Comments on Allard and Carpenter (1996), or the “Aquatic Ape” Hypothesis Revisited

Abstract

The results of Allard and Carpenter's ( Cladistics 12, 183–198, 1996) paper on weighting and congruence among mammalian mitochondrial genes are an artefact of errors in their data matrix; their “blue whale” ATPASE8 sequence is human, the actual blue whale sequence is assigned to the grey seal, and the “horse” sequence is that of the harbor seal. When these errors are corrected there is no evidence that the mitochondrial genes are incongruent.