My
Message 19 which refutes your estimate of the expected overlap in the locations in differences between human and alligator and human and frog cytochrome c (from your
Message 11). Except that I now believe that I can do better.
A mutation in the lineage from the most recent common ancestor with the alligator should be expected to show as a difference with both other lineages. The chance that it will be "masked" by one of the other lineages mutating to have the same residue at that location is relatively small, and offset by other ways in which an overlap could be found. Thus the size of the overlap should be close to the number of mutations in the human lineage since the last common ancestor wit the alligator.
If genetic equidistance is explained by mutations accumulating at the same rate in each lineage we would therefore expect half of the 13 differences between human and alligator to be shared with the frog. Which is 6-7, in close agreement with the actual figure of 7. Obviously this data poses no problem for the mainstream view at all - it is completely unsurprising..
We should also note that since the size of the overlap is dominated by the number of changes in the human lineage, and that number is on the high side of the expected value, any hypothesis that predicts that the human lineage should show fewer changes than the other two DOES have a problem with this data.
Edited by PaulK, : Restoring the parts that mysteriously vanished