On 7 Oct 2010 at 12:58, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > See, perhaps: > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/04/AR2010100405 > 700_2.html?waporef=obinsite > <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/04/AR201010040 > 5700_2.html?waporef=obinsite&sid=ST2010100405975> &sid=ST2010100405975 > > "Subsequent research this year concluded that 1 to 4 percent of the modern > human genome comes from Neanderthals, making the link tighter. And while the > percentage may seem small, Riel-Salvatore says it has to be understood in > context. Neanderthals, he said, probably never reached a total population > greater than hundreds of thousands, while Homo sapiens came in far greater > numbers." > > REALLY? What's the denominator? Does "genome" refer to the "genes", in > which case the denominator consists of the 1 percent of the stuff on the > chromosomes" that actually codes for a protein. No wait a minute. We share > 99 percent of that with a chimpanzee, right? So, the denominator would be > the proportion of the genes (codons) that we DON'T share with chimpanzees, > that we DO share with neandertals. No. that's not right either. We > presumably share almost a 100 percent of our genes with neandertals. Can > anybody help me figure this out?
There's probably no point in trying to "figure out" a newspaper reporter's version of what a scientific paper (or even its interviewed author) may or may not have said. So I won't click on the link before going on my errands; and with luck an answer will have appeared by the time I get back. However, *perhaps* there's a clue in the choice of the phrase "comes from", which might mean something distinct from "shared with". After all, *none* of the human genome "comes from" chimpanzees, no matter how much of it is "shared with" chimpanzees. But if this article is related to one I recently saw, which asserted that (1) yes, Neanderthals were a different species from _Homo sapiens sapiens_ (just as chimpanzees are), but (2) the two species could and did produce significant numbers of fertile hybrids (which is not the case with Homo and Pan, I believe), then it would indeed be so that some of the modern _Homo sapiens sapiens_ genome could be said to be "shared with" both the genome of pre-interbreeding Hss and the Neanderthal genome; and it might even be possible to decide what, and/or how much. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
