[Fwd: [ArchTheoMeth] genes and languages--Kurds and Georgians]

[A.M.S.Mcmahon]

Dear All,
             The rate of incorporation of male mitochondria into the
female cytoplasm at fertilisation is small.  What seems to happen
is that some do get in, but they are then preferentially degraded.
There is some evidence (e.g. from Maynard-Smith's group,
published 1998/99; but it's patchy so far) that a proportion of about
1:1000 times they stick around long enough to recombine.
   There's a more substantial point here, and possibly a moot one,
on the difference between a molecular history / phylogeny on the
one hand, and the history of the population(s) those molecules find
themselves in on the other.

        Best,
           April McMahon
(and Rob McMahon, my local off-list geneticist)

[ moderator snip ]

> I just looked it up in a human biology textbook. In normal
> fertilization, the sperm doesn't penetrate the egg cell as such ---
> the membranes of the sperm head and the oocyte merge to let the sperm
> nucleus inside, but the tail and its mitochondria are left outside.

> I doubt that anything viable results if those parts of the sperm do
> enter the oocyte, so the answer to the question is probably 'never.'

> Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn at diku.dk> (Humour NOT
> marked)

Professor April McMahon
Head of Department
Department of English Language and Linguistics
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK

+44 (0)114 222 0238

E-mail  April.McMahon at shef.ac.uk