Sorry, I can’t really continue this. You’re ignoring everything you told. You’re still saying that human and chimp proteins are 80% different, when you’ve been told a dozen times that your number is wrong in two completely different ways. Yet you haven’t budged an inch on your bogus factoid. And that’s the least of your problems. How can anyone talk to you after that?
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What is this gobbledygook supposed to mean?
Again, this nonsense.
I’ll try spell it out for you: There is no reason to believe that there is any significant functional difference arising from the very minor sequence differences found in these 71% (NOT 80%) of proteins. These are overwhelmingly just minor neutral mutations that were fixed thru drift. You have not presented any evidence to the contrary, you just seem to think whatever argument you are making here is self-evident, but it is not. It seems self-evident, rather, that there is something very basic you are not understanding.
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I had a hard time accepting this when I first heard it. But the math doesn’t lie. And since math is supposedly @Ahmed_AbdelSattar 's thing, he should have no problem with the concept.
Population genetics and the mathematics of mutation fixation has been well studied for a long time.
It appears you are ignorant of Kimura and Ohta’s maths which demonstrated that -
Beneficial mutations have a very good chance of fixing;
neutral mutations fix at the rate they form;
and deleterious mutations almost never fix (given a reasonable population size).
As Professor of Mathematics and Population Genetics @Joe_Felsenstein wrote on the pandasthumb blog, where he compared the probability of fixation of a 1% advantageous, a neutral, and a 1% deleterious mutation,
Fortunately, we can turn to an equation seven pages later in Kimura and Ohta’s book, equation (10), which is Kimura’s famous 1962 formula for fixation probabilities. Using it we can compare three mutants, one advantageous (s = 0.01), one neutral (s = 0), and one disadvantageous (s = -0.01). Suppose that the population has size N = 1000,000. Using equation (10) we find that
The advantageous mutation has probability of fixation 0.0198013.
The neutral mutation has probability of fixation 0.0000005.
The disadvantageous mutation has probability of fixation 3.35818 x 10^-17374
A 1% fitness benefit in a population of 1000000 has a 2% chance of being fixed in the population.
The probability of fixation of a neutral mutation = 1/2N in a diploid population.
A 1% fitness deleterious mutation effectively NEVER fixes in a population - it is “weeded out”.
For those more mathematically inclined, you can verify these numbers yourself;
Kimura’s fixation rate formula from a paper entitled “On the Probability of Fixation of Mutant Genes in a Population”
For a diploid population of size N, and deleterious mutation of selection coefficient - s, the probability of fixation is equal to
P fixation = (1 - e^(-2s))/(1 - e^(-4Ns))
(if s =/= 0. If s = 0, then we simply use his equation 6, where probability fixation = 1/2N).
Formula (10) from
If s = 0.01 and N = 1000000, (ie beneficial mutation with 1% fitness advantage and population 1000000), probability of fixation is
(1-e^(-0.02))/(1-e^(-40000)) = 0.01980132669
For a neutral mutation, s = 0, for which formula 6 states its probability fixation = 1/2N,
P fixation = 1/2000000 = 0.0000005
If - s = 0.01 (ie deleterious mutation of 1% fitness disadvantage) N = 1000 000, probability of fixation is
P fixation = (1-e^(0.02))/(1-e^(40000))
= 3.35818 x 10^-17374.
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Humans are great apes.
You keep repeating this unsupported claim. Either support the claim or stop making it. Where is the evidence that any substantial fraction of these differences have any functional impact on the protein?
You ‘think’? Is there evidence you can bring in support of the claim or not?
And yet you didn’t bother to say if you thought them similar or not, which was literally the question asked!
Fixation rate approaches mutation rate as fitness effect approaches zero.
This statement is suggestive that you don’t understand what constitutes ‘fitness’. Being physically weaker than a chimpanzee is not a deleterious trait if such a trait increases reproductive success. To say there are many fixed deleterious mutations, you actually have to demonstrate that any actually are deleterious. So far you have provided no such evidence.
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That’s not what I am asking. What I am asking is how similar the two sequences are. Here it is again.
Here are two short amino acid sequences:
YCHASQMLNH
YCHA P QMLNH
There are 10 amino acids and they differ by 1 amino acid. Are those amino acid sequences 0% similar or 90% similar?
I think that the >80% of the human genome that is accumulating mutations at a rate consistent with neutral drift probably doesn’t have function.
That wouldn’t be of much use since they only determined what percentage of the genome participated in biochemical reactions. They didn’t determine what percentage of the genome has function important to the organism.
You need to show us evidence for this claim. It would seem to me that RNA transcription, protein translation, homeostasis, and biological activity (e.g. muscle contraction) take up way, way more energy and resources than copying the DNA genome once in the cell’s lifecycle.
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How rare are beneficial mutations? You still haven’t told us.
How is the rate of fixation for beneficial mutations a problem?
You keep making these claims, but we have seen zero evidence for them.
Then factor it in and show us how it is a problem.
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He’ll first have to show why this entails fixation of deleterious mutations. I wish him luck with that.
He has a very naive view of evolution as making everything bigger, stronger, smarter, faster, etc all the time.
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Dude I’m sorry to have to tell you but if you don’t want to correct your numbers despite having it pointed out to you by multiple people, multiple times, it becomes a total waste of time to talk to you.
Are you interested in what is really true or are you just doing this for appearances sake? Does honesty matter? Either you start acknowledging your errors or this discussion has lost any meaning it might have had.
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Arguably, but sure.
Humans ARE great apes.
No, I didn’t presuppose evolution to argue evolution. I explained that you have a gross misconception about what evolution even is about. This particular argument wasn’t trying to make you accept that the tenets of evolution are true, I was trying correct your misconception in order to make sure you properly understand the subject. So you’ve completely missed the point I was making.
Yeah, I know that you believe that, but you cannot arbitrarily apply YOUR personal beliefs to the proposition that is being argued for. In order to listen to the opposition, you need to be willing to look at things outside your narrow perspective.
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What Witchdoc said, except:
N = 1000,000 should be N = 1,000,000.
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@BrianLopez, this thread amply demonstrates why you need to understand basic evolutionary theory first. Just take a look at the factual and conceptual errors @Ahmed_AbdelSattar keeps making. One can tell he has a poor understanding of the basics.
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Seriously, it’s useless for @Ahmed_AbdelSattar to come here. He ignores everything anyone says and just keeps repeating his false claims and bogus arguments. All too many creationists are like that, unfortunately. There is no basis for any real conversation.
@swamidass, do you think you had a real conversation with him? In retrospect, it seems that you did not.
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Michael_OkokoNigerian Catholic Agnostic
@BrianLopez, this thread amply demonstrates why you need to understand basic evolutionary theory first. Just take a look at the factual and conceptual errors @Ahmed_AbdelSattar keeps making. One can tell he has a poor understanding of the basics.
Yes, I see that. Although Ahmed has an additional blockage besides the fact that he has not learned the basics and the more advanced science from the ground up: his commitment to the Qur’an / Allah / Muhammad and his assumption (or “conclusion” for him) that the Qur’ran must be correct in all that it says (but actually here, it is all that is read into). A very similar problem occurs with extremists, inerrantists that defend the Bible and their distorted view of the sciences. I am not only thinking of YEC and OEC, but also of inerrantists that defend Gospel contradictions/differences in very contrived ways.
Thanks 
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Factual misunderstanding is one thing. The kind of failure of logic that leads one to make an argument like “80% of human proteins are very slightly different from the homologous proteins in chimps. Therefore neutral theory is wrong.” is another thing altogether.
And then there is the continued use of the number 80% when he has been corrected on it many times…
Joshua will have his own opinion, but as a viewer it did not seem that Ahmed was even listening to what was said. He didn’t show the slightest understanding of the scientific findings that are only explicable by common descent. And when Joshua asked Ahmed for a mathematical model based on creation that better accounted for these results, all he got were nonsensical responses like “Why are there no talking sharks?” It was obvious that Ahmed has a pre-packaged repertoire of retorts, and he just trotted one of these out whenever he had to say something, regardless of whether it had anything to do with what was just discussed.
Now, just watch: He’s going to start whining about how everyone is committing ad homs and ignore all of the substantive criticisms he has received.
I suppose it could be argued that Joshua was really aiming his presentation at followers of Ahmed who might have been hearing this sort of evidence for the first time. Could be. I’ve asked members of a Muslim group where Ahmed frequently posts for their reactions to the video, but the comment is held up in moderation.
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If you followed through with the above demo, then you can examine the percentage similarity results from comparing actual orthologous protein sequences of humans and chimps.
To compute the percentage sequence similarity I aligned the amino acid sequence of the human protein, Protein-arginine deiminase type-3 (PADI3-human) with its chimpanzee ortholog (PADI3-chimp) using BLAST. The human and chimp versions are 664 amino acids long and had ~99% sequence similarity. In other words, out of 664 aligned sites, 656 sites were identical and 8 sites were different (due to events like a nucleotide substitution, for example).
To get the percentage similarity, calculate the ratio of the aligned identical sites (656) to total number of aligned sites (664) and multiply that ratio by 100 to express it in percentage format. The percentage sequence similarity is circled in red in the screenshot below.
656/664 × 100 = ~99%
If you kept on aligning all the human and chimp orthologous protein sequences this way, you would find out that 71% of them are nonidentical (as shown above) due to some differences between them. The remnant 29% of shared protein sequences are identical (no difference at any aligned site).
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Here’s a not too difficult exercise @Ahmed_AbdelSattar
The human germline mutation rate is 0.5*10^-9 mutations per nucleotide per year.
The typical eukaryote protein has ~300 residues.
The human-chimpanzee split is estimated around 5-7mya.
Given the above, what ballpark proportion of proteins should be identical?
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This is somewhat relevant to the human and chimpanzee common ancestry, specifically about dating exactly the divergence point. But it isn’t much relevant to the predictions made by @swamidass
- The differences between chimps and humans regarding the coding sequences are predominantly synonymous changes relative to non-synonymous changes.
- The differences between the chromosomes of humans and chimps, specifically that the X chromosome diverged less and the Y chromosome diverged more relative to the autosomal chromosomes.
- The relative differences between of transitions to transversion substitutions between humans and chimps, compared to the relative differences between de novo transition and transversion mutation rates seen in human pedigree lines.
Since these are all referring relative rates, the differences in overall absolute mutation rates isn’t relevant, because changing the overall rates wouldn’t change the relative rates.
Now, I would also add shared unique insertion mutations, specifically in the form of processed pseudo genes [NANOG pseudogene familiy] and ERVs, which is even better support for common descent.
That paper has been soundly criticized.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/evo.13650
Again, no, it’s 71% not 80%. And that 71% doesn’t mean what you think it means. It means that of all the proteins coding genes we share with chimps are, 71% percent of them differ by at least one amino acid. Most differ by at the most a few amino acids, which means that most of the protein coding sequences are still almost identical, near 99%. I already explained that in my previous reply, and so did many others. Perhaps you are only paying attention to the reply by @swamidass but still, you should look at the answers people provide to you.
The fact that you can account for anything by ad hoc reasoning is a bug, not a feature. Look up Falsifiability - Wikipedia
Been there, done that.
???
Firstly, It’s 5 million indels (insertion or deletion)
Secondly, How?? On what basis do you make this judgement?
The human population contains about 88 million genetic variants, which includes 84.7 million SNPs (or single bp mutations) and 3.6 million short indels. The average human differs from a human reference genome by 4.1-5 million sites, with 3.8 million being SNPs and 0.57 million Indels.
An average human-to-human Indel/SNP ratio of 0.150
[source: “A global reference for human genetic variation”]
The genetic differences between humamans and chimpanzees constitute approximately 35 million SNPs and 5 million Indels.
An human-to-chimp Indel/SNP ratio of 0.143
[source: Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome]
This seems to be also in support of common ancestry.
No, we have a good idea of what a large portion of the genome does. As someone else already pointed out.
Wasn’t this already in “A”? And again, we have been over this many times.
As I have said earlier: you need to provide evidence for your claims, besides a mere appeal to your belief in human exceptionalism.
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@Ahmed_AbdelSattar: One of the questions you asked was about beavers building dams, which think could only happen if Allah taught the how to do it. You and Joshua were unsure about the extent to which this behaviour is learned vs instinctive. Of course, Joshua had no reason to expect this topic would come up, but this is one of your standard arguments since you also brought it up with Aron Ra.
I don’t know how completely this question has been answered, but it is known that the behaviour is instinctive i.e. beaver pups raised in isolation from their parents then released into the wild build perfect dams.
And some of the behaviour that leads to dam building is understood and is easily accounted for by genetic factors. No construction classes from Allah needed.
The Sound of Running Water Puts Beavers in the Mood to Build | Mental Floss
This took me only a couple minutes on Google to find…
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million