Progress after the Royal Society conference?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@lee_merrill

@AndyWalsh

Then we get Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution. This is theoretical work again relating to two specific mutations. Do the hosts ever give any evidence that such a combination was necessary for human evolution when discussing the >100M year wait time? Or the fact that, if the first mutation is neutral, there’s no requirement that they both happen in the lifetime of a given species?

Well, if more than 100 million years are needed for just two-mutation functions, that implies that we’re not going to get from chimps to humans in any reasonable amount of time.

Several issues here.

1. If two mutations are too much for 100 million years, how many species would need to be on the Ark if they are to have diverged that much from their common ancestors in less than 6000 years? Heck, even if you aren’t a YEC I think you need to think about how it possible so many species could show common descent with that degree of divergence if a mere two co-dependent mutations should represent a barrier to that. Could you be missing or misunderstanding something? Seriously consider that option.

2. We didn’t evolve from chimps, but from a common ancestor (from which chimps evolved too).

3. How many of the “functions” in either species required (in order to evolve) two individually deleterious mutations that only in combination became beneficial, and where there were no other possible alternative mutation-combinations that could have provided the same or an equally adaptive function? We don’t know of even a single example.

4. Have you heard of the neutral theory of molecular evolution and the rate of fixation of neutral mutations being equal to their rate of occurrence?