Quote Originally Posted by asplundii View Post
Not so. I take the mutability of microorganisms into account daily to be honest. But I also take into account other factors involved... Like selective pressure.

Odds are that an already established disease that is relatively mild will have a greater tendency to progress toward a more mild nature. The odds of it mutating into really nasty killer are much lower because the pressure to move that way is not there... Freak things do occur but odds are not in their favor
The problem with your argument is that it only applies to the grand scheme of things. Selective pressure implies that random mutation will create variations some that are more deadly and some that are less. 1000 years from now the ones that are less deadly will still be around and the ones that are more deadly will not. That's not relevant to the argument though. If a more deadly strain wipes out mankind and thus burns its self out you will have made a valuable point but we will all be dead. Odds are that an established disease will mutate randomly and the strains that kill to many hosts will die out progressing the disease toward a milder form. The more right you are, the more dead you are. One more time the PRESSURE you talk about is us all dieing.

I was never defending the video.

Quote Originally Posted by asplundii View Post
Granted I may have missed it since human genetics is not in my primary field but I do not recall a study showing the global diversity of the human genome. If you have a reference I would love to read it. I have seen a number of population level studies using specific SNPs that showed high levels of homogeneity of those SNPs within the populations but beyond that I am not sure there are even enough complete human genomes from enough regions of the world to be able to make a full global comparison.Cheers
I have read a hand full of papers over the past few years but of course I can't produce links to them. I hate to use wiki as a reference but it is a great source because at the bottom are lots of good references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_g...uman_variation
This area is of course still very actively being researched but all of the signs based on the various studies you mentioned are pointing toward not a whole lot of genetic diversity in humans. We are far from being a clonal population but we are not exactly genetically diverse. This is all my synthesis of papers I have read and my field is computer programming and server architecture so take it or leave it.