[extropy-chat] Human Evolution

[The Avantguardian]

bradbury <bradbury at blarg.net> wrote: 

I cannot view the Science web site abstract.  But the
topic of the article seems reasonable -- *what* precisely
is the chromosome structure for "Oliver"?  If indeed he
is some form of a human-chimpanzee combination then it
would suggest that my previous comments regarding the
difficulty of producing offspring with different
chromosome numbers may be less than I would have
thought.


*I don't know why you can't get to the science abstract. It may have something to do with subscriptions as my institution (UCLA) has a subscription that allows anyone from the ucla.edu domain to get to it. In any case I have sent it to the list as an attachment. As far as what I have read so far, for some reason there is some controversy as far as how many chromosomes he has. Some Japanese group apparently claimed he had 47 chromosomes while the American cited in the abstract says he has 48. From what I have read since this morning however, chromosome number is not as important for the creation of hybrids as I once thought. There are several examples of hybrids between various animal species with differing chromosome number and that such hybrids usually (but apparently not always) results in the heterogametic (males in mammals) sex being sterile while the homogametic sex (females in mammals) being fertile. I guess reproductive barriers aren't as impassable as I once thought or at
 least sexual selection by mate choice is far more important to speciation than any biochemical barrier. 

So I guess in answer to the original question of whether H. erectus and other early hominids were able breed with H. sapiens, I would have to give the answer yes, if the women of whichever species found the men of the other species sexy enough.*

 




The Avantguardian 


"He stands like some sort of pagan god or deposed tyrant. Staring out over the city he's sworn to . . .to stare out over and it's evident just by looking at him that he's got some pretty heavy things on his mind."

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