[Right Wing Professor]

It would seem that in a field of 24,000 antelopes there would be approximately 12,000 births per year. So in 1,000 years there should be 12,000,000 births. If mutations occur at a rate of one per million births, that would suggest 12 mutations.

No, you can't just assume a birth rate, however plausible. The problem says one offspring per ten years. If there's 1 in a million per generation, then there are 100 generations in 1000 years, then you have 100 mutations per individual in 1000 years, or 2,400,000 mutations in the total gene pool. That's small compared to the mammalian genome, so two successive mutations at the same site can be neglected.

It's a sloppily designed problem though.

[dawn53]

Let's just say the prof is not one of my son's favorite...he's taking the Bio class to finish out his general ed requirements (you have to have science in both disciplines and up until now, he had not taken any science classes on this side of the aisle.)