A short while ago Brian Foley wrote that sequence data show the human
genome to be very invariant, while chimpanzees are variable. It must
depend where you look.
Some years ago Eviatar nevo and collegues made a number of surveys of
data from electrophoretically detectable protein studies of
organisms. In the one I am looking at, there is for man a
probability of 0.47 that a locus is polymorphic (for 107 loci in 7349
individuals). Silent mutations will make this even higher at the
DNA level, and it is not just systems like MHC which are involved.
The equivalent figures for Pan are P=0.079 (42 loci in 182
individuals). In the latter case only two populations were
studied and it is possible variation between groups is great.
"If you've seen one human, you've seen them all." Not on this
evidence, you haven't. At the present time it seems necessary and
interesting to review critically the evidence for variability coming
from different types of investigation. Has this been done?
Laurence M. Cook
The Manchester Museum
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL U.K.
and:_lcook2 at excite.com
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