Does neutral evolution explain the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees

[Dan_Eastwood]

@kleinman

The flaw in this argument is that you must assume that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees can be accounted for by neutral evolution. However, humans and chimpanzees have significantly different reproductive fitnesses as demonstrated by the 20,000 times differences in population size. So if humans and chimpanzees are distantly related, some of those mutations had to be beneficial for humans to account for the differences in reproductive fitness.

First of all, no one has claimed there were no beneficial mutations. The evidence for the existance beneficial mutations seems pretty clear.

Second, you keep coming back to “… different reproductive fitnesses as demonstrated by the 20,000 times differences in population size.” when the difference in fitness due to intelligence is more quality than quantity. This has been pointed out several times and you haven’t seemed to notice. There is a new thread discussing just this topic that might interest you:

Roles of Natural Selection and Cognition in Evolution and Population Size?

The current thread, Does neutral evolution explain the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees, is limited to scientists, and I do not wish to go off on a tangent there. One of the concepts which has been expressed there, however, seems to me very naive. Clearly, humans could and do live in the same environment that chimpanzees do and achieve far larger populations. In fact, one of the reason that chimpanzees might go extinct is human encroachment on the chimpanzee environment. That is classic Darwinian competition. So, how many beneficial mutations do you think it required for humans to get in this evolutionary position? …and… You’ve claimed that you can account for most of the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees using neutral evolution but there are now over 7 billion humans and only 300,000 chimpanzees. There have been a number of effective replies in that thread challenging and qualifying the idea that population size correlates to fitness, but I t…

Your most recent argument requires knowledge of just what those beneficial mutations are, and indeed the entire evolutionary sample space since the MRCA to do probability calculations. This is definitely far afield from your original claim.