language (with lots of dialects as far as I know). There was never a Yoruba ‘tribe’: there were Yoruba speakers who lived in tribes (plural) or in (quite large) cities (rather like the German princly city-states) attested to by European travelers as early as the 1500s. What is Yoruba then? In modern times it is a ethnic group based around the language, no different than say German. E.g. in the past there were German tribes but no “German Tribe” – the singular. For an elaboration on this see
http://www.africapolicy.org/bp/ethnic.htm which gives a long, cogent analysis of why social scientists eschew tribe for ethnic group (again, for reasons of clear analysis and accuracy not politics).
Essentially, the way tribe is used in re Africa is wildly inaccurate. Since I prefer, in the tradition of social science and science in general, to use one name for the same phenomena, I use ethnic group, just as I would for Yugoslavia (re say Croats) or France (French people) etc. You can cling to the old fashioned and inaccurate usage as you like. I would note though that the little chesnut about the Afrikaaners being an African “tribe” is a silly piece of their rhetoric from apartheid days when they used the concept to try to justify their “Bantu” policies. Even if we adopted ‘tribe’ as a term for ethnic groups of all colors in Africa (why?) the Afrikaaners themselves never were a united group so I would still prefer to refer to them in the plural.
Now, regarding Aryan: I am afraid you simply did not understand my comments. Aryan is not a synonym for Indo-European nor do scholars connect language and biological groups as I read you doing since the 1950s, at least outiside of neo-Nazi circles or those who simply don’t know any better. I lost interest in this a while back but let me try to bring you up to date as far as my fairly small knowledge goes.
Firstly, in regards to the origins of Indo-European speakers, they are now generally thought to have originated in the Anatolian highlands, not in the Iranian heartlands and the Iranian folks who deserve the label “Aryan” – more accurately the “Indo-Iranians” are but a branching off from the IE heartland (albeit an important one certainly). So on that basis alone, thinking Aryan is a synonym for IE (anymore than German is or Germanic etc.)is wrong.
Now, since Greenburg linguistics has made huge strides by achnowleding there is no necessary link between a genetic population and language speakers. In fact, the first task Greenberg set himself, back when he was an anthropologist at Columbia, was breaking the false links between language and “race,” and he accomplished that successfully over 50 years ago. Compare his initial publications in the Southwest Journal of Anthropology with some old “standard” references on African languages, for example, edited by Tucker and Bryan in the early 1950s. The differences are immense. Turner and Bryan were certainly no racists; they were just trapped in the existing mindset which inaccurately linked populations with speakers, despite the ample historical evidence (since the earliest days) of the wholesale adoption of another language by ‘genetically’ unrelated people (noting of course that its more than evident the whole human race is quite closely related so this is a relative reference).
The old romantic models, fun, exciting as they were, of great hordes making sweeping invasions has given way to much more complicated models which correlate better with archaeological and other evidence showing much more complicated interactions, including peaceful and violent fusions. The old Aryan invasions of India, for example, are out the door for a much more nuanced, if less romantic, view of slow progress, assimilation and yes, some good old fashioned ass-kicking.
I encourage you to check out :
In regards to the shoddy nature of Cavalli Sforza and other’s efforts to simplistically revive linguistic-genetic connections see:
Richard Bateman, Ives Goddard, et al “Speaking of Forked Tongues: The Feasibility of Reconciling Human Phylogeny and the History of Language” Current Anthropology 31, 1. (Feb., 1990), pp. 1-24.
Richard M. Bateman, Ives Goddard, et al “On Human Phylogeny and Linguistic History: Reply to Comments” Current Anthropology 31, 2. (Apr., 1990), pp. 177-183.
Peter Daniels Atlas of Languages in Language in Society 27 (1998): 115.
calling Cavalli Sforza’s linking of genetics to language “fraudulent”
(in addition to an article I cited in my previous post.)
Regarding Indo-Europeans you can peruse some of these guys which are interesting:
Lane, George S. “On the Significance of Tocharian for Indo-European Linguistics,” in Studies in Historical Linguistics in Honor of George Sherman Lane, ed. By Walter W. Arndt et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967
Marija Gimbutas Review of Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. by Colin Renfrew The American Historical Review 95, 1. (Feb., 1990), pp. 125-127.
Winter, Werner. “Tocharian and Proto-Indo-European,” Lingua Posnaniensis 25 (1982), 1-11.
Online:
A readable overview, although somewhat Armeniafied:
http://www.armenianhighland.com/homeland/chronicle120.html
Also on conceptualization of the early speakers:
http://members.xoom.com/babaev/archive/archive.html
I’m afraid that this is just a pot-pourri of cites which I had as random electrons in my computer, but I hope it helps.
Hmmm, I missed this. Well… I doubt that it’s really possible in the way the article implies. I.e. tracing ancestry back to a specific village. That assumes a hyper-static view of the world (Africa and the USA). No folks moving about, intermarrying in Africa itself for example. But with a good (there are none yet) database on West African and Central African dna, I suspect one could nail down regions (note the plural) of likely origin. You might get lucky, depending on your ancestry, and nail down a specific ethnic group although I kinda doubt that many folks would be able to. A little on the old-fashioned romantic side, but still, what the hell. If this gives impetus for good, solid sampling in Africa, more power to them. On the other hand if they do it in a sloppy, poorly concieved way, well… Ah well, can’t get much worse than things now anyways.
So, we are keeping one thread and several topics?
Good, it is all based on DNA/mtDNA/fDNA anyway.
Coosa, Mipsman and others interested in DNA and interspecies breeding with viable offspring:
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/2000/03/17/56.cfm
For the main story
www.sfu.ca/~pmwillis/
For the follow up
Hybrid in the wild and possibly why.
http://oac3.hsc.uth.tmc.edu/pub_affairs/news/chimpgenes.html
Possible new chimp species
The Australian aboriginals are different than Africans (African/American) in that after 5 generations of impregnating with caucasians will end their Aboriginal line! where as many generations in the future can bring forth another baby with African heritage
The difference between Homo sapien and Homo zombinicus is minute, even at the DNA level.
What does that even mean? If an Australian aboriginal has a kid with a Caucasian, five generations later, 1/32 of his genes are in his descendants. If an African has a kid with a Caucasian, five generations later, 1/32 of his genes are in his descendants. If a Caucasian has a kid with a Caucasian, five generations later, 1/32 of his genes are in his descendants. There’s no difference.
Can homo sapiens interbreed with homo zombiens?
NEED ANSWER FAST!
[Moderating]
Bluewren, this is simply wrong. Please do not post to old threads unless you have significant new factual information to contribute. Because this thread is more than 11 years old, I am closing it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator