Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to How about a romantic non-myth?

whirlpools versus trees

I looked through the source of that chart, and I find myself objecting to the traditional attempt to portray the human genome in terms of an inheritance/descent tree. It's almost like playing darts to try to do that based on a few hundred fossils anyway, but because of the circulation phenomenon, the reality was more a cloud of genes in constant motion, splitting off and recombinging. If you insist on trying to plot the genome as if it were a family tree, you'd come to the conclusion that we're an incredibly incestuous family.

That's why the map is incomplete, in portraying the flow as a unidirectional outward radiation from Africa. The return flows included Australia by way of the Indian Ocean after people out there figured out how to make boats, and a constant churn trading genes with Eurasia.

BTW, I think of this, and wonder how Lee would take these notions. Because, if you consider Africa as the central library of the human genome, then modern-day Africans have the most advanced copy of the genome around. Science so often reveals irony.

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