Templeton on Templeton.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

By media standards, the following is already old stuff, but, if you have not already seen it, or if you were not lucky enough to have a recent taste of Australian Winter, it is certainly worth reading.

Are We Neanderthals?
ABC Science – The Science Show -- Saturday 24 July  2004

with Robyn Williams

Summary:

Alan Templeton presented his ideas on human evolution to the 51st Annual Conference of the Genetics Society of Australia. He believes that we all still carry Neanderthal genes because, contrary to traditional belief, the three waves of human expansion out of Africa did not replace one another but interbred and merged culturally and genetically.

Program Transcript:

Alan Templeton: If you really think about it, DNA can make a copy of itself and pass it on to the next generation. So DNA molecules can travel through time. So in fact DNA is kind of a living fossil.

Robyn Williams: And we’re full of it so Alan Templeton can peer at our DNA and tell us where we all came from. He’s Professor of Biology at Washington University in St Louis and was in Melbourne last work to attend the big genetics conference there. Just as Professor Rodrigo may be able to trace the immigration of cats to Australia, so Alan Templeton can tease out the origins of people long ago.


Alan Templeton: Well, I found two things that surprise people. We know for example from the fossil record that the human lineage first arose in Africa and it spread out of Africa at the stage we call Homo erectus and that occurred almost 2 million years ago, and everybody’s comfortable with that. What I then found was that there was a major expansion of humans, also out of Africa, about 600,000 to 800,000 years ago that also corresponded to a major change in stone tool culture that also spread out of Africa. And then there was yet a third expansion about 100,000 years ago, in which more anatomically modern humans came out of Africa. But the unique thing of my analysis that indicates that at least going back to 600,000 years ago, the humans who were in Africa and the humans who were in Eurasia were regularly interchanging genes, there was interbreeding and that when humans came out of Africa 100,000 years ago they did not replace these other human populations in Eurasia, rather once again they interbred. And as a result of this exchange of genes that’s been going on for 600,000 years, all of humanity is evolving as a single evolutionary lineage. So we do show difference in certain regions but those differences are very minor.

Click HERE for the full transcript of the interview.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[lagarvelho]

Jacques and all:

Yeah, this is "old stuff".  About two years old, in fact(although the interview is obviously more recent).  However, Templeton is a strong voice on the "genetic" side of human origins arguments, and at least his arguments fit with what is known about migrations out of Africa at various times.  What happened during and after the migrations, though, is still a matter of conjecture and argument.  Or so it seems to me.
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Jacques and all:

Yeah, this is "old stuff".  About two years old, in fact(although the interview is obviously more recent).  However, Templeton is a strong voice on the "genetic" side of human origins arguments, and at least his arguments fit with what is known about migrations out of Africa at various times.  What happened during and after the migrations, though, is still a matter of conjecture and argument.  Or so it seems to me.
Anne G

Anne,

I am sure I specified that it was “old stuff” by “media standards” which  usually means that after about one month  or a bit more the news ends up being obsolete and is replaced by really new, attention grabbing news.

Just for the record and for the sheer pleasure of picking nits, I am glad to note that this interview, presented by ABC-Science on “Saturday 24 July 2004”, is likely to have been made or taped shortly before or after Alan Templeton gave his plenary address, as one of a number of invited “international” speakers, at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Genetics Society of Australia, held in Melbourne, from July 11-14, 2004. This is a bit over one month ago.

At any rate, here is the abstract of Templeton’s presentation:

Recent Human Evolution: What Genes Really Tell Us.
Alan Templeton
Department of Genetics/Department of Biology,Washington University, St. Louis.

Phylogeographic inferences are frequently drawn from the analysis of an evolutionary haplotype tree of a single DNA region or type of DNA, such as mitochondrial DNA. However, a phylogeographic event is only detectable in principle if an appropriate mutation or mutations occurred in the right time and place in the evolutionary history of the genetic variation being screened. In addition, like all forms of statistical inference, phylogeographic inference is subject to both false positives and false negatives. One way of both increasing the resolution of phylogeographic analyses and reducing the error rates is to survey multiple DNA regions and cross validate phylogeographic inferences across these DNA regions. A formal hypothesis testing framework based upon likelihood ratio tests is used to test hypotheses about recent human evolution based upon ten different DNA regions. The analyses shows that there were three major expansion events out-of-Africa in the last 2 million years. Moreover, gene flow between African and non-African human populations was established at least by 600,000 years ago, and the last out-of-Africa expansion event involved interbreeding with nonAfrican populations, not their replacement. These results have implications for understanding the meaning of race in current humanity.

… and if you want to find out more about this conference and download a PDF of the entire program and abstracts, click HERE.

As to whether or not Templeton’s presentation was just a warmed up version of something he has already talked about two years ago, I can’t say. I didn’t attend his lecture.

Jacques