slevesque writes:
Yeah well, with conservative numbers and a species with a long generation time, I guess you could fall into the ballpark of acceptable.
But 50 Mpipg was very conservative.
Your characterization of 50 Mpipg as "very conservative" is incorrect. It's actually pretty close to what is actually measured. The human mutation rate is ~2.5x10
-8 mutations per base pair per generation, and with about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome that comes out to about 75. Your number of 50 is not "very conservative," but is rather right there in the ballpark.
Also, 50 is a very small number, Sanford in his ''genetic entropy'' book cited a recent study which had point mutations only to have a lower estimate of 300 (max 600. in humans).
This human mutation rate of ~2.5x10
-8 is for
*all* types of mutations, not just point mutations, and is right in the ballpark of the mutation rate for all eukaryotic cells. The precise rate is no doubt impossible to calculate precisely and is therefore open to revision, but you shouldn't put too much stock in figures that Sanford says he obtained from "personal correspondence." When someone has evidence that measurements of the eukaryote mutation rate are off by nearly half an order of magnitude then they'll publish a peer reviewed paper, not write a personal letter. It isn't like a mutation rate 6 to 10 times higher than currently thought could easily go unnoticed.
Sanford's position is that the Earth is younger than 100,000 years, that there's no common descent, and that mutation rates are so high that genomes are deteriorating too rapidly to have evolved, but the evidence from the real world says otherwise. Why don't you find some evidence that the actual mutation rate is what Sanford claims, and once we have that in hand we can proceed from there?
--Percy