[Taxacom] Human origins

Richard Zander Richard.Zander at mobot.org
Thu Jun 18 10:20:35 CDT 2009

Why should one or the other of the hypotheses be wrong? What is this
excluded middle thing? 

Both could be right. An extinct static orangutan molecular lineage may
be the direct ancestor of both humans and chimps and gorillas. The only
thing against this is the common assumption that one traditional species
or genus cannot be in two molecular lineages at once. This is nonsense
in that widely separated populations may be static morphologically but
continue to change in DNA sequences used to track lineages, and continue
to speciate by peripheral isolation. 

I suggest Grehan & Swartz and the molecularists consider a theoretical
consolidation of all the data. There is at least one, see above.

Richard H. Zander 
Voice: 314-577-0276
Missouri Botanical Garden
PO Box 299
St. Louis, MO 63166-0299 USA
richard.zander at mobot.org
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-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of John Grehan
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 9:20 AM
Subject: [Taxacom] Human origins

>From the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review. Anyone interested in a pdf of the
original article please let me know. John Grehan Pitt anthropologist
argues humans more like orangutans than chimps A University of
Pittsburgh anthropologist argues in a paper published today that humans
most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, and not
chimpanzees, which is the prevailing belief. 
Jeffrey H. Schwartz hopes the paper will get researchers to practice
fundamental science and question some assumptions.
"What I'll be happy with is if people actually think out of the box and
consider alternative theories of human relationships with apes,"
Schwartz said Wednesday in a phone interview from Zagreb, Croatia. 
He concedes it won't happen overnight, but the paper in the Journal of
Biogeography that he co-authored could help, said Schwartz, who's the
president of the World Academy of Art and Science.
"We've done the analysis," said John Grehan, who is the paper's other
co-author, director of science at the Buffalo Museum in New York and a
research associate at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Jeffrey L. Boore, an adjunct biology professor at the University of
California-Berkeley who specializes in interpretive genome sequences,
said he knows of no strong reason to discount the DNA studies that have
demonstrated chimps and gorillas are more closely related to humans than
"The overwhelming majority of those studies have given very strong
support to excluding orangutans from the human-chimp-gorilla group,"
said Boore, who's also CEO of Genome Project Solutions, Inc., in
Hercules, Calif.
"If people disagree with it, they need to put out their evidence and let
it go back and forth," said Grehan, an entomologist who also studies the
origin and evolution of animals and plants. "But I think a lot of people
are incapable of dealing with it."
That's because for years most of the scientific community accepted DNA
analyses that suggest humans are most closely related to chimps,
Schwartz and Grehan said.
But an examination of fossil and other evidence shows humans and
orangutans share 28 features -- including reproductive systems, tooth
structures and mouth palates, the scientists say.
Schwartz and Grehan write in their paper that humans share only two
features with chimpanzees and seven with gorillas.
"In science, you must integrate the fossil record with the living
record," Grehan said. "That's what we've done."
They propose a scenario that explains the migration of the
human-orangutan common ancestor from Southeast Asia, where modern
orangutans are from.
The molecular evidence that scientists commonly cite to demonstrate the
link between humans and chimps is flawed, Schwartz said.
"Only 2 percent of the entire human genome can be verified," he said.
"But people are saying that chimps and humans share 98 percent of some
portion of that 2 percent to make their case."
That's not good science, said Malte Ebach, a paleontologist at Arizona
State University's International Institute for Species Exploration, who,
like Grehan, studies the origin and evolution of animals and plants.
"People think DNA data is better because they perceive it as
technologically superior and more progressive," Ebach said. "But
technology doesn't make data better."
Schwartz proposed his human-orangutan theory in 1982. He wrote the book,
"The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins," in 1986 that expanded on
those ideas. In 2005, Schwartz published and revised an updated version
of the book.
The work was ignored as molecular studies came out that showed the
similarity between chimps and humans.
Grehan said alternative views should not be dismissed when a theory
becomes so accepted.
During the mid-20th century, scientists so fervently disagreed with
Barbara McClintock's theory that genes could move along a chromosome
that she stopped publishing, Grehan said. In 1983, McClintock won a
Nobel Prize for her research in "jumping genes."

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