georgir said:
Um sorry, but did you even spend a second to think about what you are posting? This last paragraph of yours is complete nonsense.
If 1 in 150 is not neutral, then 149 are 150 is neutral, plain and simple. that's 149 times more, not "thousands of times more".
Then, even if we go with your "thousands", your math still does not make sense. Take 1 in 1000 mutations being benefical, and a mutation happening every 1e7 divisions, means a benefical mutation happens every 1e10 divisions. The 1e9, 1e16 numers that you pull out of a hat are making my head hurt.
But these mistakes don't matter anyway, the whole calculation is pointless when you don't even know what the result means. You arrive at some huge number and go flaunting it around as some absolute probability. It should be probability per time and then you should sum it over the millions of years that evolution needs, or probability per birth, and you should sum it over the millions of organisms that are born between evolutionary steps. As it is now, you got something like probability per cell division, and to get probability per birth for example you should take into account how many cell divisions happen in an embryo before the sex cells are formed - a figure with which I can't help you unfortunately.
And even your starting assumption about the frequency of mutations is incorrect. I can't check the given reference, it may be true on average in normal conditions today, but it can vary greatly with different conditions, for example increased radiation, i.e. before the ozone layer was formed etc. The chance of mutations is also greater in the more complex process of meiosis, or the formation of sex cells, as well as in sexual fertilisation, than in the usual mitosis. Mutation of the already formed sex cells can also occur while they are idle in storage in an organism and not during a cell division at all.
P.S.: Just to ease up your calculations, I googled up an article about the first human family that had its DNA sequenced.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-10/family-genome-sequence-fewer-mutations-inherited-update1-.html
It says that previous estimates were for about 75 mutations passed to children from each parent or 150 total, and the new data showing around half that mutation rate. That is still huge, and no matter how little the chance of one mutation being benefical is, given a large enough population size and number of generations, it is obvious benefical mutations will occur.
At risk of incurring the wrath of the moderators, who've already deleted multiple replies of mine because she claims they are "religious", despite being based on scientific evidence, I'll respond...
I'm reading back through my post and am not quite sure where I was going with the 1 in 150 turning into 1E9. I think I should have said "Now figure out how many divisions result in neutral mutations". Let's take a base for mutations of 1E7. Out of those, 1 in 150 will be either beneficial or harmful, resulting in a low end of 1E9 divisions resulting in beneficial/harmful mutations. Out of those, the vast majority are harmful (how many times does a mutation in humans result in cancer, vs how many times does it result in a human growing wings, or at least SOMETHING of benefit). Let's go on the absurdly low end and say 1 in 10,000 beneficial/harmful divisions end up being beneficial. That brings us to 1E13 on an absurdly low end, but let's go with it.
Now, take that 1E13 and assume a 5 part system (which is a very very very small system), each part of which offers no benefit on its own, unless all 5 parts are present. Therefore all of which must be developed in the same organism, or successive organisms, despite there not being any natural selection benefit to preserve those traits. Now you're looking at 1E65 chance of that happening (not 1E80 as I said before). It's still an absurdly large number.
Now average that over time:
Let's assume that the entire surface of the Earth is covered by bacteria, and the oceans, instead of being made up of water, are a soup made up entirely of bacteria. And every second for 5 billion years, every single bacteria reproduces.
So we have an absurdly high number of 1 E47 bacteria, reproducing every second for 1 E17 seconds. Given that, we have 1 E64 attempts at generating that 5 part system, giving a 10% chance at producing that incredibly simple system, IF every atom in the ocean and on the surface of the Earth was a bacteria, and IF they reproduced every second, and IF they all tried unique combinations (not repeating any previously tried ones), then you have a chance at producing that very simple system. If you want to get into more complex systems requiring 10 (still simple), 20, 40, 100+ parts, you're looking at very low chances. Just requiring 6 parts changes it to 1E78, and takes us from a 10% chance to a .000000000001% chance. 7 Parts makes it 1E91, so add 13 more zeroes prior to the 1 at the end of the decimal place...
Show me the "religion" in there moderators, and I'll pull the post. Again, when scientists are willing to set aside their preconceptions (like the one I'm discussing here), their eyes will be open to all possibilities for advancement, even if it contradicts their personally held beliefs.
which shows up first under http://www.iopblog.org/todays-physics-news-tuesday-17-august-2010/" on the IOP blog.