welcome home. are you going to drink ?

nah, need to do some statistics...

trying to figure out how to calculated coalesence times from an alignment...

it should tell me something about the ancestral demographics of orangutans

but the equations are putting up a fight

could you do the same analysis on humans? (why orangutans?)

I'm using humans in the analysis

humans, chimps, orangutans and macaque

but the interesting part is actually the ancestors of human and chimps up to the point they meet the orangutan

but since the project is part of the orangutan genome project, I have to take an interestin in orangutans as well.

so we will have even more proof for evolution

not at all, but /assuming/ evolution, you will get information about the diversity in ancestor species

we have indications that humans went through a bottleneck (almost went extinct)

we want to know if something similar happened earlier

right now it looks like ancestral apes were more diverse than humans are now

damn, why extinct? any theories? [and in what era?]

I think it's about 100,000 years ago ... there are several theories, I am not sure which are more credible

we just have a lot less variation in our genes than we should if it hadn't happened

and those we have are too high frequent

which can be explained by us having increased in numbers very rapidly from a very small population

we certainly have increased in numbers rapidly, but I am not talking within the last few centuries

too much variation for that

I'm talking pre- discovery of agriculture

of course there is also a bottleneck out of Africa, making non-Africans a lot less polymorph than Africans

ok, pretty interesting. do you know how much our genes have changed the past few generations?

they haven't changed in a few generations

we are talking /long/ time scales here

you get changes all over your genome all the time, but for anything to matter on population levels -- much less on an evolutionary scale --

you need a /lot/ of time

ic i thought big changes in enviroment / society could affect our genes

so if Jesus lived today he could code? (if he had the proper teaching) ?

there is no significant changes in homo sapiens the last 10000 at least

probably not the last 100000

(before that it is more debateble)

at some point around 100000 art and new kinds of tools shows up

which could be an evolutionary change

if it isn't just culture

after that, there is no real reason to think we have changed dramatically

somewhat, yes, but not enough to look or behave drastically different from today