Dude I just quoted it to you. They obviously intend to show that if even the waiting time for 2-8 mutations is fantastically prohibitive, those “150 million nucleotide differences” between humans and chimps must be totally outside the realm of possibility. Do I really have to copy-paste it again?
The implication, the take-home message is obvious: if it takes that long to even get between 2 and 8 specific mutations, clearly 150 million of them would be absurd.
There’s more:
When we have reduced the single point mutation’s fitness benefit to a more realistic level of 1%, waiting time increases ten fold (15.9 million years, rather than 1.5 million years). Given an even more reasonable fitness benefit of 0.1%, average waiting time was 145 million years. So allowing for a more realistic range of fitness effects, we should more accurately say that even given very substantial fitness effects, the waiting time for a specific point mutation ranges between 1.5 and 15.9 million years. This is consistent with comments by Durrett and Schmidt [16]. They only calculated waiting time to first instance, but at the end of their paper acknowledged that with a 1% beneficial effect their waiting time to fixation would have been about 100 times longer – due to the need to wait for the effective instance. The need to wait 1.5 – 15.9 million years for the fixation of a particular point mutation is very sobering, since it is estimated that mankind evolved from a chimp-like creature in just 6 million years.
While total waiting time for a particular point mutation to arise and be fixed is surprisingly long in this type of population, the waiting time for any particular string of mutations is vastly longer. Waiting times increase dramatically as we increase the string length (Fig. 2). As shown in Table 2, if an eight-nucleotide string is required, waiting time exceeds the estimated age of the universe.’
There’s no mystery here, I really did correctly characterize what the study is intended to show: That the millions and millions of nucleotide differences that separate humans and chimpanzees couldn’t possibly have evolved in a mere 6 million years, and would require times exceeding the total age of the universe by many many orders of magnitude.
Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5% [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information.
While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man.
Man, even two or three specific mutations take too long for 6 million years. And those silly evolutionists think there’s enough time for over 75 million nucleotide differences?
No Gilbert, I really do think I have correctly understood the message of the paper. I wonder, did YOU even read it?
