Glenn wrote:
>To my knowledge no one has ever said what you are saying. Can you provide a
>reference? What they say is that the !Kung appear to be the most logical
>common link between all populations, not that the !Kung themselves are
>extremely diverse.
The following is from "Mitochondrial Eve: Wounded, but not dead yet",
Science vol 257, 14 August, 1992 Ann Gibbons:
The Fall From Grace
But when Madison, then a postdoc at Harvard University, took
a look at the phylogenetic tree, he realized right away that
something was wrong - the 25 !Kung bushmen of Africa were
split on the deepest branches of the tree, even though the
!Kung are closely related. So he contacted Wilson's co-authors
on the Science paper, Stoneking and Linda Vigilant, now
at Pennsylvania State University, and got their data. After
4500 computer runs, Maddison ended up with thousands of trees
that were even more parsimonious- and many showed non-African
roots.
So the !Kung are closely related, but using certain assumptions you can show
them to be more genetically diverse (i.e. "split on the deepest branches of
the tree") then the rest of the race. There are two possibilities:
1) Evolutionists resolve this problem by changing the assumptions and being
able to generate future trees that are not parsimonious.
2) Evolutionists are not able to resolve this problem and any assumed
scenario yields results that are parsimonious (if not among the !Kung, then
among the other women that were surveyed)
If 1) is true, then the credibility of the evolutionary scenario can only
be determined by an evaluation of the assumptions that are made. Since
they have not yet published results where they successfully eliminate
parsimony (I did a computer search of the literature a couple of weeks
ago.) these assumptions cannot be evaluated because no one knows what
they might be.
If 2) is true then in order to salvage the neutral theory of evolution in the
hominid case, you must use some kind of "convergent evolution" scenario.
In Christ,
robert van de water
associate researcher
UCLA