<Language> Mitochondria

[H. Mark Hubey]

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Mitochondrial evidence has been considered to be the definite
answer to many problems of the biological and social sciences
for a while. There was some disturbing news in Science News
years ago that mtDNA could be passed from the father but it
was buried away. Meanwhile the news that was created by mtDNA
(e.g. African Eve), and its relative African Adam (obtained
from the Y-chromosome) are still around.

This issue (5 March 1999) of Science (journal of the AAAS) has
a special on Mitochondria. The article on p. 1435 has some
really disturbing news for the believers. First, the mtDNA
clock is off. Mutations occur at different rates and the numbers
don't tally with other evidence. Second, there is the possibility
of recombination with the father's contribution, so there is
a distinct possibility that there was no such woman as the African
Eve (literally speaking) and that today's distribution of the
mtDNA could have occurred via a recombination with the male
contribution. Third, some type of substitutions in the DNA
are more likely to occur, so that the concept of uniform and
constant mutation is out the window.

With all of these caveats many "presently" believed-in  theories
are also sunk. Examples are given in the article (which I debunked
on lists on USENET) such as the famous experiment from
a year ago in which it was "proven" that the Neandertals
separated from modern humans 600,000 years, and these are now
"theories" that have gone out the window. The other example is the
"African Eve" who lived about 200,000 years ago which I criticized
on sci.lang within weeks after it was printed.

Times are getting more exciting. I think social scientists and
biologists are about to discover "diffusion" equations, Ito
stochastic differential equation, and Fokker-Planck methods.
I worked on these during my PhD and never thought I'd see them
again. Recently I saw whole books on finance (derivatives) which
are full of Ito calculus and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov methods
and Brownian motion. These are really a part of stochastic
processes and we got tantalizingly close to this topic the last
time around. Summer is almost here (well, at least spring is here)
and if we start again, we might get to this topic by summer.

It looks like historical linguistics is now ready for the diffusion
equation, as is biochemistry and some social sciences.

--
Best Regards,
Mark
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hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey
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