Interesting question!

The Tiem Magazine had a feature article about it

Here is my response in a letter to the editor



Letter to the editor:



Time Magazine, Sunday, Oct. 1, 2006

Article: What Makes us Different?

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541283,00.html



The question about our origin is as old as humans can think. It is one of the most important, but also one of the most elusive questions we can ask.



Right at the beginning of the article you write that humans have agriculture, art, music, language, etc. You omit one item in the list: religion. We are the only species that knows about their finite lifespan, think about eternal life and have a longing for God.



Being a scientist myself, I can only appeal to scientists working in the field of human evolution to apply the utmost scientific rigor. Formulating hypothesis based on scientific findings is one thing. But then the hypothesis has to be tested against all available information. The personal faith, belief and wishful thinking of scientists have to stand back.

Evolutionary biology is in the unfortunate situation to have to work backwards from conclusions. Extrapolating into a past that is no more available for direct scientific inquiry is always dangerous.

Drawing conclusions from that extrapolation is even more dangerous.

For example, it was found that most of the differences between the chimp and human genome is located on the Y chromosome, as you wrote in your article. Does this make women (who are lacking the Y chromosome) more apelike than men? Or less human? Heaven forbid that we think so!

Just playing a number game on similarities and differences of the genome cannot be used to define a human.



Physics and chemistry are open to the full rigor of scientific inquiry. Newton’s law of gravity can be tested. And it was. And it was found to be true by many scientists around the world, over the last 2 centuries. Extreme minor deviations from the original law formulated by Newton that ‘the gravitational pull is proportional to the mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance of the mass’ can be explained by relativistic effects, as expected by Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Everything is fine and everybody agrees that Newton’s law holds true.

To give another example: the quantum efficiency of a solar cell can be measured. Precisely. By many scientists, with different equipment in many laboratories. No room for errors. No need for retractions. And ‘black sheep’ will be immediately found, like in the Schoen case of organic transistors a couple of years ago.



But reading your article I can’t help thinking that there are rifts in the biology community. Opinion stands against opinion, as exactly the same facts are interpreted differently.



The last paragraph of your article nicely summarizes the issue.



“In fact, even the most ardent proponents of genome-comparison research acknowledge that pretty much everything we know so far is preliminary. “



Not too long ago Neanderthals have been hailed as our ancestors. Now they are seen as our ‘cousins’ – a side line that died out when homo sapiens rose. Scientists have to be careful about the data at hand. So have the journalists reporting about them.

Biology is an exciting science, but reporting preliminary results may lead to retractions later (as you report in your article as well).