re: Science is debunking itself again

quote:

---

Oh? Link? (or should I say Missing Link?)

---

This is the first time we can detect the actual signal of Neanderthal ancestry in Africans,” said Lu Chen, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics (LSI) and a co-author of a new paper that published Thursday in the journal Cell.

Joshua Akey, a professor at LSI who led the study, suggested their findings cast doubt on the widely held “out of Africa” theory of human migration

This ancient group of Europeans then migrated into Africa, introducing Neanderthal ancestry to African populations.

quote:

---

Survival of the fittest is not evolutionary, it is the driver of evolution.

---

New Scientist: By itself, survival of the fittest is a dead end. People are especially guilty of confusing survival of the fittest with evolution.

What’s more, although the phrase conjures up an image of a violent struggle for survival, in reality the word “fittest” seldom entails evolution. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy.

quote:

---

quote:

---

DNA changes are not random

---

DNA mutations are

---

Nature: Why mutation is not as random as we thought. Challenging the dogma of gene evolution. However, new research is challenging this idea of randomness, showing that mutations in the genome of the plant Arabidosis thaliana appear to happen less frequently in important regions of the genome.

quote:

---

DNA similarity between chimps and humans has dropped from 98.5% to 81%

---

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Greater Than 98% Chimp/Human DNA Similarity? Not Any More.

David A. DeWitt cited a study which found that the two species are only 95% identical when insertions and deletions are considered, showing that the estimate of divergence depends mainly on what type of DNA is being compared. A number of differences between humans and chimps were named that are difficult to quantify in an estimate of sequence divergence, including shorter telomeres in humans, a 10% larger chimp genome, and great differences in chromosomes 4, 9, 12 and the Y chromosome, for example. Indeed, DNA similarity estimates ‘do not adequately represent fine changes in genome organization.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirm in a study, nearly one-half of the MHC region was sequenced, ‘which to date represents the longest continuous sequence within this species [chimps], our closest evolutionary relative’, and has been described as a ‘rapidly evolving’ part of the genome. Although it has been held that human/chimp similarity in the MHC is ‘so great that the alleles must have originated before the supposed chimp/human evolutionary divergence’, the sequence results actually dropped the DNA similarity estimate down to 86.7%