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Author Topic:   Why is evolution so controversial?
sfs
Member (Idle past 2561 days)
Posts: 464
From: Cambridge, MA USA
Joined: 08-27-2003


Message 953 of 969 (741120)
11-09-2014 7:56 PM
Reply to: Message 948 by zaius137
11-09-2014 1:08 PM


Re: Crickets in a vacuum.
Zaius asked why it was dumb to just add up the unique sequence from each species to get the total divergence. Here's why. Consider two sequences, each 20 bp long:
----------ACGGTTCCGATTTTTTTTTT
CCCCCCCCCCACGGTTCCGA----------
The dashes are sequence that doesn't exist in that copy. 10 out of the 20 bp in each sequence are identical and ten are different. 50% of the sequence in each is unique to that copy (e.g. represents an insertion in its lineage). If we add up the fraction of unique sequence in both, we conclude that they have 0% of their bases in common, even though they are 50% identical.
That is dumb.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 948 by zaius137, posted 11-09-2014 1:08 PM zaius137 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 956 by zaius137, posted 11-10-2014 2:00 AM sfs has not replied
 Message 957 by zaius137, posted 11-10-2014 11:32 AM sfs has not replied

  
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