What are the odds that another organism mutates at around the same time/when the first one hasn’t died yet and that that mutation changes the second organism into the exact same species as the first one (changes the same dna bases) AND that those 2 organisms find each other and have sex?
In: 3
That’s not how mutations work. It’s not like some homo erectus gave birth to a fully modern human and then there was just one modern human around. Mutations happen gradually, a few per generation, over many many *many* generations. For humans, that’s many hundreds of thousands of years. During all of that time, the different organisms of the same species with different mutations are still interbreeding and sharing those mutations with each other.
Just to give you an idea, humans and neanderthals diverged from their common ancestor somewhere around 600-700 thousand years ago, and over 500,000 years later, they were still similar enough to interbreed despite being clearly distinct, separate species at that point.
Latest Answers