From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260611024612.htm

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed5260

HAQER sequences are Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions of the
genome. They are sequences that show rapid change in the human lineage.
They can look at our close relatives and determine which parts of the
genome have evolved more in the human lineage than in the lineages of
our primate relatives. The HAQER sequences comprise less than 0.l% of
the genome (less than 3 million base-pairs).

I haven't taken the time to read the paper carefully after reading their methods and finding out that they rely on a data set of only 350
children that they associated with 7 language factors (like sentence repetition and non verbal IQ score), and claim to have associated
several of these factors with the HAQER sequences among their 350
children. This would be severely underpowered for any genomic sequence analysis, so my guess is we have to wait for replication. They claim
that other data sets such as Autism studies and their language scores
are associated with the language HAQER sequences that they have
identified. How can you take something as complex as language and the associated brain power needed and think that you have identified some
genomic regions associated with language using only 350 individuals?
They would have needed to get very lucky in the 350 individuals chosen
or many changes in the HAQER sequences are associated with language ability.

What might save them is that for some reason the HAQER sequences are
more stable than random sequence (exhibit less variation than other
parts of the genome). It looks like these sequences evolved rapidly to
some point and are now maintained by selection (changes are selected
against and exist at a lower frequency in the population than random sequence). So the sequences may have quickly evolved to do something
useful, and are now maintained in the genome as conserved sequences. Neanderthals also have these sequences so they evolved among humans
before Neanderthals split off and left Africa. The claim is that these sequences may be less conserved among Neanderthals, but we have fewer individuals and have to worry about sequencing errors due to degraded
DNA samples.

Ron Okimoto

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2