Genuine Puzzles In Biology?

Have we met on the JREF forums? Your name seems familiar somehow.

It sounds like you have a story to tell. Well, you know, Randi himself has never had anything to do with the JREF forums. In fact, he doesn't even run the JREF itself any more. Just because it's named after him doesn't mean that he personally approves of everything that happens on the forums that he has never administered of the institution that he is no longer in charge of. I just like the "A" avatar better. Apart from anything else, some people thought that the Snape avatar was a picture of me, rather than realizing that it's a picture of the actor Alan Rickman. It's a bit of a let-down when they discover that in real life I'm small, shy, boyish, and have a tendency to giggle.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

The meaning of this sentence is obscure. However I suspect that if and when you ever elucidate your meaning, this will turn out not to be a genuine puzzle in biology but rather a question to which every biologist knows the answer.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But what is being suggested here is not that "epigenetic complexity" causes "equidistance" but rather that it limits it. The cause of the (neutral) divergence would still be drift.

To summarize: the greater the number of cell types in an organism, the less likely it is that a given mutation to protein-coding DNA will be neutral, since it would have to be neutral with respect to all the disparate cellular environments in which the protein is active. Hence, other things being equal, we should expect a lower rate of neutral mutations in the coding DNA of more complex organisms.That has a certain innate plausibility.It would not really be a problem for the application of genetic clocks, since these are already known to tick at different rates in different groups of organisms. No-one is currently assuming a uniform rate across all organisms.Your question doesn't really fit the remit of this thread, since the question is whether this effect exists to any significant degree. This thread is about things that are known to be true and which make you ask why is that true and how did it come about.What you have is not a puzzle in that sense, merely an open question.