Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5177565" data-attributes="member: 4720">As is the case with a lot of DNA, the vast majority of it will be either junk or regulatory functions we don't understand yet.  I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for anyone to know what any of it does.That said, I'm sure within a couple years we'll have a couple people claiming to know something, and the media will hype it beyond belief.  But the more media attention a bit of science gets, the faster the facts become fuzzy and then irrelevant.As for the DNA evidence.... spotty as heck and not as mature a science as many would suggest.  I will continue to live with the largely untried hypothesis that interbreeding happened.  My reasons for this have little to do with various dodgy examples of paleo-genetic analysis.  After all, humans will mate with anything that will stand still long enough.  That assessment has stood unaltered for some time, and it will continue to stand as the most behaviorally parsimonious set of circumstances in my opinion, until such time as the evidence is conclusive.Actually, a decent percentage of female lygers and tigons have been fertile.  For some reason, we've never really bothered applying everything we've learned about the fallacies of the generally accepted species concept to animals.  We've got this species concept we inherited from the Dark Ages that we keep teaching in school because it kinda works a decent chunk of the time for more or less all of the highly visible animals and we don't notice the ubiquitous, even habitual, way everything but animals ignores it almost entirely.That would involve explaining complicated things to children.  Can't allow that.While non-trivial, that's not insurmountable.  You could back check your DNA libraries against each separate human lineage they tested (5 as I recall) and see if there are differences that cannot be accounted for due to contamination from the lineage of the researchers.This is an example of journalists asking researchers to speculate on possible, but not necessarily probable, mistakes.  It is also a go-to statement for scientists who don't want this to be true: "Those guys are doin' it wrong."</blockquote>

Verification