Australopithecus and orangutans

[John Grehan]

At 09:46 AM 5/14/2003 -0400, Jason de Koning wrote:
>>...(and one's skepticism should be based on some kind of direct appraisal
>>of the characters)...
>
>>the total number of proposed human-orangutan synapomorphies currently
>>stands at 36 (and some may be more robust than others).
>
>Well since that's how you feel, the total number of molecular
>synapomorphies supporting ((human, chimp) orang) is probably around 3-5
>orders of magnitude beyond that figure at the moment.  Do you yet care to
>confront your skepticism and "directly appraise" those characters?

I already have. I have commented earlier (if memory serves me correctly)
that molecular 'synapomorphies' are not determined prior to analysis, but
are inferred after parsimony or maximum likelihood methods that impute a
derived status to characters. To me that's just applying tree construction
techniques to characters that are an unknown combination of plesiomorphic
and apomorphic states and the shortest resulting tree infers those
characters to be the synapomorphies.

In Ken's case I don't think he has identified the nature of his skepticism.
Perhaps its based on molecular characters, perhaps on morphological.
Perhaps he could offer clarification on that.

John Grehan


>- Jason
>
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Dr. John Grehan
Director of Science and Collections
Buffalo Museum of Science
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