Publishing on human origins

[John Grehan]

>Morphological results can be presented testable, with probabilities that can
>be entered into a Bayes' Formula with the molecular results as a prior, or
>vice versa. I'll bet the orangutan article that was rejected had no real
>statistical evaluation of which is better, the morphological or the
>molecular results.

A probability test might be suitable if one is comparing apples with
apples. In the case of morphological characters vs DNA sequences I don't
thing that would be the case.

Despite the protestations of Curtis and others, using outgroups to root DNA
sequences does not make the data any more cladistic in the first place.

The article focused on the uniquely shared morphological characteristics
shared by humans and orangutans, and the relative lack of comparably
uniquely shared morphological features shared by humans and chimpanzees.
The paper was not a direct critique of molecular characters, although it
did point out that the DNA sequence similarities might be called into
question. The end point of the paper is that the australpoithecines have
certain features that are shared with orangutans rather than chimpanzees
(these characters would be symplesiomorphies if australopithecines are more
closely related to humans than orangutans, and parallelisms if
australopithecines are more closely related to humans than chimpanzees), so
the facial form of the skull is like an orangutan which is the opposite of
what one might otherwise predict from the DNA sequence similarity if DNA
sequences do precisely map phylogeny (which seems to be more an assumption
than a demonstration).

Lastly the paper pointed out that there seems to be NOTHING (have to use
upper case for emphasis here) in the literature listing synapomoprhies
supporting the monophyly of humans, chimps and australopithecines. I have
so far contacted about 10 prominent players. They have either not responded
once this question is broached, or they are unable to provide anything. In
my latest effort a hominid paleontologists could only cite the earlier
fusion of the os centrale and frontal sinuses for the monophyly of humans,
chimps, and australopithecines but these two features are also found in
gorillas!

John