>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.
>
Thank you Robert, I will look into this a little more. Jim Foley, do you
know anything about this?
glenn