I apologize for misspelling your name.

You said

“Note that this does not imply that chimps and humans are a few hundred changes away from each other; but rather that humans and the human-chimp common ancestor are a few hundred changes from each other.”

This essentially says the same thing. Double a few hundred and one has at most a few hundred more.

But it implies that only a few hundred changes separate us from some species that didn’t make it and they would be essentially the same because a few hundred in the scheme of things is not very much. What do we have of this species that the chimp doesn’t and why and vice versa.

Sean Carroll believes that the switches that control human development represent in the order of 60 million nucleotides or more and would take several thousand pages to write down. So a few hundred changes might represent what percentage of this? How long is the average switch? It would be a very small percentage. And with switches we are not talking changes in amino acid sequences where many may not change much but changes to switches are changes to the basic code laying out the human and chimp body.

This seems quite small to come up with all the differences between the chimp and the human.

I always wonder about switches since apparently they are layers upon layers upon layers of them turning on and turning off in very complicated sequences and how mutations would affect these sequences in any positive way especially with a species that does not reproduce that frequently.

As the king said in the “King and I”, it is a “Puzzlement.”

The 94% article is supposed to be at
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ps-not-985

I found it through using the search box and ’94%’

I could not re-find the article that stated 86% – sorry.

If indeed the development of white sclera is positive evidence of intelligent design, why don’t you encourage the Discovery Institute to fund a precise study of the regulatory elements leading to white sclera. Perhaps this would be of general interest for the ID debate, but even if you’re wrong and there is a bog-standard evolutionary mechanism which leads to white sclera the study would probably give some insight into various developmental disorders of the eye, so whatever the result of the study the Discovery Institute could rest happy that it had bettered the lot of humanity.

I understand you’re a fellow of the DI, and they have a bit of a budget. You should really take something like this up with them.

See: Genomes and Form: The Case for Teleomorphic Recursivity by one the finest evolutionary biologists on the planet, Richard Sternberg:

The genotype-phenotype (genome-form) distinction is considered by many to be fundamental to modern evolutionary thinking. Indeed, the premises that: DNA solely constitutes the genotype; that the phenotype is a transient product of the genotype, with the latter not only describing, but also implementing the construction of the former; and that the constructed materials and systems of the cell have no impact on the genotype, have become dogmas. Yet a vast body of data from molecular genetics reveals that cellular systems, directly and indirectly, alter the genome. Some of these data are reviewed. Proteins can influence mutations along the chromosomes, heritably modify the information content of DNA sequences, and, in some instances, reorganize the germline or somatic genome via DNA engineering pathways. These data suggest that the constructed (proteins, chromatin arrays, and metabolic pathways) has an important role in shaping the descriptor. Insofar as it is biochemically possible for states adopted by cellular structures to be stabilized and eventually memorized by engineering chromosomes, semantic closure can be transcended-meaning can be transferred from the domain of form to the genome, and this presumably ongoing process is termed teleomorphic recursivity. Throughout the paper, I implicitly argue that the genome-form partition is strictly a formal one, with no deeply material basis.

I believe Paul’s argument could be summarized as:

1) there is a fundamental difference between humans and chimps; in some manner it is “macro”
2) the coding genome part of the differences are inadequate to explain this “macro” difference
3) there must therefore be a big “macro” difference in the non-coding regulatory portion of the genome
4) (implicit) “neo-darwinism” needs to account for these great changes in the non-coding regulatory genome

Given that it seems likely that the coding difference between humans and chimps amounts to a couple of hundred genes or thereabouts, in my view it would not be astonishing if the changes in the non-coding regulatory component were of similar magnitude (but take into account that the individual non-coding regulatory potions are smaller than individual genes; therefore it might be disproportionately more non-coding regulatory components, but only to the extent that non-coding components are smaller).
To me it’s not at all clear from chimp anatomy or behavior that there is some “macro” difference between humans and chimps on a genomic level, whatever “macro” means; presumably “macro” means “so great as to require processes other than those described in a standard college-level text on evolution and genetics which would be produced from a common ancestor of about 5 million years ago”. This does not say that the changes might not be “decisive”, in the sense that a lot hangs off them, but my guess is that they are also small. Small events, small changes often have big consequences, so it might well be with our development.

In summary point (1) of Paul’s argument is not clear to me. Perhaps if he were to define “macro” in a more detailed way it would be clearer.

Note that this does not imply that chimps and humans are a few hundred changes away from each other; but rather that humans and the human-chimp common ancestor are a few hundred changes from each other.

Also my name is spelled “Caldon” without an “r”, thanks.

Hi Mike,

You asked:

could you take a couple of minutes to elaborate on exactly why you believe that human-chimp divergence is macroevolutionary rather than microevolutionary?

Micro, macro, tomato, tomahto…”I am apt to suspect there enters somewhat of a dispute of words into this controversy” (Hume 1779).

But seriously: my first introduction to King & Wilson 1975 was, IIRC, reading Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) as a college student, which then sent me back to the original paper. Gould was so excited about King & Wilson 1975 that he used it to launch the book’s epilogue (and thanked King and Wilson in his acknowledgments for providing the launching point) about searching for evolutionary mechanisms to explain the “phenomena of saltation” (p. 409):

Although the differences between humans and chimps may be quantitative only, the two species as adults do not look much alike and their adaptive differences are, to say the least, profound (no monkey, despite the common metaphor, will ever type -– much less write –- the Iliad). Yet King and Wilson (1975), reviewing evidence for the astoundingly small differences in structural genes between the two species, have found that the average human polypeptide is more than 99 percent identical with its counterpart in chimps….For 44 structural loci, the average genetic distance between chimps and humans is less than the average distance between sibling species barely, if at all, distinguishable in morphology – and far less than the distance between any measured pair of congeneric species.

What, then, is at the root of our profound separation? King and Wilson argue convincingly that the decisive differences must involve the evolution of regulation….Of the nature of our regulatory differences, King and Wilson profess ignorance: “Most important for the future study of human evolution would be the demonstration of differences between apes and humans in the timing of gene expression during development of adaptively crucial organ systems such as the brain” (p. 114).

I think King and Wilson 1975 was deeply prescient -– a great paper, deservedly a classic. But the puzzle they posed is still unsolved today. Sorry, Toejam, but that’s the truth; don’t gripe to me, take it up with Massimo Pigliucci:

http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/.....elties.pdf

See slides 11 and 18-20.

Consider an anatomical character that, except under pathologic circumstances, is universally shared in Homo sapiens, our white sclera:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/si.....d_RVDocSum

How did this character arise, and how was it fixed, in our common ancestry with chimps (who lack the character)? Various adaptive hypotheses exist about the communication function of white sclera. These however tend to be of the “it’s good to have that trait, so we have it” sort. Given that other primates have pigmented sclera, it is likely that the common ancestor of chimps and humans also had pigmented sclera. The character “white sclera” must then have evolved on the branch leading to Homo sapiens.

How did that happen? Anybody?

Doc Bill, you asked about “astonishment.” My conversations about King & Wilson 1975 have typically gone (roughly) like this [EA, evolution activist; PN, me]:

EA: King & Wilson showed that we’re basically chimps. You know, the “third chimpanzee,” as Jared Diamond put it. 99 percent identical genetically.

PN: Actually, the main point of their paper was to argue that significant evolutionary change must arise from mutations in “regulatory,” not structural, genes, and that how this happens, and what these loci are, is an open puzzle.

EA: Say what?

About like that. This conversation does not occur with evolutionary biologists of my acquaintance who have read King & Wilson 1975.

HERE

I’ve seen figures as low as 86% in some articles.”

The link “HERE” is broken. Where is the article/site?
NG says 96% at here.
[Evan] “Eichler and his colleagues found that the human and chimp sequences differ by only 1.2 percent in terms of single-nucleotide changes to the genetic code. But 2.7 percent of the genetic difference between humans and chimps are duplications, in which segments of genetic code are copied many times in the genome.” So the 99% figure comes from counting single-nucleotide changes, but is not an accurate representation of the total difference between human and chimp DNA.

It’s also interesting that they state “the scientists identified some 40 million differences among the three billion DNA molecules, or nucleotides, in each genome.
The vast majority of those differences are not biologically significant [= "junk DNA"?], but researchers were able to identify a couple thousand differences that are potentially important to the evolution of the human lineage.”

You said

“Without this first premise that “humans and chimps are inexplicably different”, I’m not sure that your argument holds water.”

What argument does not hold water?

Are you saying that chimps and humans are just a few regulatory changes away from each other and if we just wait a short time we will see chimps turn into a more intelligent species?

Are you saying that the differences are really less than 1% and this number has not been a mis-representation over the years?

Just what are you trying to propose or say?

Humans apparently share a 50% DNA likeness to bananas. So what conclusions must we draw from that?

You are what you eat!

Humans are worms are 75% similar in DNA.

Anyone eating worms here?

I see…men eat chickens, chickens eat worms.