> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
> Behalf Of Preston Garrison
> Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2000 4:14 AM
> Question for any real population geneticists here:
>
> Is it possible that something like population level selection for
> polymorphism at these loci could throw this estimate off?
I am not a real population geneticist but I have read one or two of them.
:-)
Here is what 3 of them say about the speed of mutation among the MHC
alleles. The standing assumption had been that the MHC genes mutated faster
and thus the polymorphism arose after the speciation event. But in the late
70's this was apparently shown to be wrong:
"In the late 1970's Bernhard Arden, Edward K. Wakeland and Klein, all then
working at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tubingen, found identical
MHC alleles in two mouse species that had diverged two million years ago.
This quite unexpected finding, in species whose MHC diversity at least
matches that of humans, implied that the MHC genes did not evolve faster
than other genes." ~ Jan Klein, Naoyuki Takahata and Francisco J. Ayala,
"MHC Polymorphism and Human Origins," Scientific American, Dec. 1993, p. 80
If any real population geneticists could show the above to be wrong, I would
be delighted because it would explain a piece of data that goes directly
against what I view as the biblical view.
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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