  We study the large N degeneracy in the structure of the four-point amplitudes
of 1/2-BPS operators of arbitrary weight k in perturbative N=4 SYM theory. At
one loop (order g^2) this degeneracy manifests itself in a smaller number of
independent conformal invariant functions describing the amplitude, compared to
AdS_5 supergravity results. To study this phenomenon at the two-loop level
(order g^4) we consider a particular N=2 hypermultiplet projection of the
general N=4 amplitude. Using the formalism of N=2 harmonic superspace we then
explicitly compute this four-point correlator at two loops and identify the
corresponding conformal invariant functions. In the cases of 1/2-BPS operators
of weight k=3 and k=4 the one-loop large N degeneracy is lifted by the two-loop
corrections. However, for weight k > 4 the degeneracy is still there at the
two-loop level. This behavior suggests that for a given weight k the degeneracy
will be removed if perturbative corrections of sufficiently high order are
taken into account. These results are in accord with the AdS/CFT duality
conjecture.
