Where are all the mutations?

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

These two posts from an expert in the field can be helpful:

Adam and Eve had Perfect Genomes (The Genetic Entropy Argument)

Most intergenic mutations have less effect even than synonymous mutations. In any case, it doesn’t matter: mutations with very slight effect on fitness will not be selected against, but they also were never selected for, so most sites in that class will be more or less at equilibrium, with as many very slightly deleterious mutations as very slightly beneficial, all of them meaning nothing in the long run. Nah, that’s quite incorrect. Natural selection can remove an arbitrarily large number of…

Adam and Eve had Perfect Genomes (The Genetic Entropy Argument)

Oh criminy. That’s a model, a mathematical expression someone made up as a guess at what the real distribution might look like. In 1977, when we knew next to nothing about the actual distribution. There is no empirical data at all that says that the majority of mutations in humans are very slightly deleterious. There are also excellent grounds for thinking that mutations of slight effect in humans are not strongly skewed toward being deleterious. For example, one class of slightly deleterious …