Re: [asa] Two questions... (bottlenecking)

I'm out of my depth here, but one key paper is Ayala, "The Myth of
Mitochondrial Eve." There are several papers following Ayala. The point of
these papers is that some regions of the present human genome are too
diverse to have derived from one pair in the recent (hundreds of thousands
of years) past. However, David C. has pointed out that these studies are
(a) just models based on probabilities; and (b) based on assumed rates of
mutation that could be wrong. In particular, the region of the genome
studies by Ayala relates to disease resistance, meaning it can come under
heavy selective pressure, and so it's possible that it might have
diversified more rapidly. Of course, it's also possible, though outside the
realm of science, that God intervened to diversify the human genome early on
in order to protect the species. Finally, it's possible that some of the
diversity came from some interbreeding of homo sapiens sapiens with other
homo groups, in which case "true" humanity has its ultimate origin in one
pair (I confess that I personally prefer this to "Adam as a group"
scenarios).

David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>wrote:

> David said:
> "However, there doesn't seem to be any way that the existing data fits a
> bottleneck of two people. "
>
>
>
> I argued this a while back, suggesting to George Murphy that he should
> definitely state there is no historical Adam and Eve because evolution
> happens in groups, not individuals. He responded that it was possible that
> all humanity derived biologically from one pair, and appealed to Dr.
> Campbell for support, of which Dr. Campbell agreed.
>
>
>
> Later- someone showed me a quote from Francis Collins saying there's no way
> he could see how humanity could descend from one couple. I'm going with
> Collins.
>
>
>
> …Bernie
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> *From:* asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] *On
> Behalf Of *David Opderbeck
> *Sent:* Sunday, February 08, 2009 12:50 PM
> *To:* James Patterson
> *Cc:* asa@calvin.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [asa] Two questions...
>
>
>
> James - you are correct that not all TE views have to deny a "special
> creation" of man. However, there doesn't seem to be any way that the
> existing data fits a bottleneck of two people. This is the gaping hole in
> the RTB approach, IMHO. It really doesn't deal with all the data.
>
> David W. Opderbeck
> Associate Professor of Law
> Seton Hall University Law School
> Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Feb 9 12:55:05 2009