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

Yes. Read the papers carefully. No group is so truly isolated as you might
think. Again, we are not necessarily speaking about a direct line of
ancestry -- just someone somewhere in the family tree.

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

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Preston Garrison <pngarrison@att.net>wrote:

> 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 21:31:29 2009