Chimp-Bonobo-Human genetics

Robert Karl Stonjek <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

There has been a lot of talk about comparisons between the
chimp and human genome, but what work is being done on human-
bonobo genomes?

It seems to me that we are much closer to the Bonobo -
they have smaller noses than chimps; pink lips; hairless
faces; can walk upright carrying items in their hands
including food; are less aggressive than Chimps; have

Quoted message said:

apatite to humans.

Does anyone have more info on this?

We branched from them at the same time as we branched
from chimps.

However, it is widely speculated that the LCA was more like
a bonobo than a chimpanzee.
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

Robert Karl Stonjek said:

There has been a lot of talk about comparisons between the
chimp and human genome, but what work is being done on human-
bonobo genomes?

It seems to me that we are much closer to the Bonobo -
they have smaller noses than chimps; pink lips; hairless
faces; can walk upright carrying items in their hands
including food; are less aggressive than Chimps; have

Quoted message said:

apatite to humans.

Does anyone have more info on this?

Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.

As a result of your post I searched the web for photos of
bonobos. I was somewhat astounded to see that many of them
look quite different than chimpanzees, and the differenence
is toward looking more human-like. Some of the females would
almost pass for humans, although extremely ugly ones. These
have breasts that look like hairy human breasts, and head
and faces like defective humans. Their body shape was longer
and leaner and more upright. Also notable was that there was
a lot of variation in their appearance. Many of them looked
pretty much like chimpanzees.

The ones that were more human-like also reminded me of
reconstructions that I have seen of early hominids, such as
australopithecine.

So based on their appearance I would call them our closest
cousins. (but they sure are ugly, to my eyes! I find chimps
and gorillas better looking.

Mitchell Timin.

--
"Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen,
few in pursuit of the goal." - Friedrich Nietzsche

annevolve.sourceforge.netannevolve.sourceforge.netOpen ↗ is what I'm into
nowadays. Humans may write to me at this address: zenguy
at shaw dot ca

"Robert Karl Stonjek" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Common misconception. It is engorged blood vessels. Bone is
not involved.

Or did you mean appetite? ;-)

Quoted message said:

Robert Karl Stonjek said:

There has been a lot of talk about comparisons between
the chimp and

human

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

genome, but what work is being done on human-bonobo
genomes?

It seems to me that we are much closer to the Bonobo -
they have smaller noses than chimps; pink lips; hairless
faces; can walk upright carrying items in their hands
including food; are less aggressive than Chimps;

have

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

the same physical proportions as Australopithecines; and
have similar

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

apatite to humans.

Does anyone have more info on this?

Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.

As a result of your post I searched the web for photos of
bonobos. I was somewhat astounded to see that many of them
look quite different than chimpanzees, and the
differenence is toward looking more human-like. Some of
the females would almost pass for humans, although
extremely ugly ones. These have breasts that look like
hairy human breasts, and head and faces like defective
humans. Their body shape was longer and leaner and more
upright. Also notable was that there was a lot of
variation in their appearance. Many of them looked pretty
much like chimpanzees.

The ones that were more human-like also reminded me of
reconstructions that I have seen of early hominids, such
as australopithecine.

So based on their appearance I would call them our closest
cousins. (but they sure are ugly, to my eyes! I find
chimps and gorillas better looking.

Mitchell Timin.

RKS: They have a smaller nose, less prominent jaw, pink
lips, and smaller teeth which is more human like, and less
facial hair than a chimp. They are also

and for reasons other than breeding ie just for fun.

They are also excellent upright walkers and can carry food
items (their hands are free when they walk) etc.

I wasn't suggesting you should date one, though I would
point out that she would be disappointed to find no
baculum bone.

For more pictures may I recommend: "Bonobo: The Forgotten
Ape" by Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting and "My Family
Album: Thirty Years of Primate Photography" by Frans de Waal

Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Robert Karl Stonjek <[email hidden]> wrote
or quoted:

Quoted message said:

There has been a lot of talk about comparisons between
the chimp and human genome, but what work is being done
on human-bonobo genomes?

It seems to me that we are much closer to the Bonobo -
they have smaller noses than chimps; pink lips; hairless
faces; can walk upright carrying items in their hands
including food; are less aggressive than Chimps; have

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

appetite to humans.

Does anyone have more info on this?

We branched from them at the same time as we branched
from chimps.

However, it is widely speculated that the LCA was more
like a bonobo than a chimpanzee.

These ideas raise a number of questions in my mind, not so
much related to chimps, bonobos, and humans per se, but
related to theories of drift, speciation, and genomics. The
best way to ask these questions seems to me to present a
series of fictitious comments regarding Stonjek's ideas that
might arise from non-experts in sbe, and then to ask for a
critique of these comments by the experts. Here goes:

1. I can't believe that all those similarities between
Bonobo and [censored] could arise by convergence (ie.
Bonobo following in [censored]'s footsteps after a several
million year delay.) Therefore, I have to assume that
many of these traits were also present in the LCA of
[censored] and Bonobo.
2. You also have to assume that they were present in the
LCA of Bonobo and Chimp, but they were then lost on the
Chimp branch.
3. But that means that, since the divergence of Chimp and
Bonobo, Chimp has been evolving faster.
4. A lot of those differences between Chimp and Bonobo
don't look like adaptations. So, I'm guessing that this
means that they arose by drift.
5. The hypothesis that Chimp is drifting faster
should be checkable just by comparing the Chimp
and Bonobo genomes.
6. No, to make that test, you need an outgroup. You need to
include the [censored] genome in this analysis.
7. In any case, if Chimp has drifted faster since the
divergence from Bonobo, then there has to be an
explanation. I think it could be due to a series of
bottlenecks in the Chimp population. Low population
increases drift.
8. No. That is wrong. Drift speed is independent of
population. It would have to be because Chimp has a
higher mutation rate than Bonobo.
9. Yes, but is it higher than the mutation rate in the Chimp-
Bonobo LCA? I don't think it can be. Mutation rates
cannot increase in evolution. Therefore we would have
to assume that the Bonobo somehow decreased its
mutation rate.
10. But can't we tell whether it was an increase in Chimp
mutations or a decrease in Bonobo mutations by looking
at the genome data?
11. Maybe, but we would need another outgroup - Gorilla, or
better yet, Pongo.
12. You molecular people are giving me a headache. Isn't it
obvious that the traits that Stonjek cites as
differences between Chimp and Bonobo are mostly the
kinds of traits that might be involved in

Bonobo by a kind of species budding. And that Chimp quickly
developed differences in those traits to enforce
reproductive isolation.
13. That is OK for all of the traits except walking upright
and carrying things in your hand. It is crazy to claim
that that trait already existed in the Chimp-Human-
Bonobo LCA, isn't it? I mean, don't we have skeletons
refuting this? So, that trait, at least, arose by
convergence.

The ideas expressed here are not necessarily those of
the poster.

So, how about it? Are any of these ideas orthodox and
theoretically sound? Are any of them just plain wrong, under
current understanding? I would appreciate it if people who
consider themselves experts could weigh in on those points
where they believe their expertise is useful.

For example, even though I am not an expert, I think that 5
is wrong, 7 is partly wrong, and 2, 6, and 8 are right. But
what do the experts say?

Has anyone tried an experiment to change the bonobo's FOXP2
allele to the human version of FOXP2?

Also, haver there been any experiments to figure out if
there is a way to make a hybrid bonobo-human? I.e., can we
work out a way to make offspring that include both genomes?

Just my curiosity; I'm not a biologist, Rich

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Menegay" <[email hidden]>
Newsgroups: sci.bio.evolution
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: Chimp-Bonobo-Human genetics

RKS: Interesting thoughts. I would add that there are
possibly two evolutionary strategies for the same
environment, and these are currently represented by the
chimp (Pan troglodyte) and bonobo (Pan paniscus).

If the bonobo is the bud that branched off the chimp
lineage, then a similar budding may have occurred in the
last common ancestor of the pre-chimp/bonobo split ancestor.
If that were so, then should the bonobo suddenly disappear,
and given enough habitat and time, another branching would
occur at sometime giving rise to another Bonobo/Australopithecine-
like line.

In other words, the Bonobo may be more human-like because it
budded off from the hominid-chimp line in the same way that
Australopithecines did, but at a much later time, so they
have not evolved as much in the human-like direction as
humans have, perhaps also because there is no selection
pressure for them to change further.

This idea says that if the (human lineage)-(chimp lineage)
can split once, it can do so again given a similar
environment, and the bonobo-chimp split is the evidence for
that idea.

So, after the space probes have infected mars with the life
so desperately sought there and the planet greens up a bit,
we can run an experiment and see if I'm right - shouldn't
take more than a few hundred thousand years to run the
experiment, once the billion years for life to re-establish
on the windy ol' planet has passed 🙂

Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 4/16/04 9:29 PM:

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Robert Karl Stonjek <[email hidden]> wrote or
quoted:

Quoted message said:

There has been a lot of talk about comparisons between
the chimp and human genome, but what work is being done
on human-bonobo genomes?

It seems to me that we are much closer to the Bonobo -
they have smaller noses than chimps; pink lips; hairless
faces; can walk upright carrying items in their hands
including food; are less aggressive than Chimps; have

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

appetite to humans.

Does anyone have more info on this?

We branched from them at the same time as we branched
from chimps.

However, it is widely speculated that the LCA was more
like a bonobo than a chimpanzee.

These ideas raise a number of questions in my mind, not so
much related to chimps, bonobos, and humans per se, but
related to theories of drift, speciation, and genomics.
The best way to ask these questions seems to me to present
a series of fictitious comments regarding Stonjek's ideas
that might arise from non-experts in sbe, and then to ask
for a critique of these comments by the experts.

I'll take the bait.

Here goes:

Quoted message said:

1. I can't believe that all those similarities between
Bonobo and [censored] could arise by convergence (ie. Bonobo
following in [censored]'s footsteps after a several million
year delay.) Therefore, I have to assume that many of
these traits were also present in the LCA of [censored] and
Bonobo.

OK, but you don't have to assume your way out of an
uncomfortable hypothesis. You could simply posit a more
comforting one, like you essentially did at the end. Of
course, there is no guarantee that the data will end up
supporting your comfort level, but then again that is how
learning takes place.

Quoted message said:

2. You also have to assume that they were present in the
LCA of Bonobo and Chimp, but they were then lost on
the Chimp branch.

This would indeed be an extension of the hypothesis
outlined above.

Quoted message said:

3. But that means that, since the divergence of Chimp and
Bonobo, Chimp has been evolving faster.

It would indeed mean this.

Quoted message said:

4. A lot of those differences between Chimp and Bonobo
don't look like adaptations. So, I'm guessing that
this means that they arose by drift.

This would be an independent hypothesis. The validity of the
previous hypothesis would not depend upon the validity of
this "guess."

Quoted message said:

5. The hypothesis that Chimp is drifting faster should be
checkable just by comparing the Chimp and Bonobo
genomes.

There are a number of things you could compare directly
between these gene pools as tests of this hypothesis. There
are a number of freeware programs available, for example,
that examine single gene pools (not in comparison with other
gene pools) for the "fingerprints" of drift, such as the
ratio of microsatellite size ranges to the number of alleles
with different sizes at a particular locus. Although I am
not aware of methods designed specifically for the kind of
comparison suggested here, you could easily compare test
statistics generated from the single gene pool tests.

Quoted message said:

6. No, to make that test, you need an outgroup. You need
to include the [censored] genome in this analysis.

Although you do not NEED to do this, phylogenetically
grounded methods of comparison provide a potentially
powerful approach. The problem with power is that it can be
misused (misleading), so you have to know what you are doing
here. Outgroups are generally used as surrogates for the
true MRCA of the ingroup (chimps and bonobos, in this case).
If the outgroup is different from the ingroup MRCA in key
aspects, then you can be misled by the analysis. This issue
is not as big of a problem with many of the relative rate
tests, although it is still something to be considered.

Quoted message said:

7. In any case, if Chimp has drifted faster since the
divergence from Bonobo, then there has to be an
explanation. I think it could be due to a series of
bottlenecks in the Chimp population. Low population
increases drift.

Right. Genetic diversity is lost from a population faster by
drift when the effective population size is lower.

Quoted message said:

8. No. That is wrong. Drift speed is independent of
population. It would have to be because Chimp has a
higher mutation rate than Bonobo.

7 is not wrong, but neither is 8; one focuses on short term
effects, while the other focuses on long term effects. When
drift acts fast enough, or when the strength of selection is
low enough, then the evolution of the population is more
strongly controlled by the mutation rate. As Kimura pointed
out, in the mutation/drift balance model population size has
no effect on the rate of evolutionary substitution (allelic
fixation) in a population. Smaller populations drift faster,
but have to wait longer for new mutations to generate
polymorphism. Larger populations have plenty of new
mutations to deal with every generation, but drift happens
more slowly. These effects negate the influence of
population size on the rate of evolutionary substitution.

Quoted message said:

9. Yes, but is it higher than the mutation rate in the
Chimp-Bonobo LCA? I don't think it can be. Mutation
rates cannot increase in evolution. Therefore we would
have to assume that the Bonobo somehow decreased its
mutation rate.

I have never seen an argument positing that mutation rates
cannot increase in evolution, and this claim seems patently
false to me.

Quoted message said:

10. But can't we tell whether it was an increase in Chimp
mutations or a decrease in Bonobo mutations by looking
at the genome data?

I don't think this would be possible by looking directly at
these genomes. You would probably need to use a
phylogenetically grounded comparative method to get at this.

Quoted message said:

11. Maybe, but we would need another outgroup - Gorilla,
or better yet, Pongo.

Yup. In fact, I think you would need to nest the
chimp/bononbo clade into a fairly rich phylogenetic context
to characterize the history of mutation rate evolution in
the lineage underpinning the chimp/bonobo MRCA.

Quoted message said:

12. You molecular people are giving me a headache. Isn't
it obvious that the traits that Stonjek cites as
differences between Chimp and Bonobo are mostly the
kinds of traits that might be involved in

Quoted message said:

Bonobo by a kind of species budding. And that Chimp
quickly developed differences in those traits to enforce
reproductive isolation.

This hypothesis could be roughly true, even if the other
hypotheses are roughly true. It approaches the issue from a
different angle.

Quoted message said:

13. That is OK for all of the traits except walking
upright and carrying things in your hand. It is crazy
to claim that that trait already existed in the Chimp-Human-
Bonobo LCA, isn't it? I mean, don't we have skeletons
refuting this? So, that trait, at least, arose by
convergence.

I see this argument as sloppy on many points, and
therefore unconvincing to a skeptic. Note that I am not
arguing it is false, just that it is based on too much arm
waiving. It would not be "crazy to claim that that trait
already existed in the Chimp-Human-Bonobo LCA;" this would
just be another hypothesis. It seems unlikely to be true,
but that would make a bold hypothesis, which is a good
thing. We do not have skeletons refuting this hypothesis
at this point. In fact, we have very little homonid fossil
evidence at all from the critical period of time when the
lineages leading to humans, gorillas, chimps and bonobos
became isolated. There may be a few teeth from that time
period, but I don't think there is ANY other fossil
material of value to point to.

Cheers,

Guy Hoelzer

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

We branched from them at the same time as we branched
from chimps.

However, it is widely speculated that the LCA was more
like a bonobo than a chimpanzee.

Stupid question: What are the autapomorphies for chimp and
bonobo? I just can't remember.

P.S. Did anybody ever try to argue that bonobo is in fact
the sister taxon of human? Would be a nice blow to the
last resort of the dogma of human specialness though.

"Rich" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Have there been any experiments to figure out if there is
a way to make a hybrid bonobo-human?

What a remarkably bad idea!

Any lab attempting this would be attacked by peasants
carrying torches and pitchforks.

There are some kinds of ethical and political forbidden
fruit that Science doesn't need to taste.

Still, if it does happen, sign me up for pitchfork duty.

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Thank you for a thoughtful and informative (particularly
point 5) response. I mostly agree with your points, most of
which have been snipped to save space. I also tend to agree
with your delicate hints that my protagonists are probably
speculating too freely based on some very limited data. The
data are also suspect due to possible investigator bias in
the data selection - one can also find points of convergence
between human and sea otter (to choose one example not
completely at random). I think that my fictional
protagonists are wrong to draw any conclusions regarding the
Chimp-Bonobo LCA from this data, and I think that Stonjek's
own theory (of a kind of directed convergence that would
occur in any branch from the Chimp line) is even less
believable.

I respond to only two points.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

7. In any case, if Chimp has drifted faster since the
divergence from Bonobo, then there has to be an
explanation. I think it could be due to a series of
bottlenecks in the Chimp population. Low population
increases drift.

Quoted message said:

Right. Genetic diversity is lost from a population faster
by drift when the effective population size is lower.

Your response is technically correct, but I don't yet see
how this would explain either of the two hypothetical data
patterns being considered. I don't see that a bottleneck
would cause longer branch lengths in the genome-data-derived
tree, nor that it would result in more phenotypic divergence
from the LCA than would be seen in a more populous branch.
Loss of diversity is not the same as creation of novelty.
But perhaps I am missing some subtlety.

The validity or not of the argument in #7 is interesting to
me because one occasionally finds low population touted as a
source of novelty in analyses of speciation. It seems that
the proponents of these analyses have been influenced more
by Wright than by Fisher. I don't yet understand the
Wrightian viewpoint.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

9. [snip] Mutation rates cannot increase in evolution.
[snip]

I have never seen an argument positing that mutation rates
cannot increase in evolution, and this claim seems
patently false to me.

Seems false to me too, but I seem to recall Larry Moran
asserting something like this in a dialog with Tyler.
(However, this may be a figment of my imagination - I
couldn't find the post that I thought I had remembered.) I
hope that Larry weighs in on this issue, to clarify. If he
did say something along these lines, it would have been that
NS cannot cause a mutation rate increase - I wouldn't think
that he would be rash enough to state flatly that evolution
could not produce one.

Joachim Dagg said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

We branched from them at the same time as we branched
from chimps.

However, it is widely speculated that the LCA was more
like a bonobo than a chimpanzee.

Stupid question: What are the autapomorphies for chimp and
bonobo? I just can't remember.

P.S. Did anybody ever try to argue that bonobo is in fact
the sister taxon of human? Would be a nice blow to
the last resort of the dogma of human specialness
though.

In Danish scientific radio broadcasts, Danish specialists in
human evolution will often argue that bonobos and humans are
closer related than any of the two species are related to
the chimpanzee.
--
Per Erik Rønne

Rich <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Has anyone tried an experiment to change the bonobo's
FOXP2 allele to the human version of FOXP2?

Also, haver there been any experiments to figure out if
there is a way to make a hybrid bonobo-human? I.e., can we
work out a way to make offspring that include both
genomes?

Perhaps search under the word "humanzee".

gate.nethum ape chrom.htmlOpen ↗

...explains the chromosomal differences that would be
encountered.

Today such a project would be technically challenging - but
in the future we will be able to interbreed (at least
genetically) with practically every other organism on the
planet - including our cousins.

I.e. technology will turn the biosphere's gene pool into one
big melting pot - and horizontal gene transfer will see
a dramatic resurgence - as a technology trade is
established between previously-separated species.
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

Jim Menegay <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

9. [snip] Mutation rates cannot increase in evolution.
[snip]

I have never seen an argument positing that mutation
rates cannot increase in evolution, and this claim seems
patently false to me.

Seems false to me too, but I seem to recall Larry Moran
asserting something like this in a dialog with Tyler.
(However, this may be a figment of my imagination - I
couldn't find the post that I thought I had remembered.)

Relevant post:

groups.google.comgroupsOpen ↗
rwin.ediacara.org

As I recall, the G. C. Williams 1966 volume I mention argued
not so much that mutation rates couldn't increase - but
higher mutation rates couldn't be favoured because of the
effect of mutations themselves.

It suggested that high levels of mutation might benefit
high levels of selection - but could not be favoured
because they were deleterious on the individual level - and
one of the themes of the book was that group selection
models didn't work.

But maybe I'm being too charitable - certainly it seems
clear that mutation rates are a function of expenditure on
error correction machinery, maintenance and repair
activities, and burning fuel cleanly - and those things are
clearly under natural selection's control - so natural
selection can turn up the error rate - by reducing
expenditure on machinery to rectify errors.
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 03:34:25 +0000 (UTC),

Jim Menegay said:

Guy Hoelzer <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

[snip]

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

9. [snip] Mutation rates cannot increase in evolution.
[snip]

I have never seen an argument positing that mutation
rates cannot increase in evolution, and this claim seems
patently false to me.

Seems false to me too, but I seem to recall Larry Moran
asserting something like this in a dialog with Tyler.
(However, this may be a figment of my imagination - I
couldn't find the post that I thought I had remembered.) I
hope that Larry weighs in on this issue, to clarify. If he
did say something along these lines, it would have been
that NS cannot cause a mutation rate increase - I wouldn't
think that he would be rash enough to state flatly that
evolution could not produce one.

I don't believe that mutation rates change much during the
evolution of a lineage. It doesn't make biochemical (or
logical) sense. There are a few examples of sub-populations
with different mutations rates and there are certainly
regions of the chromosome that have higher mutation rates
than others but this isn't the same thing.

Larry Moran

Hi Jim,

[I have snipped discussion of our broad agreements.]

in article [email hidden], Jim Menegay at
[email hidden] wrote on 4/20/04 8:34 PM:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

7. In any case, if Chimp has drifted faster since the
divergence from Bonobo, then there has to be an
explanation. I think it could be due to a series of
bottlenecks in the Chimp population. Low population
increases drift.

Quoted message said:

Right. Genetic diversity is lost from a population faster
by drift when the effective population size is lower.

Your response is technically correct, but I don't yet see
how this would explain either of the two hypothetical data
patterns being considered. I don't see that a bottleneck
would cause longer branch lengths in the genome-data-
derived tree, nor that it would result in more phenotypic
divergence from the LCA than would be seen in a more
populous branch. Loss of diversity is not the same as
creation of novelty. But perhaps I am missing some
subtlety.

The validity or not of the argument in #7 is interesting
to me because one occasionally finds low population touted
as a source of novelty in analyses of speciation. It seems
that the proponents of these analyses have been influenced
more by Wright than by Fisher. I don't yet understand the
Wrightian viewpoint.

I would point you to a literature that I consider to be
vastly underappreciated. I think that the originator of this
way of thinking was Hampton Carson, who was quickly joined
by Alan Templeton. Carson may have coined the term
"coadapted gene complexes" in this context. His argument was
that in large populations natural selection effectively
builds and maintains sets of alleles at numerous loci that
interact functionally and exhibit non-linear epistasis in
such a way as to canalize the development of the organism.
Carson was an early evolutionary geneticist focusing on
Hawaiian Drosophila, so he naturally related chromosomal
inversion as a mechanism protecting linked sets of loci and
facilitating the evolution of the coadapted gene complexes.
He then considered founder effect driven speciation, which
is a natural concept for someone studying Hawaiian
Drosophila. He reasoned that the intensity of drift, and the
virtual loss of selective effect accompanying a severe
bottleneck could result in the disintegration of coadapted
gene complexes. This would mean that the founder population
would suffer reduced mean fitness during this period, but it
would not guarantee extinction, especially in a benign
environment. If the founder population is able to grow
despite the reduction in mean fitness, natural selection
would then regain its effect and the influence of drift
would be reduced, resulting in the building of NEW coadapted
gene complexes. This process would result in the origin of a
unique species that is genetically incompatible with the
source population. This paradigm made some bold (counter-
intuitive) predictions that have been strongly supported by
several studies, although IMHO the message of all of this
has not been well-digested by the evolutionary biology
community at large. For example, Carson predicted that
putting an historically large population through a severe
bottleneck would INCREASE heritable variation for all kinds
of traits, including fitness itself, at the same time that
it DECREASES genetic variation. This turns out to be
generally true IMHO, which reveals a potentially important
kind of interaction between drift and selection that can
strongly facilitate the potential for adaptive evolution
beyond what natural selection can do on its own. I see this
as the connection with the thinking of Sewall Wright, who
emphasized this aspect of the shifting balance model.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

9. [snip] Mutation rates cannot increase in evolution.
[snip]

I have never seen an argument positing that mutation
rates cannot increase in evolution, and this claim seems
patently false to me.

Seems false to me too, but I seem to recall Larry Moran
asserting something like this in a dialog with Tyler.
(However, this may be a figment of my imagination - I
couldn't find the post that I thought I had remembered.) I
hope that Larry weighs in on this issue, to clarify. If he
did say something along these lines, it would have been
that NS cannot cause a mutation rate increase - I wouldn't
think that he would be rash enough to state flatly that
evolution could not produce one.

I, too, would be interested in seeing an argument on issue
if there is one to be made.

Cheers,

Guy

[email hidden] (Joachim Dagg) wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Tim Tyler <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

We branched from them at the same time as we branched
from chimps.

However, it is widely speculated that the LCA was more
like a bonobo than a chimpanzee.

Stupid question: What are the autapomorphies for chimp and
bonobo? I just can't remember.

P.S. Did anybody ever try to argue that bonobo is in fact
the sister taxon of human? Would be a nice blow to
the last resort of the dogma of human specialness
though.

Jared Diamond argues in "The Third Chimpanzee" that chimps
and bonobos should be placed in the genus, _Homo_ with
_Homo sapiens_.

He correctly points out that there is less genetic distance
between humans and chimps and bonobos than there are for
many other species that occupy the same genus.

Keith

So, what are we going to call the hybrid species, assuming
that it is fertile? It would have to be either '[censored]
paniscus' or 'Pan sapiens'. No doubt, come election time,
politicians will be spreading rumours of other candidates
lineage "no, our family has always been hairy, long before
the bonobo-human experiments. And opposable toes allow me to
use two keyboards simultaneously, allowing me to do twice
the work of others."

Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.

Quoted message said:

Rich <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Has anyone tried an experiment to change the bonobo's
FOXP2 allele to the human version of FOXP2?

Also, haver there been any experiments to figure out if
there is a way to make a hybrid bonobo-human? I.e., can
we work out a way to make offspring that include both
genomes?

Perhaps search under the word "humanzee".

gate.nethum ape chrom.htmlOpen ↗

...explains the chromosomal differences that would be
encountered.

Today such a project would be technically challenging -
but in the future we will be able to interbreed (at least
genetically) with practically every other organism on the
planet - including our cousins.

I.e. technology will turn the biosphere's gene pool into
one big melting pot - and horizontal gene transfer
will see a dramatic resurgence - as a technology
trade is established between previously-separated
species.
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

"Tim Tyler" wrote

Quoted message said:

Rich wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Has anyone tried an experiment to change the bonobo's
FOXP2 allele to the human version of FOXP2?

Also, haver there been any experiments to figure out if
there is a way to make a hybrid bonobo-human? I.e., can
we work out a way to make offspring that include both
genomes?

Perhaps search under the word "humanzee".

gate.nethum ape chrom.htmlOpen ↗

Interesting comparison, thanks.

Quoted message said:

...explains the chromosomal differences that would be
encountered.

A recent BBC web page discussed new findings about FOXP2
specifically, and the methylation of FOXP2 in humans versus
in Bonobos. It seems there might be some ability to give
Bonobos better language capability in the brain by somehow
methylating the FOXP2 alleles. If that could be done,
Bonobos would still not have the voice tract capabilities of
humans, but they might be better able to use language-like
communications mechanisms, such as sign languages, to test
whether the language capabilities have indeed been
implemented in the brain.

It would be good to know another species has some ability to
communicate with us, even if we have to modify the Bonobo
genome incrementally to get them there.

Quoted message said:

Today such a project would be technically challenging -
but in the future we will be able to interbreed (at least
genetically) with practically every other organism on the
planet - including our cousins.

I.e. technology will turn the biosphere's gene pool into
one big melting pot - and horizontal gene transfer
will see a dramatic resurgence - as a technology
trade is established between previously-separated
species.
--
__________
|im |yler timtyler.orgtimtyler.orgOpen ↗ [email hidden] Remove
lock to reply.

Thanks for the insights, Rich