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From: elt@astrovax.UUCP (Ed Turner)
Newsgroups: net.roots,net.women,net.flame,net.misc,net.religion
Subject: Re: A Common Female Ancestor for Everyone
Message-ID: <117@astrovax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Nov-83 17:51:27 EST
Article-I.D.: astrovax.117
Posted: Thu Nov 10 17:51:27 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Nov-83 07:15:59 EST
Organization: Princeton Univ. Astrophysics
Lines: 27

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Questions have been raised about my article on a single common female
ancestor for everyone.  Let me try to answer some of them:

1) It is not a joke.  It wouldn't be funny if it were, would it?

2) As far as I know the result has not yet been published but only presented
by the authors I cited in my original article at the Cold Spring Harbor
meeting.  Presumably it will eventually appear in the conference proceedings
and probably elsewhere.  I originally heard about it from colleagues here at
Princeton who were not involved in the work; they regard the result with
caution but not disbelief as far as I can tell.  The work was reported in
the August 13, 1983 issue of SCIENCE NEWS on page 101.

3) The interpretation of the mitochondrial DNA results in terms of a common
ancestor is that of the original authors and certainly not my own (I am no
expert on this subject).

4) Obviously there are possible natural selection biases which might account
for some similarity in the mitochondrial DNA, but in this case the similarity
is so great (i.e., at such a large fraction of the loci) that at least some
experts reject this explanation.

5) On statistical grounds (a subject in which I am reasonably expert), I'm
not sure if the result is all that surprising given that the total human
female population was roughly constant at N individuals for of order N total
generations.