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>Yes, my complaint is that you are highjacking an article on species differentiation in giraffes to talk about purported human subspecies. I did nothing of the

>Yes, my complaint is that you are highjacking an article on species differentiation in giraffes to talk about purported human subspecies. I did nothing of the sort. >No, we emphatically do not have that high of a genetic difference Yes, we do. The genetic distance between Nigerians and Australian aboriginals is .176. This is greater than the distance between almost any subspecies ever tested. >DNA doesn't lie. Humans lie, or are mistaken Yes they do. And they will even deliberately misrepresent facts to present things the way they want them to be. Like looking at isolated segments of DNA and drawing conclusions based on that (your link).

dalke 10y ago
Citation for the "0.176", please? There are many scoring functions for DNA similarity. Citation for the same numbers for chimpanzee subspecies, please? Also, which Nigerians do you refer to? Huasa? Ibo? Because I think you meant to say either Yoruba or Western Pygmy. At least I give links so others can double-check my statements. I would laugh if your reference used 500 bases rather than 10,000, or used something under strong evolutionary pressure instead of something neutral like this study. FWIW, I'll use the time to the most recent common ancestor as my scoring function. For chimpanzees, two of the subspecies started to separate ~1 million years ago: http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/AAAS/Kaessmann_Extensive_Science_1999_1556296.pdf http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/AAAS/Kaessmann_Extensive_Sci... : > When the MRCAs of the two chimpanzee subspecies for which multiple samples were available were estimated, they were found to be 1,755,000 years (95% confidence interval: 915,000 to 3,660,000 years) for the central chimpanzees and 502,000 years (95% confidence interval: 270,000 to 1,010,000 years) for the western chimpanzees. The most recent ancestry for humans is no more than 100-200,000 years ago, dating from Mitochondrial Eve. We've had about an order of magnitude fewer generations to diversify than the chimps have. (We reach puberty later than chimps, so our generations are longer. Also, it's much more likely that our most recent common ancestor, pre-1400, is more recent than mtEve.) By that definition, chimps are more diverse than humans.

dalke 10y ago

Citation for the "0.176", please? There are many scoring functions for DNA similarity. Citation for the same numbers for chimpanzee subspecies, please? Also, which Nigerians do you refer to? Huasa? Ibo? Because I think you meant to say either Yoruba or Western Pygmy. At least I give links so others can double-check my statements. I would laugh if your reference used 500 bases rather than 10,000, or used something under strong evolutionary pressure instead of something neutral like this study. FWIW, I'll use the time to the most recent common ancestor as my scoring function. For chimpanzees, two of the subspecies started to separate ~1 million years ago: http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/AAAS/Kaessmann_Extensive_Science_1999_1556296.pdf http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/AAAS/Kaessmann_Extensive_Sci... : > When the MRCAs of the two chimpanzee subspecies for which multiple samples were available were estimated, they were found to be 1,755,000 years (95% confidence interval: 915,000 to 3,660,000 years) for the central chimpanzees and 502,000 years (95% confidence interval: 270,000 to 1,010,000 years) for the western chimpanzees. The most recent ancestry for humans is no more than 100-200,000 years ago, dating from Mitochondrial Eve. We've had about an order of magnitude fewer generations to diversify than the chimps have. (We reach puberty later than chimps, so our generations are longer. Also, it's much more likely that our most recent common ancestor, pre-1400, is more recent than mtEve.) By that definition, chimps are more diverse than humans.