Reduction of Alleles by Natural Selection (Faith and ZenMonkey Only)

Just wanted to clarify how the math works.If the 60 mutations are single nucleotide mistakes that occur randomly throughout an average individual's genome, then with 3 billion nucleotides that's a mutation rate of 2 x 10^-8. If 1 to 2 x 10^-2 of the genome is coding (i.e., 1% to 2%) and the number of genes in the human genome is 30,000, then one could reasonably expect the number of genes with new alleles to be around 1 most of the time, because the odds for one of those mutations occurring in an actual gene is .002% to .004%, times 30,000 genes, which is 0.6 to 1.2 mutations (which are new alleles) per individual.There are about 130 million babies born every year, and so if there's approximately one new allele per individual then on average the human race produces around 130 million new alleles every year. Some number of those would be duplicates, but getting in the ballpark statistically on that figure would not be a simple calculation.If a small group of a hundred individuals were to become trapped on an island then they would have around 1 or 2 babies per year (I'm assuming same birth rate as the world), which is 1 or two new alleles per year.The question you two are currently discussing is how this rate of increase in alleles in this small population compares with it's rate of loss. The death rate in the world today is only about 40% of the birth rate, so barring catastrophe the population size will increase.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I think it is important to keep the focus on mutations until a common understanding emerges.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Could we please return to more of a "Just the facts, ma'am" kind of discussion?PS - The quote is a dragnet reference, which Faith might recognize and Bluejay might not.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

My suggestion is that you focus on the discussion in this thread. You're still focused on the other thread, you're just posting your responses here instead, which is very confusing. If you choose not to follow my suggestion then you may as well at least post your replies in the correct thread.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

What would the participants like to do? I see two ways to go: I can either close this thread or replace BlueJay.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Well, this isn't fair. ZenMonkey can take as much time as he likes, but it isn't fair to you that you have no posting permissions over in Biological Evolution while awaiting a response here, so I'm going to restore them for now.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Hi Faith,Just a clarification about something ZenMonkey said: ZenMonkey didn't completely describe the dominance hierarchy, but it can be implied from the outcome he described. Here's his full dominance hierarchy: Or using his abbreviations: Thus, Br mating with Gt can produce these allele combinations:

• Black and Grey, and since Black is dominant over Grey: Bg
• Black and Tan, and since Black is dominant over Tan: Bt
• Brown and Grey, and since Grey is dominant over Brown: Gr
• Brown and Tan, and since Brown is dominant over Tan: Rt

This means 50% Black, 25% Grey and 25% Brown.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director