Questioning The Evolutionary Process

Crahfrog --- your figures seem a little low, at least for humans. See here.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hi, welcome to the forums.You say that these rates are "low". This is true. The question is, are they too low? The consequence of a low mutation rate is that evolution will go slowly. Well, it does go slowly. Here's a post made by one of our members, sfs, over on christianforums.com. Here's the most relevant bit:"The scientific question then is this: Do genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees look like they are the result of lots of accumulated mutations? What predictions about the differences can one make, based on the hypothesis that they are all the result of mutation?

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For starters, we should be able to predict how different the genomes should be. The seven million years of evolution in each lineage represents about 350,000 generations in each (assuming 20 years per generation). How many mutations happen per generation? Estimating mutation rates is not easy (at least without assuming common descent): it is hard to find a few changed nucleotides out of 3 billion that have not changed. By studying new cases of genetic diseases, individuals whose parents' do not have the disease, however, it is possible to identify and count new mutations, at least in a small number of genes. Using this technique, it has been estimated[1] that the single-base substitution rate for humans is approximately 1.7 x 10^-8 substitutions/nucleotide/generation, that is, 17 changes per billion nucleotides. That translates into ~100 new mutations for every human birth. (17 x 3, for the 3 billion nucleotides in the genome, x 2 for the two genome copies we each carry). At that rate, in 350,000 generations a copy of the human genome should have accumulated about 18 million mutations, while the chimpanzee genome should have accumulated a similar number.

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The evolutionary prediction, then, is that there should be roughly 36 million single-base differences between humans and chimpanzees. The actual number could be determined when both the chimpanzee and human genomes had been completely sequenced. When the two genomes were compared[2], thirty-five million substitutions were found, in remarkably good agreement with the evolutionary expectation. Fortuitously good agreement, in fact: the uncertainty on most of the numbers used in the estimate is large enough that it took luck to come that close."Footnotes:[1] Kondrashov AS. Direct estimates of human per nucleotide mutation rates at 20 loci causing Mendelian diseases. Human Mutation 21:12-27 (2003).[2] The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium. Initial sequencing of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome. Nature 437:69-87 (2005).---In summary, the known mutation rate does in fact account for the known genetic divergence.

This is quite true, but does not dispose of all the other mutations which do not make hormones biologically unrecognisable. Such a mutation as you posit would indeed not be accompanied by compensatory mutations elsewhere in the gene pool except by a wild coincidence, and would therefore be rapidly removed from the gene pool by natural selection: but as this is precisely what the theory of evolution predicts, this observation does not contradict it.

Ah, that's per year. Such figures are normally given per generation, which is certainly the figure to use if we want to know how many differences from the parental genes are carried per individual. Indeed.

The paper I linked to calculates it at 128 --- a rather overprecise figure. I don't think you'd go far wrong saying "probably more than 100 and less than 200".Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hi. You seem to have invented a new theory of evolution of your own.Yours appears to be a mumbo-jumbo of sophomoric metaphysics, whereas the one in the science textbooks appears to be a collection of facts and laws of nature.

Ah, so I see.However, what I meant was that when you talk about what you are pleased to call "the current theory", you are also discussing a metaphysical mumbo-jumbo of your own invention, rather than anything you'd find in a textbook.

Interesting.So, in your own words, what is the theory of evolution?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I've explained why you're wrong on another thread. You may feel the need to be wrong in parallel, but I'm content to be right just once. 'Cos that's all it takes.

And a big hi from Dr Adequate, with a PhD in mathematics. And a certain amount of, how can I put this?Adequacy.* waves *You are talking stupid bullshit about a subject that you've never bothered to study.Now go and learn what "dimensionless" actually means.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.