Most Common Lie in Genetics: More Similar than Not

Feb 3, 2020, 12:26 PM

—“More similar than different can be said about us and chimps”–Göran Dahl

When discussing genetics “more similar than different’ is a pseudoscientific, and pseudo-mathematical lie. There is even a name for it: “Lewontin’s Fallacy”. Or we can just call it postmodern denialism and igorance. Any of those labels will do.

Very minor changes appear to have very vast consequences and some groups have accumulated better minor changes and others worse minor changes (genetic load).

Same is true for rate of calculation of adaption. The rate of adaption depends largely on the number of life forms, the life span, the frequency of generations, the environmental pressures of a given locality, the available means of expressing fitness, the possibility of non local reproduction(travelled); the complexity of the life form(size of the information), the expressed population of the genome, whether it’s RNA(adaptive) or DNA(error checking), asexual or sexual, and the number of points in the replication process that errors can insert, delete, and survive, and some factors we don’t clearly understand yet, that facilitate or inhibit those changes and rates of change.

DNA(RNA) is a supercomputer that works at chemical rather than electrical velocity.

There are say, 5m SNP’s (blocks, instructions) and that is not all that can change – in an individuals genome, and 100m active SNPs worldwide.

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