Australopithecus and orangutans

[John grehan]

Jason de Koning wrote:

>>Since ultimately, the only way we have to really convince each other
>>is through experimental or analytic tests of theoretical predictions,
>>consider the several experimental phylogeny papers, where different
>>groups have subjected bacterial strains or viruses to serial
>>bottlenecks (or recently, generated mutants along a known phylogeny by
>>PCR), sequenced genes from some of those strains, and then correctly
>>reconstructed the historical process of simulated speciation.

The above seems to indicate that gene sequences can provide accurate
predictions of phylogeny. It does not, however, follow that gene sequences
do this for all phylogenies.

>>If one chooses to ignore molecular data out of principle, one must
>>confront their principles with ... congruence between large
>>morphological and molecular datasets, which all suggest that the
>>cladistic analysis of molecular data (as defined conventionally) all
>>lead to known, correct, or congruent answers.

I thought it was interesting to see congruence with morphological datasets
being cited as one of the demonstrations for the reliability of molecular
datasets and yet molecular phylogenies are then supposed to over rule
morphological phylogenies when the two are incongruent.

With respect to the orangutan hypothesis the issue may boil down to whether
the rejection of uniquely shared human-orangutan characters is seen to be
too problematic relative to the rejection of the shared gene sequences. I
admit on my part that my view is considerably influenced by the nature of
the human-orangutan characters involved - that they include some very
'dramatic' features as I have mentioned before. I hope to get some time
tomorrow to post the proposed human-chimp characters for comparison.

John Grehan