Evolution is a faith because common ancestry doesn't add up

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@aarceng

I suggest Richard Buggs calculations from 2017/18 are more up to date than those done in 2005, that is probably >10% difference.

I’ve previously disagreed with that conclusion, based on a paper that @RichardBuggs cited; see my comments here.

@aarceng

I’m not sure how much “approximately thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion/deletion events” would add up to but since most indels are quite small, <10bp, I doubt the total will reach that. If you want to argue that neutral theory could explain 10% difference (or more) you should provide references where size, frequency, and rate of being fixed is fully taken into account for both neutral and selectable mutations.

I described the various comparisons between mutation rate and divergence to you here. We don’t really have to worry about the non-neutral mutations at this point, since the uncertainty in the mutation rate is much larger than the fraction of mutations that aren’t neutral. Note that in the discussion that’s been going on here, only the single-base substitution rate matters, and also that the bulk of the difference between the two genomes does lie in insertions and deletions (probably mostly in large segmental duplications).

@aarceng

None of that explains orphan genes

What isn’t the gain of one or more regulatory motifs by mutation an adequate explanation? What is your explanation for orphan genes in humans? (Keeping in mind that they correspond to nearly identical sequence in the chimpanzee genome.)