Re: [asa] Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam

It's not encouraging to learn that an ASA member runs a blog, anonymously, that
describes itself (in part) as follows:

"In recent years there has been a flood of scientific discoveries which point
to the fact that the Universe and everything in it were not created by a
mindless natural process as asserted by materialists. Instead, the evidence
points strongly to the conclusion that the Universe was created by an
intelligent designer. These discoveries however remain largely unknown to the
general public. The Isaac Newton Institute was established in 1998 to help
desiminate knowledge of these discoveries and their implications."

If that weren't bad enough, ask yourself how anyone even slightly
well-informed could have written this:

"Materialists generally believed the universe to be eternal in age and
infinite in size, therefore it needed no creator. While Materialism is still
the dominant philosophy among scientists, there is a growing number who are
turning to I.D. for answers. As Scientific American reported in its coverage of
a 1998 Design conference, “many of these people are not junior scientists
but, …are at the top of their fields.” These include people such as Nobel
Prize winning physicist Charles Townes, Francis Collins (Director of the Human
Genome Research Institute) and numerous other well-known scientists."

I'm not sure whether or not I should thank Randy for bringing this blog to my
attention.

Steve Matheson

>>> "Randy Isaac" <randyisaac@comcast.net> 05/07/08 3:00 PM >>>
One of our ASA members maintains a blog http://www.idscience.org/ in which the
current entry tries out a concordist approach. I don't intend to pursue that
here (and will monitor the attitude of those who do!) but I did want to comment
on the allusion to mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. Do I recall
correctly that m-Eve is dated to about 60kya and Y-Adam to about 90-kya leaving
about a 30kya separation? Have their respective geographical locales been
pinpointed? Are they in close proximity?

I also think it is important to reinforce the understanding that evidences for
m-Eve and Y-Adam are not at all equivalent to their being the only female/male
of the population at the time, just that other lineages died out some time
later. But I have a question in this regard. If m-Eve were monogomous, doesn't
the fact that her "husband" is not Y-Adam necessitate that there were other
males living at that time? And vice versa? How is the minimum population at
some time in the past determined?

Randy

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Received on Wed May 7 15:29:44 2008