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Human evolution

Scientific discovery and discussion
GrahamPlatt
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Human evolution

#410606

Postby GrahamPlatt » May 9th, 2021, 7:03 pm

The Belgian diet thread in Beerpig’s snug evolved into a discussion about DNA.

servodude wrote:
UncleEbenezer wrote:As for DNA, of course there's far more variation within humans than between an average human and a gorilla


I get your point... but back in the day the rules of thumb were:
Humans share 98% DNA with gorillas
99% with chimps
and all the variation within the human species is in the last 0.5%
or at least that's what was drilled in to us a reason not to give up on the convergence of a Genetic Algorithm fitting a cost function: small changes can have very radical effect on phenotype.

-sd


That prompted my recollection of this YouTube video, which some might find interesting:

https://youtu.be/oXfDF5Ew3Gc

ursaminortaur
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Re: Human evolution

#410636

Postby ursaminortaur » May 9th, 2021, 9:53 pm

GrahamPlatt wrote:The Belgian diet thread in Beerpig’s snug evolved into a discussion about DNA.

servodude wrote:
UncleEbenezer wrote:As for DNA, of course there's far more variation within humans than between an average human and a gorilla


I get your point... but back in the day the rules of thumb were:
Humans share 98% DNA with gorillas
99% with chimps
and all the variation within the human species is in the last 0.5%
or at least that's what was drilled in to us a reason not to give up on the convergence of a Genetic Algorithm fitting a cost function: small changes can have very radical effect on phenotype.

-sd


That prompted my recollection of this YouTube video, which some might find interesting:

https://youtu.be/oXfDF5Ew3Gc


However humans have surprisingly little DNA variation compared with chimpanzees

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2012-03-02-chimps-show-much-greater-genetic-diversity-humans

'That chimpanzees from habitats in the same country, separated only by a river, are more distinct than humans from different continents is really interesting. It speaks to the great genetic similarities between human populations, and to much more stability and less interbreeding over hundreds of thousands of years in the chimpanzee groups.'


And the same goes for Gorillas

https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/primatology/Molecular_Genetics_Laboratory/pdf/VigilantBradleyAJP2004.pdf

When calculated in a way that takes into account varied sample sizes, the diversity found in gorillas is about twice that in humans, while chimpanzees and orangutans each possess more than three times the variation in humans. Phylogenetic analysis does not sort the sequences from gorillas,chimpanzees, or orangutans by subspecies. This lack of sorting suggests that it is not population structure in the ape species that produces the higher diversity values, but rather that humans are less diverse because the population history of humans is fundamentally different from that of the African apes.


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