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....divide 1 million generations by 40,000 we get 25 minor changes (eg. the abilty to digest something not previously able to handle).....
You think this was "minor". Wow. This is the biological equivilant of me being able to live by ingesting top soil and use CO2 in the Krebs Cycle.
This is a very, very major phenotypic change.
Originally Posted by Jazmyn
surely at a minimum to go from ape ancestor to human would take some 30 million minor changes, or 19,590,000,000 mutations, according to that experiment, there would happen only 16,325 mutations during that amount of time. Is it possible?
When you stop arguing by guessing numbers... Anyways, you seem to be forgetting that unlike bacteria, higher animals use this thing called "Sex" for their reproduction.
Now that I'm back at college, I have journal access! Grabbed a copy of the Nature article off the web last night, can't wait to have a peruse....
What database did you get it through? Or does your school have an institutional subscription to Nature? I can't find the way to get through my school library to any full text. Bleh. Which means I'll have to wait for it to come out in print, and make an Inter-Library Loan request or xerox the article directly myself and scan it.
But other species are supposed to have evolved far more and they don't even have enough generations available to do it in, humans, for example. Between humans and a putative human-ape ancestor ten million years ago there are a maximum of perhaps one million generations, depending on the reproductive age at different stages. During that e-coli experiment, there was time for 653 mutations by generation 40,000, the later ones being mostly not helpful to the bacteria, divide 1 million generations by 40,000 we get 25 minor changes (eg. the abilty to digest something not previously able to handle), surely at a minimum to go from ape ancestor to human would take some 30 million minor changes, or 19,590,000,000 mutations, according to that experiment, there would happen only 16,325 mutations during that amount of time. Is it possible?
You can't directly compare mutation rates in E.coli with mutation rates in humans. You're talking about a single-celled organism that reproduces asexually versus a sexually-reproducing multicellular organism. Mutation rates on an individual basis in humans are much higher than an individual basis in E.coli, because our gametes (sperm and eggs) undergo multiple generations of cellular division. So more mutations accumulate during reproduction.
In humans, the number of mutations are estimated at over 100 per individual.
__________________ Creationism has not made a single contribution to agriculture, medicine, conservation, forestry, pathology, or any other applied area of biology. Creationism has yielded no classifications, no biogeographies, no underlying mechanisms, no unifying concepts with which to study organisms or life. - Botanical Society of America's Statement on Evolution
You can't directly compare mutation rates in E.coli with mutation rates in humans. You're talking about a single-celled organism that reproduces asexually versus a sexually-reproducing multicellular organism. Mutation rates on an individual basis in humans are much higher than an individual basis in E.coli, because our gametes (sperm and eggs) undergo multiple generations of cellular division. So more mutations accumulate during reproduction.
In humans, the number of mutations are estimated at over 100 per individual.
Has anyone ever actually done an equation to work out human evolution?
Equations relate variables together. What equation are you asking about? How many new mutations a human gets during conception? The percentage genetic similarity between mother and child? The number of mutations between a particular number of generations?
The thing people find hard to grasp is that, although it may take a great deal of mutations, every offspring is a mutant. Every offspring has a chance of finding the right mutation that takes it one step closer to evolving a new trait (evolution doesn't have foresight, of course, but it's a useful analogy). So when you have millions of individuals searching for this elusive path, suddenly it's not so unlikely that one individual will find it. And, once they have found it, within about ten generations, everyone in the local populace will have it.
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Why don't humans really evolve that much any longer?
We are continually evolving. It's just the level of change we can witness directly over our lives (3-4 generations max) isn't going to be as readily apparent as something like a 40,000 generation experiment with E.coli.
__________________ Creationism has not made a single contribution to agriculture, medicine, conservation, forestry, pathology, or any other applied area of biology. Creationism has yielded no classifications, no biogeographies, no underlying mechanisms, no unifying concepts with which to study organisms or life. - Botanical Society of America's Statement on Evolution
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