[Taxacom] Schwartz and Grehan (2009) cited on Dinosaur Mailing List

[Kim van der Linde]

Well, I always liked the chromosomal rearrangement patterns the best as 
evidence for human-chimp, especially chromosome two that is most similar 
to the chimpanzee chromosomes. Really, parallelisms are so common that 
you need far more than some morphological similarities to be able to 
reject the results of many thousands of base-pairs, in-dels, chromosome 
inversions etc. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Kim

On 9/12/2011 11:26 PM, Kenneth Kinman wrote:
> Dear All,
>         I was catching up on postings at the DML (Dinosaur Mailing List),
> and one last week caught my eye.  It cites the paper by Schwartz and
> Grehan (2009) challenging the exclusivity of a supposed chimp-hominid
> clade.  Although the poster has reservations about the paper's
> conclusions, he does make some interesting observations (as does Greg
> Paul, whose posting he is responding to).  However, one thing that he
> fails to point out is that Schwartz and Grehan, 2009, do not produce
> even a single molecular character to support their proposed
> orangutan-hominid clade, which in my mind is it biggest shortcoming.
>         Therefore, if Schwartz and Grehan cannot produce any molecular
> evidence to support an orangutan-hominid clade, and the molecularists
> cannot produce convincing morphological evidence for a chimp-hominid
> clade, then I still feel that hominids most like did not exclusively
> clade with either of them, but that they are sister group to a
> chimp-gorilla clade.
>         It seems that symplesiomorphies are relatively easy to find among
> greats apes, but finding true synapomorphies (molecular or
> morphological) for its subclades is no easy matter.  I have little hope
> of relevant fossil finds shedding much light on the debate anytime soon,
> but whole genomes (especially certain LINES contained therein) will soon
> make considerable progress in resolving this debate.  Anyway, for the
> DML postings (for what they are worth), see the weblink below.
>            -----------Ken Kinman
>
> http://dml.cmnh.org/2011Sep/msg00030.html
>
>
>
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