Why is evolution so controversial?

We also know that humans have undergone strong (runaway) sexual selection putting higher than average selection pressure on mating, and that this is still going on.Among other things, strong (runaway) sexual selection explains the apparent hairlessness, the neoteny and the large brain.See Sexual Selection, Stasis, Runaway Selection, Dimorphism, & Human Evolution for more information in this regard.Such runaway sexual selection in addition to normal survival selection is more than sufficient to cause a higher U value than would otherwise be expected.Enjoy

I still don't like it.If you're talking about humans diverging from chimps, then you are implying that both humans and chimps exist.But what you are trying to calculate, is how much divergence both chimps and humans have from their common ancestor. Neither chimps nor humans existed at that time. I'd say they'd look like a combination of the two of us. The artistic rendition of Ardi looks good enough to me:

You're talking about the amount of divergence we see today, right?The scenarios are, actually, tenable when you take into consideration the exponential population growth that humans have gone though: But not when the population is growing at the rates that humans are.

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It is true that ~1.7% of the genome is subject to constraint as this is approximately the percentage of the genome that codes for functional proteins (the literature varies a bit on the precise percentage, but that's not really relevant here). However, that there is a constraint in no way implies that every single mutation in this genomic region will be deleterious.

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I do not dispute your statement above. All the deleterious mutations do not account one for one in mortality. There is a lot of different opinions about the number of deleterious mutations that are subject to natural selection or diseases.You miss my point in your arguments.With the implication that indels do influence protein coding regions in DNA a legitimate assertion has been made that they must be counted as percentage divergence.

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Estimated to 3—5% indel divergence Just a moment...

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An initial map of insertion and deletion (INDEL) variation in the human genome

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There are literally a dozen or so new papers either directly or indirectly pointing out the fact that new research shows a higher divergence between humans and chimps. If you can not accept these authorities that is another matter.Now to the crux of my argument.Using accepted statistics (the same used in my cited paper), I showed that the new mutation rate needed to account for a divergence time between humans and chimps is UNTENABLE.The deleterious mutations resulting from a 95% divergence will be certainly fatal.With 1.3% divergent U=~3.With 5% divergent U=~10.A U of (10) >> A U of (3) Implies certain fatality no matter how you cut the pie.I put this in perspective by calculating needed birth rates...You can dispute minutia all you want. The fact is that a divergence of 95% and a divergence time of 6 million or even 14 million years can not work!You are obviously knowledgeable of the subject You posts are excellent.Do the math yourself If I am wrong and you point out where, I have no trouble eating crow serve the unwashed bird up feathers and all. Just be intellectually honest.

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The scenarios are, actually, tenable when you take into consideration the exponential population growth that humans have gone though:

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No surprise, any high school math student knows about the population growth curve. Fish, fowl, insects All follow that curve. Even humans. By the way, why doesn’t that curve start back 200,000 years given the growth constant for humans?Wow, your graph corresponds to ~4300 years of growth in population Let us see, what event as recorded in the Bible corresponds to ~4300 years ago.

The 5% is not the number of mutations but the number of bases that are different. An indel may cover thousands of bases, but it is only counted as one mutation. That is what you are getting wrong.

Silly rabbit! You just committed that creaky old PRATT called The Bunny Blunder. From my 1991 discussion of it (THE BUNNY BLUNDER, or What's Up, Doc Morris?):

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Nor does Morris' population model limit us to the human population. If we apply the model to rabbits, whose population doubles every two years, then we find that the world rabbit population (all species of rabbit being due to variation within the basic created bunny kind) had to have come from two bunnies created about 100 years ago. Here we have clear evidence that the earth can be no older than 100 years! The alternative to such a very young earth is to say that creation is on-going and rabbits were created ex nihilo in the last century (please ignore any mention of rabbits in the literature preceeding the time of their creation -- they simply didn't exist). We should see new species being created ex nihilo all the time. But we don't; so why aren't we up to our necks in bunnies? Yes, indeed: Creationism is more fun than science!

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Read the rest of that page for the complete explanation. You, like Dr. Henry Morris, PhD Hydraulic Engineering, former President of the ICR and co-creator of "creation science", made the fundamental mistake of using an invalid mathematical model. You both used the "pure-birth model", which makes the assumption of unlimited resources so there are no limits placed on population growth. In reality, the environment can only support a limited number of critters (eg, bunnies, humans), so as the population approaches that limit, known as the environment's "carrying capacity", its growth starts to slow down, stop, and even go into fluctuation between periods of growth and decline. The model that takes carrying capacity into account is called the "logistic model" and even that model cannot take into account other significant factors, such as predator-prey cycles and catastrophic events (eg, the Black Death, during which the European population's growth rate declined) and migration (which is a factor when trying to model the growth of the US population).From my page:

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Of course, the real thing is not so simple. The Logistic Model does not take into account disasters such as plagues or wars. At the start of the Plague in Europe (mid-14th century), one quarter of the population died in a single year and the population continued to decline for the next two centuries, drastically so in the epidemic years. Also, the carrying capacity of the environment is variable due to several factors such as drought, good weather, and agricultural technology. In non-human animal populations, predator-prey interactions come into play, resulting in pronounced cycles. All of these factors will affect the rate of population growth/decay.

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So the human population, like the rabbit population, can indeed be millions of years old and still be no larger than we find it at present; we need but acknowledge the effects of its environment's low carrying capacity for most of its history. Our population's explosive growth these past few centuries can be attributed to the sudden increase of the carrying capacity due mainly to applied technology, such as agriculture and, more recently, sanitation and medicine.

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CONCLUSION:

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Morris' population model is simplistic even by an introductory textbook's standards and is sadly typical of the ICR's "science." Like their probability arguments, it is based on false premises which are then used to reach false conclusions. Ironically, the Bunny Blunder's assumption of a constant rate of change is exactly what the ICR criticizes radiometric dating for, only here such an assumption is totally unwarranted.

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In Troubled Waters, Dr. Morris says: "The burden of proof is altogether on evolutionists if they wish to promote some other population model." Judging from his Bunny Blunder, we need to ask him, "What's up, Doc?"

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But I would be remiss if I were to not share the hilarious part of the Bunny Blunder:

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But now we get to the weird part (no, that isn't what we were just doing). In his article, "Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid," David H. Milne points out that since Morris' population model is predictive, then we should be able to use it to determine the world human population at any time in human history. Therefore, it reveals some interesting facts about human history.
According to Morris' model, in 2500 BCE, the world population was 750 people, so there were only about 150 to 200 able-bodied males, all concentrated in Egypt, available to hew and haul the 2.3 million limestone blocks ranging in weight from 2 to 50 tons to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops. During the preceding 200 years, even fewer men built six neighboring pyramids and many other structures. Things were even more hectic back between 3800 BCE and 3600 BCE when the total world population of 10 - 20 people, including women and children, rushed madly back and forth between Crete and the Indus River Valley building and abandoning enough fortified cities and massive irrigation systems to have housed and fed millions. My father was right; we HAVE gotten soft!

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One immediately apparent error in Morris' 1974 reasoning is that he forgot the Flood! (how could he, the Father of Modern Flood Geology?) The present human population did not start with some un-named couple recently evicted from an un-named Garden, but rather with the 8 un-named passengers debarking from an un-named Ark at the end of a year-long voyage through an un-named world-wide Flood (isn't this game of "Hide the Bible" fun?). However, working with the ICR's dates for the Creation and Flood (c 8000 BCE and 4600 BCE), and applying Morris' human population model, James S. Monroe discovered some even more interesting "facts" about the antediluvian world. According to the ICR's premises, the world population at the time of the Flood would have been at least 7.2946 E+19 people, or 13,000 people per square foot over the entire earth's surface. And if the flood only happened 4000 years ago as other ICR works suggest, then the mass of people on earth just before the Flood would have exceeded the mass of the earth itself.

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Verily I say unto you: Creationism is more fun than science!Edited by dwise1, : changed subtitle

Well, to be fair, he/she made that brief comment based on the graph provided by Cat Sci. So we don't know if his/her line of thinking is based on the same argument as Morris's. Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.

Correct, yes. With improved bioinformatic/sequence alignment methods, etc., it makes sense that the percentage of sequence identity should change.However, you can't directly plug 5% into the formula you're using. That's because the formula is based on the percent identity estimated from point mutations, not indels. If you trace the formula you're using back to the primary literature, you can see that it's all about point mutations -- indels don't work in the formula if you're going off of gross percent dissimilarity. The formula comes from Kimura's landmark 1983 work. Read it.It's not really biologically appropriate to conflate indels with point mutations in this context, and you can't use that formula with indels unless you count each indel as a single mutational event, instead of treating each difference in base pair as a single mutational event. Make sense?And when you treat each indel as a mutational event, things look different:"This is an observation of the major way in which the genomes of closely related primates divergeby insertion/deletion. More nucleotides are included in insertion/deletion events (3.4%) than base substitutions (1.4%) by much more than a factor of two. However, the number of events is small in comparison. About 1,000 indels listed in Tables 2 and 3 compared with about 10,000 base substitution events in this comparison of 779,142 nt between chimp and human. Little can be said about the effect of these indel events."From: "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels," 2002.You'll have to rethink your argument considerably based on the points I've raised above.

Then why did you say that it was not tenable? Huh? Humans are a species. Fish, fowl, and insects are not species.It is impossible for very many animals to follow that same curve or we'd all be walking all over each other.What are you talking about? Do you have a graph as well? What do you mean? The rate of growth increases over time. What does the Bible have to do with this topic?

I wouldn't expect such a thing. I think it is reasonable to assume that most of the things that make us look for human than a chimpanzee developed post divergence.That's just a guess of course, but I don't understand why we should favor a guess that chimpanzees actually lost a bunch of human features which is what would have to happen if our common ancestor looked like Ardi.

I figure after we/they left the savanna they ended up adapting to the trees.That is, our common ancestor was already on the route towards what you'd call modern humans features but then when the chimp-side split off they evolved the more monkey-like adaptations because they ended up in the trees.But I could be completely wrong.

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Then why did you say that it was not tenable?

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Because humans are not and can not sustain 600 mutations per generation per individual. We are only about 70 mutations per generation per individual now.

That isn't the amount that is needed. Your calculation is wrong.

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However, you can't directly plug 5% into the formula you're using. That's because the formula is based on the percent identity estimated from point mutations, not indels. If you trace the formula you're using back to the primary literature, you can see that it's all about point mutations -- indels don't work in the formula if you're going off of gross percent dissimilarity. The formula comes from Kimura's landmark 1983 work. Read it.
It's not really biologically appropriate to conflate indels with point mutations in this context, and you can't use that formula with indels unless you count each indel as a single mutational event, instead of treating each difference in base pair as a single mutational event. Make sense?

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Yes at the time the paper was accepted there was no controversy about mutation rates because indels were not in play, that is because they were not thought to affect protein coding. I have not seen any appropriate argument that indels are excluded in equivalency to SNP’s since about 2001. The statistics are the same. I am not an expert here but I can do the math. Maybe you are referring to a paper I do not have access to.I really need a quote (in the literature) from you to back up your point. I have not been able to reject 95% similarity as a calculable quantity (I have tried in ernest). I will stop my claims about indels if you can present a objective counterclaim.It has already been found that the necessary point mutations to reconcile a chimp human split at 5.6 million years is deficient by about half the needed mutations, since this paper was written.Calculated: 175 mutations per generation.Found empirically: 70 mutations.In regards to SNP mutations outside protein coding (those in supposed junk DNA). Well that DNA is not just junk is it?If you remember from the chimp genome project about 700 million bp did not align. Those so called long repeats and duplications. What do you think the actual divergence will end up as?Maybe 75% or 80% similarity Just asking. By the way your responses are very thoughtful thanks.