Eugene E. Harris

Give this book a few more generations to evolve and it might be great.

I have the feeling I'm just the sort of reader author Harris doesn't want. I know a significant amount about evolutionary biology and stemmatics, but not enough to be expert. That means that I can see certain weak points and errors in his presentation, but at other times don't find his explanation sufficient and don't know enough to fill it in.

A sample error, or weak point, or something: At one point in the book, a study was being done to determine the relatedness of modern humans and Neandertals. For comparison, the genome of chimpanzees was included in the study. That's fine; that's a good study. But Harris describes the chimpanzee as being used to represent to common ancestor of humans, Neandertals, and chimpanzees. Well, guess what, folks: We are not descended from chimpanzees. Some time around six million years ago, two lineages split. One lineage gave rise to humans and Neandertals (and Homo erectus and Denisovans and all sorts of other things). The other gave rise to chimpanzees and bonobos. Both lineages have evolved for six million years since then. None of the surviving creatures is the same as our ancestor. Was this ancestor more like chimps than like us? Probably -- since chimps and bonobos are pretty similar, and what they have in common is pretty much like gorillas, so humans are the odd ones out in the ape family tree. But that is not proof. Chimps could be the outgroup in the comparison Harris describes; that's good methodology. But they are not a proxy for the common ancestor.

I'm pretty sure Harris knows better than that. He clearly knows a lot! But goofs like that interfere with the explanations on the book. For me, that's pretty jolting.

If you can live with that, there is one other warning: This book is being sold as a study of the relationship between humans, Neandertals, and Denisovans, and by implication as a study of how they interbred after (mostly) separating into separate species. There is some of that, but only a little, near the end. That's fair, really, since we don't have all that much evidence. We have only a few Neandertal and Denisovan genomes. On the other hand, we have plenty of individual humans' genomes, and those haven't been brought into play as well as they should have -- we should be looking at dozens of individuals' genes, not one or two, to see how much Neandertal DNA is still around. That's not Harris's fault, but it is a fault in the studies, and he doesn't bring it out.

There are just too many things like that in this book. It's a good book; don't get me wrong. But I felt like there was more that I wasn't getting.… (altro)

Ancestors in Our Genome: The New Science of Human Evolution by Eugene E. Harris (Oxford University Press, $27.95).

Genetic research and DNA sequencing have opened up a wide field of uses, and one of those is population genetics, the use of genetic evidence to determine the movements of entire groups. In Ancestors in Our Genome: The New Science of Human Evolution, Eugene E. Harris, a professor at NYU who studies human origins, explains how the information encoded in our genetic heritage can precisely track human evolution, including telling us which other species are our closest relatives and when we split off from the other species on the same branch of the evolutionary tree.

This is a little more detailed than a general interest book on evolutionary biology, but that’s because it’s so loaded with information about what our genome can tell us ...

Full review on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/110983950785/ancestors-in-our-genome-the-new-scie...… (altro)