> Walter Remine, author of "The Biotic Message", notes:
>
> Imagine a population of 100,000 of those organisms quietly evolving their
> way to humanity. For easy visualization, I'll have you imagine a scenario
> that favors rapid evolution. Imagine evolution happens like this. Every
> generation, one male and one female receive a beneficial mutation so
> advantageous that the 999,998 others die off immediately, and the
population
> is then replenished in one generation by the surviving couple. Imagine
> evolution happens like this, generation after generation, for ten million
> years. How many beneficial mutations could be substituted at this
crashing
> pace? One per generation -- or 500,000 nucleotides. That's 0.014
percent
> of the genome. (That is a minuscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that
> separates us from chimpanzees).
>
> That's not a difficult calculation, yet it immediately reveals a problem.
> Is 500,000 beneficial nucleotides enough to explain the origin of humanity
> from some chimp-like ancestor?
Is the 2-3 % that separates us from chimps mostly in the supposedly "junk"
DNA, and if so, does that affect the speed at which such changes
can accumulate ?
Bob Maziasz