Re: ChatGPT contributing to current science papers

On 8/12/2024 11:00 PM, JTEM wrote:

  John Harshman wrote:
 

Yes, I believe this is all about one particular aquatic ape theorist

 The first example I raised was AIDS and the oral vaccine, this one
I'm raising now is Multi Regionalism.
  

Multi Regionalism was likely never supported by the molecular data.  The first isozyme and blood group data that started to accumulate after the 1950's indicated that Europeans, Asians and Africans were closely related and that Native Americans came from Asia.  All the DNA data has just confirmed that.  Neanderthals and Denisovans existed in Asia and Europe for over half a million years as pretty much separate populations, but they came from Africa, and were replaced by Africans with very little of their DNA still existing in the extant population.
Crackpot junk just doesn't get published.  Just try to interpret the existing data in a way that supports the multiregional hypothesis.
This is something discussing the issue from 2008 in a prestigious journal Nature Genetics.  At this time we did not have the fossil DNA evidence.  We already had the Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, but the paper doesn't state it as evidence for African replacement.  They have something about the isozyme data (Lewontin, 1972).  We had other genetic polymorphisms that were being typed at the time like microsatellites (short tandem repeats).  At this time population sampling was still only in the hundreds, often much less than a hundred for each "racial" group.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/human-evolutionary-tree-417/
We now have fossil DNA sequence of Neanderthals and Denisovans, we can tell that there was never extensive gene flow between Modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans because we can tell how much of their DNA still exists in the extant population.  We have fossil DNA sequence indicating that there were multiple interbreeding events, but after the initial interbreeding event with Neanderthals when modern humans were leaving Africa less than 80,000 years ago.  Subsequent interbreeding events with Neanderthals seem to have been mostly dead ends leaving no evidence in the extant population.  Modern humans interbred with Denisovans in South East Asia and Indonesia, and some Indonesian individuals retain 7% Denisovan DNA.
The mitochondrial DNA data had already indicated that there was not significant gene flow in terms of reacquiring mitochondrial lineages through interbreeding with populations that had left Africa before mitochondrial Eve existed.  We have Denisovan and Neanderthal mitochondrial sequence, and we haven't found any evidence for the existence of these lineages in any modern human population.  You would have to have genetic mixing at a level not supported by the nuclear DNA data, and this extensive genetic mixing would have to have avoided exchange of mitochondrial DNA between existing populations.
We have identified a small amount of DNA in mostly extant Indonesian genomes that was inherited from Denisovans that are likely ancient bits of DNA from Homo erectus (May have left Africa half a million years before the Denisovans) that the Denisovans likely obtained by interbreeding with the Homo species they met up with in the region, but it was only a small fraction of the Denisovan genome.
The multiregional hypothesis, option D, Fig. 1 is not supported by the existing data, nor is option C that is dependent on intermixing of the regional populations with Africans.  It turned out that option B is the one that is partially correct.  Instead of a little DNA exchanged between each existing population with the invading Africans we first had an exchange with Neanderthals and then took a small amount of Neanderthal DNA with us as we expanded into Europe and Asia, and then in Asia this mixed population interbred with Denisovans that had already interbred with another Homo population that preceded them in Asia.
The multiregional hypothesis was already coming up short with the data we had in the 1980's, and the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA killed it for good.  Peer Review is not keeping the junk from being published, just reality.
Ron Okimoto