Re: For Sean Pitman: Some real nested hierarchies

Seanpit wrote:
On Mar 13, 7:44 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
If you took the person that was 22 substitutions different from a
Neanderthal and compared that person to every other human being, are
you really suggesting that you would be unlikely to find any other
human being with more than 22 differences to this person? I find this
notion of yours to be statistically unlikely given a Poisson
distribution of a few billion people.
Distribution of what? And why would it be Poisson?
I believe he's claiming that sequence differences are randomly and
independently sprinkled among individuals. Apparently he doesn't know
that mitochondrial genomes form a single linkage group.

Mitochondrial differences are indeed randomly produced in individual
generation lines. That is why there would be a Poisson distribution
of differences relative to any one person with a range of more than 22
regardless of the person chosen as a reference relative to all other
people in the world.

That would be true if there were no tree structure to the data, which in turn might happen if mitochondria were freely recombining at a sufficient rate. But mitochondria don't recombine, and so there is a tree structure to the data. Tree structure prevents there from being the sort of distribution you imagine. The number of mutations in a parallel lineages after some branch point may be poisson distributed, but lineages aren't parallel and share some proportion of their paths. Because of this sharing, distances between individuals are not independent.

.

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