Administrative retirement, but not yet ready to give up science. We will continue on another floor. No chance that we purify nuclei anymore, though. Enjoy it.

Wrong link

I started a scientific discussion with another colleague who posted this paper where I argued that these creations of new paleospecies names for a subset of bones were not helping in a better understanding of human evolution, on the contrary. He preferred to block me than being contradicted. 🥲

If you can reformulate your question after reading them, if you still want to discuss this matter. Thanks.

I will answer publicly later today. Meanwhile, you can find the articles I mentioned here filesender.renater.fr?s=download&t...

Defining categories can be useful to structure our thinking, but categories can be counterproductive when they hide the relationships that exist between different parts. I am concerned that many paleospecies fall into the counterproductive category.

They do not result from a bona fide biological selection. The risk is just very high that phenotypic diversity within a metapopulation is overinterpreted as defining features of a biological species.

Paleospecies are resulting from a different purely random process: the chances of a favorable set of taphonomic conditions favoring preservation and the serendipitous discovery of the bones.

Biological species result from the subsampling through time of the past biodiversity and the various bushy branches of metapopulations. This subsampling was involving both selection and chance but has been validated by time and survival.

I agree with your point and this is exactly why I am not convinced by many paleospecies, not talking about the very concept of paleospecies.

There were good biological reasons that Svante Paabo did not name the Denisovans as Homo denisovans. I find it useful to integrate multiple perspectives. Genomics can, and should, in my view, widen the perspective of Paleoanthropology.

I don't see that separating Homo longi and Denisovians into different species and renaming the Denisovians Homo juliensis is lumping and is clarifying the landscape.

I read the paper just before posting anything. I see that they are oversplitting and even adding a new species, and I think that it had more confusion than clarity.

... you can better describe it as a bushy evolution within (a) structured metapopulation(s) showing local phenotypic variability, sometime adaptative. Putting a few rigid boxes (species) into this complex landscape based on a few bones biases our thinking process and hides the full picture.

The problem I see with the species concept is that it was used since the 18th century to describe highly divergent lineages after all the intermediate branches were removed through random evolution and sometimes selection. When you study the evolutionary process over a short (1 My) distance...

Putting boxes (species names) around subparts of a bushy evolutionary tree hampers our understanding of evolution. See www.nature.com/articles/s41... for a better understanding of the complexity of human evolution integrating multiple genomes rather than relying just on isolated individual bones.

Thank you, Pedro, for your involvement in solving this issue.

Thanks. I am glad you liked it.