Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm(bbc.co.uk) |
Rare 'goat-sheep' born on Irish farm(bbc.co.uk) |
http://www.mindserpent.com/American_History/books/Porta/jpor...
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There is a beast called "Musimones", gendered of a Goat and a Ram. Pliny says, that in Spain, but especially in Corsica, there are beasts called Musimones not much unlike to Sheep, which have Goats hair, but in other parts, Sheep; the young ones which are gendered of them, coupling with Sheep, are called by the Ancients, Umbri. Strabo calls them Musimones. But Albertus calls them Musini or Musimones, which are gendered of a Goat and a Ram. I have heard that in Rhetia, in Helvetian confines, there are generated certain beasts, which are Goats in the hinder parts, but in the former parts, Sheep or Rams; but they cannot live long, but commonly they die, as soon as they are born. And that there the Rams being grown in years, are very strong and lustful, and so often times meet with Goats, do run over them, and that the young ones which wild Rams beget of tame Sheep, are color like the sire, and so is their breed after them; and the wool of the first breed is shaggy, but in their after-breed soft and tender.
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"It has been long known to shepherds, though questioned by naturalists, that the progeny of the cross between the sheep and goat is fertile. Breeds of this mixed race are numerous in the north of Europe." Nothing appears to be known of such hybrids either in Scandinavia or in Italy; but Professor Giglioli of Florence has kindly given me some useful references to works in which they are described. The following extract from his letter is very interesting: "I need not tell you that there being such hybrids is now generally accepted as a fact. Buffon (Supplements, tom. iii. p. 7, 1756) obtained one such hybrid in 1751 and eight in 1752. Sanson (La Culture, vol. vi. p. 372, 1865) mentions a case observed in the Vosges, France. Geoff. St. Hilaire (Hist. Nat. Gén. des reg. org., vol. iii. p. 163) was the first to mention, I believe, that in different parts of South America the ram is more usually crossed with the she-goat than the sheep with the he-goat. The well-known 'pellones' of Chile are produced by the second and third generation of such hybrids (Gay, 'Hist, de Chile,' vol. i. p. 466, Agriculture, 1862). Hybrids bred from goat and sheep are called 'chabin' in French, and 'cabruno' in Spanish. In Chile such hybrids are called 'carneros lanudos'; their breeding inter se appears to be not always successful, and often the original cross has to be recommenced to obtain the proportion of three-eighths of he-goat and five-eighths of sheep, or of three-eighths of ram and five-eighths of she-goat; such being the reputed best hybrids.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Darwinism_by_Alfred_Walla...
I'm ignorant about most things farm-related, but maybe someone knows what rules apply to meat coming from unusual mixes? I assume it's harmless to eat it, but would it be legal to sell?
Food is a distant second...
For the record, I still think my spelling is better...
Given that the top comment in the thread is a relevant (and deservedly upvoted) quotation from a late-Renaissance text, I'd say we're doing pretty well here.
I certainly found it interesting that this sort of thing is possible in nature. Other's mileage may vary but that's what the voting process is for, no?
theres no way this is real, right?
Seriously interesting though how closely related are the two species?
Is that similar here? Are there traits in modern goats or sheep that came from the other?
[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.ht...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/science/another-genetic-qu...
"A DNA study has concluded that some Neanderthals also had red hair, although the mutation responsible for this differs from that which causes red hair in modern humans."
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/04/neandertals-gave-europe...
Please don't claim things on or about Hacker News that you can't possibly know are true. Concerns about dead comments and anything else about HN can be sent to hn@ycombinator.com.
Edit: I deleted things that were too harsh.
eps was obviously trying to be helpful to lacero. If lacero was hell-banned, he wouldn't know it to email you, would he? And for his trouble he gets this mean reply from you.
2. You can nitpick on technicalities, but it doesn't matter to lacero if he was hell-banned or ip-blacklisted. All that matters is that his comments go in trash can and that's what I was trying to rectify.
PS. A proper way to support these cases is to add "flag for mod review" option to dead comments and/or user accounts. Unlike the email option, it would be actually usable for everyone. Until then I will keep posting "hell-banned" when I see an account with auto-killed, but otherwise reasonable comments. Have a nice weekend.
Shame on you, Daniel.
Not even kidding! :D
Much more surprising is that people have reportedly successfully created hybrids [1] between chickens (family Phasianidae) and guinea fowl (family Numididae), which diverged around 50 million years ago [2].
Note that http://timetree.org is a beautiful service for finding out how closely related two species are (in evolutionary time).
[0] http://www.timetree.org/index.php?taxon_a=Ovis+aries&taxon_b...
[1] http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/2592/is-sexual-re...
[2] http://www.timetree.org/index.php?taxon_a=Gallus+gallus&taxo...
I was really confused for a second there.
Also, different breeds of dogs are considered the same species (and likewise with cats).
[1] http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/89/44/91/PDF/hal-008...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics#Div...
"A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?"
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
from the article:
" I asked McCarthy if he could give a date estimate for the hybridization event, he said that there are a couple broad possibilities: (1) It might be that hybridization between pigs and apes produced the earliest hominids millions of years ago and that subsequent mating within this hybrid swarm eventually led to the various hominid types and to modern humans; (2) separate crosses between pigs and apes could have produced separate hominids (and there's even a creepy possibility that hybridization might even still be occurring in regions where Sus and Pan still seem to come into contact, like Southern Sudan)."
Wondering if they pronounce 'geep' as "gee eep" or "jeep".
Yes, they're called "hats" or "corses".
Similar deal (not so much the slippery genome) for horses and housecats. I think you're confusing breeds with species.
No mystical powers though.
quoting: "Darwinism – An Exposition Of The Theory Of Natural Selection With Some Of Its Applications (1889)"
"It has been long known to shepherds, though questioned by naturalists, that the progeny of the cross between the sheep and goat is fertile. Breeds of this mixed race are numerous in the north of Europe.""
It's not just nitpicking. We've gotten many emails from distressed users asking why they were banned because they believed this misinformation. Usually it's nothing more than a duplicate comment that got killed, or something nearly as innocuous.
Edit: I thought about this overnight and I do think there's some merit to your proposal. (I don't buy the thing about email not being accessible enough, but that's separate.) It would need some careful design thinking—something I haven't had a minute for all week—so don't expect anything right away.
There's nothing to buy. I will not email mods about false negatives. It's inconvenient.
A better way for eps to help lacero, if that's all he or she wanted to do, would have been to email and ask us to check why lacero's comment was dead. We would have replied with a thank-you note saying what the reason was and that we had restored all the comments in question. But it doesn't feel to me like helping others is the only agenda going on with comments like eps's, which as you may know are something of a cottage industry on HN.
How you're "going to be treated by the new moderators" is with as much fairness and clarity as we can possibly muster, and willingness to correct our mistakes.
When it comes to exercising authority less is more. If you've ever been "forced" to smile at lame jokes from bouncers when going in to a club you probably know what I mean. Your comments reads like passive aggressive lectures rather than "fair and clear" moderation.
Re "lectures": I've been erring on the side of responding to things and giving information. None of that is really on-topic for HN, of course, and I don't intend to do it for long.
This is now understood, but you say it in a severe way - as though you think it should have been obvious for eps to know this. You seem to be making an assumption that, by not doing what you prefer, eps was deliberately acting with negative intent.
From an outside point of view, it is very hard to understand how eps should have known what your preference was (even after rechecking the Guidelines and FAQ). As such, it is hard to understand that eps's intent was anything but positive.
Well, it is what the guidelines say, and what we've been saying on the site for years. But you're right: that doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone, and the benefit of the doubt would have helped a lot. That was my mistake.
Yes I understand there needs to be a balance to avoid an arms race with spammers and the like.
We would like to implement a better feedback mechanism for HN moderation, but that's a long-term prospect.
It's quite telling that in this era of abundant genetic data, this guy bases all of his arguments on anatomical similarities and says nothing about genetics. It's all but impossible that a link like what he's suggesting would have been overlooked if pigs had made any significant contribution to the human genome. (Just for example, we've got all sorts of estimates of species divergence dates among primates based on genetic data that should have given nonsensical results if there had been massive influxes of pig DNA in the middle of that history.)
That being said, diluted gene contribution is not the same thing as no gene contribution. To even begin accepting such a theory I would require direct genetic evidence showing considerable horizontal gene transfer between porcine and hominid lines.
I'm not going to say that's impossible, but it sounds like one heck of a stretch. Even just sitting here thinking about it, most genetic inheritance happens one full chromosome at a time. We clearly don't have any full pig chromosomes, so to make this theory work you'd have to have a whole lot of lucky recombination events (chromosomal crossover, etc.) that preserved only the precise genes involved in all these "distinctive pig traits" and got rid of the rest. So what's the selective effect that selects extraordinarily strongly for this random selection of pig-like anatomical traits but against all of the other pig genes that would have usually been linked to them?
In short, this is a very extraordinary claim, and it requires equally extraordinary evidence, especially given how remarkably consistent the known genetic evidence has proven to be.
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evi...
While goats and sheep diverged 8 million years ago, humans/chimps and pigs diverged 80 million years ago. The last time a proto-chimp got with a proto-pig, the T-Rex hadn't evolved yet. While goats and sheep have a difference of 6 chromosomes, chimps and pigs have a difference of 10. McCarthy, despite being a geneticist, makes his absurd claim without even discussing the genetic difficulties.
What little similarity there is between humans and pigs is simply a case of convergent evolution.
Another argument was that the morphological distance, or genetic differences besides chromosome number, are just too great. Most of us are familiar with the platypus. A paper published in Nature a few years ago demonstrated that the platypus genome contains both bird and mammal chromosomes, and therefore that the vastly different bird and mammal sex chromosome systems have been successfully bridged by this creature. This example is not offered as any kind of proof. But it does suggest that sometime, long ago, a cross occurred that would have been even more distant than that between a chimpanzee and a pig – one between a otter-like mammal and a duck-like bird. And if such was the case, the hybrids from the cross must have been able to produce offspring (otherwise they would have died out, and the platypus would not exist today).
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evi...
The platypus is not a bird/reptile hybrid. That is a wild misinterpretation of a genome study which happened a few years back.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/10/the-platypus-g...
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/02/the-mfap-hypot...
Most likely it's just someone stepping outside their wheelhouse. I mean, I trust PZ on biology, but I wouldn't incredulously accept legal advice from him. So, maybe reliable for physics/space, but unreliable for biology is my guess?
> most genetic inheritance happens one full chromosome at a time.
is actually not true. Sperm and eggs have only one copy of each chromosome instead of two like most cells in the body. However, that one chromosome is a pretty good mixture of the versions received from each parent due to recombination events that occur randomly during maturation of those cell types. Linkage between nearby genes does exist, but it's not nearly so strong as you seem to imply. Even in a single generation inheritance of two genes on either end of the same chromosome is nearly uncorrelated.
What he is suggesting is that a single hybrid made it's way back into the hominid population. It had children with other hominids, and those children would have had half as much pig DNA. They had children with even less, and so on. After awhile there would be almost nothing left of the pig ancestor. The only genes that would survive such dilution would be ones that were significantly selected for.
I understand the idea of dilution, I just don't understand why he thinks that so many random things would survive it to become defining features of the human species. Remember, he's not just saying that 2% of living humans carry Genghis Khan's Y-chromosome or have red hair or something, he's saying that all of these traits became completely universal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539143
The author posted some replies, one of which points to this article:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/07/charlemag...
That puts it at about 3400 years (the article gets the number from some paper on the topic).
Not exactly 1,000 years, but more like 120-135,000 years for the male line [1], and 200,000 years for the female line [2].
[1] "Sequencing Y Chromosomes Resolves Discrepancy in Time to Common Ancestor of Males Versus Females " dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1237619
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Mitoch...
If a generation is about 30 years then you will have close to 33 ancestors lines in your family tree over those 1000 years. That makes 2^33 ancestors or 10 billion, that's impressive (well there is probably a large overlap)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
So, based on that, we're descended from fewer people in the past than most people realize. Another way to say it is that most of our ancestors were cousins.
http://gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic...
After ~15 generations your genealogical ancestors aren't all that likely to have contributed much to your DNA.
I'm not certain how much mixing there was between the new and the old world. However it did happen a lot and it's likely a large number of people do have some new and old world ancestors.
1000 years ago, people in villages and towns were regularly marrying their (2,3,4) cousins and rarely marrying people from 'different lands'.
Another way to look at it: for 1 person to become the ancestor of just several thousand people takes 'a few generations'. Getting to whole populations takes lots of generations.
