Re: predictions confirmed


floyd wrote:
> Marco wrote:
> > I'm wading through the FAQs as I post this so excuse me in advance if it is
> > covered. My question is whether there has been a prediction made based on
> > DNA evidence for the divergence of 2 species that was confirmed later in
> > the fossil record. It seems to me that evidence of this sort would be pretty
> > compelling.
>
> I'm not sure in how much detail either of these are covered in the FAQ,
> but off the top of my head I can think of two predictions drawn from
> DNA that have later been confirmed by fossil evidence. The first
> prediction follows from Sibley and Alquist's hybridisation work back in
> the 1970s that suggested that the human and chimp clades diverged
> somewhere between 5-7 MYA. Since then, hominid transitionals have been
> found all the way back to about 6MYA and no older primate remains are
> recognisably bipedal. So we know that the divergence must have been
> prior to 6MYA and we have negative evidence of anything much earlier.
> (That is, the fossil evidence found since Sibley and Alquist published
> is consistent with their dates and not consistent with a much earler or
> much later date.) The second comes from predictions derived from the
> Kriggs et al. 1997. The article suggests that the split of the
> human/neandertal mitochondrial lineages occurred sometime around 600
> KYA. To date, the earliest hominid remains in Europe are no older than
> about 550 KYA or so, which is again consistent with the predictions and
> inconsistent with a much earler or much later date. (One might argue
> that the second doesn't really count, since the dates were derived
> before the mtDNA was extracted, so the fossils predicted the DNA rather
> than the other way around. But the DNA divergence dates did predict
> that no older fossil material was likely, and to date, none has been
> found. Absence of evidence |= evidence of absence, of course. This
> could change tomorrow. I'd bet against it though.) Hope that helps.

Sarich and Wilson took the heat for making the prediction that the
common ancestor of chimps and humans existed only 4-8 million years
ago. Their studies were based on amino acid differences in proteins.
We couldn't sequence DNA very well until 1978.

Sibley and Alquist did a bunch of DNA hybridization experiments, but I
don't know if anyone was hanging any dates on the DNA differences.
They are always cited for the 1-2% difference between chimp and human
DNA.

Ron Okimoto

.

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