Dr. Schwartz' "MIssing Links"

Sounds like the latest in a long line of scientists quoted out of context by the media to fit their narrative of equal opposing consensuses.

Ok, I admit error. I assumed he was being misquoted because I made the charitable assumption that he wasn't an idiot.I stand corrected.

I didn't understand this in your paper, and I don't understand it now. When you say the "mutation rate" is "10^-8 or -9", 10^9 what? Mutations? Over what period of time, per what reference frame?Page and Holmes' "Molecular Evolution: A Phylogenetic Approach" - a standard text in the field - says "Mutation rates are notoriously difficult to measure directly," so I wonder from what basis you're claiming this measurement. Furthermore, it cites a figure of 10^-9 synonymous substitutions (aka "neutral mutations") per base per year as a general figure for eukaryotes.Is that the measurement you're referring to? With a human genome consisting of over 3 billion base pairs in every cell, that's between 1-4 synonymous substitutions per cell per year, which would add up to a considerable number of mutations by the time an organism is able to reproduce, even discounting somatic cell mutations. While it's been abundantly clear for a very long time now that mutation is not the primary motivator of morphological variation among individuals, it seems premature at this point to assert that mutations are so rare that they have no place in explanations of the origins of biological novelty, as you seem to be doing.

You'd be mistaken, I think, if you were under the impression that molecular phylogeneticists weren't aware of the fact that mutations rates are mutable. The text I referenced earlier has a whole chapter devoted to how to take inconstant clocks into account.You're right that it's a bad assumption; but I've had pretty intimate exposure to molecular phylogenetics through my wife's work and while I certainly would claim any kind of authority, it's obvious to me that geneticists aren't ignoring what we now know about substitution rates.

My understanding is that they're reliably stable over sufficiently short periods of time, so they're relevant for closely-related species. If you tried to use one molecular rate assumption over a wider scope than that your results would be little better than chance.