I made the following post on the OCW board, on which creationist electrical engineer Walter ReMine is presently active.
In addition, I posted the pertinent information in several other threads on that board, and ReMine simply ignores the evidence, and continues to peddle his erroneous fluff. ReMine is the author of the creationist book "The Biotic Message", which he seems desperate to get people to buy, judging from the repeated references to it.
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The following papers:
J. C. Fay, G. J. Wyckoff and C.-I. Wu: Positive and Negative Selection on the Human Genome,Genetics 158, 1227-1234. 2001.
and
Sexual Recombination and the Power of Natural Selection
William R. Rice* and Adam K. Chippindale 2001 Science 294:555-559
severely impact the various claims of creationists who insist that because of 'Haldane's dilemma', among other things,human evolution from an ape-like ancestor is impossible.
This 'conclusion' is premised primarily on personal opinions, for there is, at present, no information at all regarding the
numbers of fixed beneficial mutations required to explain various adaptations and traits in extant organisms.
Nonetheless, the argument regarding the human question goes something like this:
According to an extrapolation of Haldane's 1957 paper, no more than 1667 fixed, beneficial mutations could accrue in the lineage leading to humans from an ape-like ancestor.
1667 is too few to account for this (unsupported assertion), therefore, humans must not have evolved at all.
According to the first paper mentioned, the number is off - way off. We cannot blame Haldane - he was working more than a decade before and sequence data was available to him.This paper demonstrates that there have been approximately one beneficial allele substitution every 200 years since the split between Old and New world primates some 30 million years ago.
This amounts to 150,000 in 30 million years. The estimated split between the lineage leading to humans from that leading to chimps is around 5-6 million years ago.
We'll go with 5. That allows for some 25,000. That is 14 times what was allowed under Haldane's model.
Considering the fact that HGP analysis and others put the total gene number in the human genome at between 30 and 60,000, and if we consider that each of these genes may be influenced by at least one regulatory region, 25,000 substitutions - by anyone's standards - should be seen as more than enough to acocunt for the differences.
Of course, since it is a fact that it has not been shown that 1667 fbms is too few, I am still not convinced that it cannot be explained by the lower number.
I suppose it all rests on one's point of view, and whether or not one is willing to accommodate new discoveries into their lexicon.
From the second paper, emphases mine:
"Our results
experimentally verify a counteracting advantage of recombining compared to clonal lineages:
reduced accumulation of harmful mutations and increased accumulation of beneficial mutations. The magnitude of this benefit will accrue over geological time and promote the superior persistence of recombining lineages at both the level of species within communities (clonal versus sexual species) and genes within chromosomes (nonrecombining Y-linked versus
recombining X-linked genes)."
I don't think that needs any more explanation.
Comments appreciated.