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Re: Unorthodox science projects



I suspect a large fraction of the genes are to provide for just living
i.e. metabolism, protein synthesis, et cet. That's why we have so many
in common with all life. I'd have to search, but my impression is that
we differ form Chimps less than 1%. That should make variation among
"us" even less. Some where I read the diversity within a "racial"
group is more that the variation between the averages of the groups.

this is interesting:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/12/031219072314.htm

John Denker wrote:

Fernanda Foertter [Advanced Physics Forums] wrote:


millions of genes...even 1% diversity is much more diversity than
Noah and his family could ever provide.



If you are going to argue against unscientific and
unorthodox beliefs, you ought to take care to offer
scientific arguments.

"millions of genes... 1% diversity" is not a scientific
calculation; it's just throwing numbers at the wall to
see if they stick. And these numbers don't stick.

Suppose Adam had 3 million genes, and was heterozygous
at every locus. That makes 6 million alleles. I
don't think it happened that way, but you can't prove
it didn't. Similarly in the extreme his wife could
have had 6 million completely different alleles. Each
of his three daughters-in-law could have had another
6 million, for a total of 30 million alleles on the
ark ... ten per locus ... one thousand percent diversity.

So even if the original endowment was a factor of ten
less than the extreme values in the previous paragraph,
and even if 90% of the endowment has been lost by
accident since then, there could still be vastly more
than enough to account for 1% observed diversity at
the present time.

If you could point to a particular locus where there
are more than ten alleles, you might have an argument.
But even then it would be a pointless exercise. It
wouldn't be convincing to anyone who didn't already
agree with you.

In any case, could we please make an effort to stick
to scientific reasoning, with clearly-stated premises,
real facts, and careful logic, leading to clearly-stated
conclusions?