What is it about?
Biologists universally accept that living species, even ones that look very different from one another, share common ancestors in the distant past. However, it is less frequent to subject this hypothesis to formal statistical testing. We explore the range of statistical tests that can be used to compare common ancestry (CA) with the alternative, separate ancestry, and then apply many of these statistical tests to the primates. This work clarifies the principles underlying statistical tests of CA and confirms that diverse kinds of data yield incredible strong statistical support for the claim that all primates, including humans, show descent from common ancestry.
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Why is it important?
Our analyses show that diverse kinds of data, including the physical traits of organisms, their chromosome numbers, geographic distributions, and DNA sequences, can provide strong statistical support for the common ancestry of both living and fossil species.
Perspectives
This paper is an outcome of a seminar course in which a group of graduate students and three faculty members discussed previously used tests of common ancestry and developed our own new tests. We were surprised that there have been so few published statistical tests of common ancestry, and enjoyed applying both the new and the old tests to the case of primates. While I was not surprised that there was such strong and consistent support for the idea that humans are part of the primate tree, it was pleasing to see just how well supported this theory is. I would like to think that the paper might help some readers who had been skeptical about the claims of human evolution see that the scientific account stands up to even under the most stringent testing.
Dr David Baum
University of Wisconsin Madison
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Statistical evidence for common ancestry: Application to primates, Evolution, May 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/evo.12934.
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Resources
Tests of universal common ancestry in primates
This is an associated paper, in preprint form. This paper implements several tests of the hypothesis of universal common ancestry using primates as an example.
Tests of primate common ancestry using silent sites
This is an associated paper, in preprint form. This paper develops tests of common ancestry that exploit the fact that there are some changes in DNA sequences that are likely to be almost invisible to selection because they do not alter the amino acid sequences of encoded proteins.
Contributors
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