Replies

Dog-gone it, there you go again. Both of you side stepped any attempt to put this thing to numbers, even a reasonable estimate. C-man, you are now apealing to speculation about virii making monkies into men, at least that is what I get from your vauge response. Well, you at least said you doubted there was ever a bottleneck down to 20 breeders except at the start. That was better than our friend jenny, who did not hazard a guess.

Since you guys seem relectant, by default the crevo will put some numbers in. As I have been doing this whole thread, I will be outrageously generous to you in my assumptions.....

I will say there have been ten, no TWENTY OCCASIONS where the human population has super-bottle necked. A small group survied and ALL the rest died off. Each time, this group has had a hundred, no wait, a thousand, ok, as long as I am going crazy here, TEN THOUSAND mutations that were not present in any of their ancestors fixated throughout their whole population.

I must be insane. There is no way the population bottlenecked that much, and the number of mutations fixated is far too high. Even with a small population being a POSSIBLE exception to the Hardy -Weis. Law there is not REQUIREMENT that the mutations take hold, yet here I am saying TEN THOUSAND of them took hold at all 20 bottlenecks. Tell you what, just to get plain silly about it I will say it was TWENTY THOUSAND mutations that got fixated. Way too high of course.

If we total that up we get 20 X 20,000 = 400,000 mutations. That is a lot, but it pales before the 1.42 million we need in the coding regions alone. Add to that the fact that this is not for the coding regions, but the whole genome. Another words, we must compare the 400,000 mutations likely (and that only with fantastically pro-evo assumptions) to the minumum of 42 million observed (using your numbers again).

I can see why you guys are reluctant to give numbers. gore3000 points out that certain conditions are needed before neutral mutations can spread in a population. When you try to model human-chimp differences based on the laws of genetics that we know, the gene differences fall far outside what would be expected.

C-man is forced to appeal to some mystery virus. Is that really any more rational than appealing to a Designer? Is saying "I don't know" but I know evolution did it any less a faith based statement than what I hold true?

We have a lot in common, we are all men and women of faith. I invite you to have faith in the God of the Bible. It may not be the choice you make, but the reason for that choice will have nothing to do with its rationality.

When you try to model human-chimp differences based on the laws of genetics that we know, the gene differences fall far outside what would be expected.

And all that tells us is that we probably don't know everything about the mechanisms of genetic variation yet. This in no way strengthens any other particular hypothesis.

C-man is forced to appeal to some mystery virus.

You are appealing to incredulty to make your case. I bring up viral action as a mechanism of variation. "Mystery" is YOUR addition. Sentis is the one who originally referenced the recent work in virus-induced variation, so I am pinging him to the thread. I believe Nebullis may also be able provide some information on the topic.

Chimps and humans are genetically different. I'm saying let's try to figure out how it happened. 42 million differences? Great! First, are we sure, and second, how do we get there from here (or, how did we get here from there)? I read your posts as suggesting that a natural explanation is impossible.