Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 11:25 AM, David Campbell <pleuronaia@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm rather
> skeptical about exact estimates of population size, since so many
> factors affect the calculations, but it does seem likely that the
> population would be small enough that everyone would be fairly closely
> related in one way or another, and any one individual with descendants
> would be an ancestor of everybody within a few generations.
>

Another thing that needs to be understood is that most of the numbers I was
throwing around over the last few days were "effective" population sizes.
These are idealized numbers and not the census population size which is what
most people think of when hearing the words population size. The 95%
confidence variance was also quite wide. So, for adjectives that could apply
to the phrase population size, "exact" ain't one of them. I do your oxymoron
"exact estimate". I plan on using it in my next report to my boss. :-)

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Thu May 8 14:35:48 2008