Yes it does.

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Irony here is that when one mentions publishing in prominent ‘mainstream’ journals as possiblity indicating soemthing about the quality of the work, one then gets the response that the source of publishing has no necessary relationship to the quality. I am inclined to agree.

“P.S. what about the ERVs issue?” just responded.

Are these ltr ervs uniquely identical or do they share unique base substitutions?

By the way, none of the ltr’s listed in this paper support a human-chimp clade.

P.S. what about the ERVs issue?

How did Bob O’H know what jouornal slpage was referring to?

What Rivista?

Rivista di Biologia. It has a bad reputation, having published papers by the likes of John A. Davison (an infamous crank).

In addition, Carl Zimmer points out that Alu inserts tell a similar story. See the thread I linked to earlier.

I would be interested to see John Lynch explain how their results indicate that Pan is closer to Homo than Pongo.

John Grehan

Outgroup analysis is part of the cladistic method, but one also needs a homology criterion for each character and that’s where it gets tricky with bases that replace each other with no transitional information.

I notice that one of the example citations refers to hybridization – a method acknowledged by molecular theorists to be phenetic.

“NONE of which have indicated a closer kinship between orangs and humans than between chimps and humans – must be wrong because Schwartz and his band of merry men, using a carefully selected set of morphological characters, have shown everyone else to be all wrong, and when other morphological studies do not support their claim, those studies myust be bashed, the authors accused of all but engaging in fraud.”

Thank you for acknowledging that our characters have been ‘carefully selected” – yes we did our best to make sure that they were corroborated apomorphies and provide documentation of the evidence (which has been lacking in other studies).

We do no ‘bashing’ but took the time to go through each character proposed in support of human-chimp and human-African ape relationships and establish whether or not they could be verified.

distance-based methods – these are also phenetic measures of relationship.

“Funny how one must perform analyses in the way you demand they be done in order to get the same results you do.”

No – that is incorrect. One would not necessarily get our results if there were indeed more human-chimp apomorphies than human-orangutan.

“the authors are accused of just shy of fraud for not coming to the same conclusions you folks did”

You are insinuating that accusation. I am not.

(and since Hezy was killed last year”

I am very sorry to hear that. I did not know. But much of his data came from Colin Groves who is active in the field.

“their use of 246 characters apparently did not include beard and mustache… If only they had conculted Schwartz first and learned what the BEST characters to use would have been”

Groves and others can evaluate our charactes and falsify them and counter argue that their features are correct. I welcome and look forward to such a response.

That’s it for me today.

Your longish comment was held up for moderation due to the number of links. Sorry about the inconvenience. I’ll delete the duplicate.

But my point was that most of their evidence is not corroborated. The fact that two were admitted do not invalidate the rest. The authors have never responsed on the rest.

What do you mean by cheery picking (I have to ask as your previous response shows that I need to make sure of your meaning first).

“methods are all just plain wrong because they apparently do not do what you think they should”

I have never said that. What I have said is that there are systematics principles that provide possible explanations as to why a consistent molecualr result is not necessarily correct and could be wrong (note – not necessarily wrong, just could be) in the face of contradictory morhological evidence.