It seemed to me that he basically trying to state that to many mutations had occured in the time that humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor to account for the evolution of the human mind. Was that what he was trying to say?
That was essentially the argument he was making, although he had some other side arguments as well about any mutation affecting neural development having to be detrimental.
What was he wrong about?
A lot of different things.
The principle thing in the mutation rate argument was that, even though he was aware of the existence of insertion/deletion mutations that could change lengths of DNA by deleting or inserting between 1 to several thousand base pairs, he insisted on treating the genetic difference caused by insertion/deletion events as if they should be accounted for by the single base substitution mutation rate as if they were substitutions. Therefore a 1 kilobase insertion would represent 1000 mutational events. Consequently he produced a massive overestimation of the necessary fixation rate of mutations as he was really only estimating the average fixation rate of individual diverging nucleotides and ignoring the fact that thousands could be fixated at a time.
When he started talking about actual genetic changes to specific genes he got almost everything wrong, including what the genes actually were, what types of mutations were seen and how widespread they were and even the way proteins are produced.
He was wrong about a lot of other things too.
TTFN,
WK
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