Re: [asa] Two questions...Ayala's article

>I don't agree Dick. Any number of studies have shown that every
>living person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to a
>common ancestor who lived only a few thousand years ago, though
>obviously this person was not the only person alive at the time, nor
>will most of us have inherited genes directly from that person. See,
>e.g., Rhode, On the Common Ancestors of All Living Humans
>(<http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf>http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf);
>Chang, Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals
>(<http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/Ancestors.pdf>http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/Ancestors.pdf).
>A focus on "bloodlines," I think, is archaic -- that's a
>scientifically meaningless term. A focus on the coalescence of
>genes, I think, is foreign to the Biblical text and unproductive.
>The focus ought to fall, I think, on geneology, which is what the
>papers referenced above discuss.
>
>David W. Opderbeck
>Associate Professor of Law
>Seton Hall University Law School
>Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology

There's really supposed to be a common ancestor in the last few
thousand years for everyone in a remote tribe in the Amazon and for
every Australian aborigine? Is this a statement about how thoroughly
the modern world has penetrated every corner of the planet?

Again, am I missing something?

Preston G.

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Received on Wed Feb 25 20:30:58 2009