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

Gordon,
As a former Coloradan, you'll appreciate this link.? A friend of mine suggested that pogroms on the Iberian peninsula drove Jews to flee to Mexico.? Eventually some folks made it to the San Luis Valley.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/san-luis-valley.html

Karl
********************
Karl V. Evans
cmekve@aol.com

-----Original Message-----
From: gordon brown <Gordon.Brown@Colorado.EDU>
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 9:52 pm
Subject: Re: [asa] Two questions...Ayala's article

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009, Preston Garrison 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??
>?
?
I first learned about this several years ago from Glenn Morton on this forum. I haven't taken the time to read the papers, but my impression was that the conclusion was based on the observation that any individual has a lot of ancestors only a few generations back. Likewise most individuals who have descendants have very many after a few generations. Thus even taking into account that not all the ancestors in such a calculation are distinct and that descendants may mate with each other, it was concluded that one did not have to go back to a time when the human population was extremely small to find a common ancestor. Glenn pointed out that this didn't take into account that some populations have apparently been isolated from everyone else until quite recently.?
?
Here is a tangentially related question: Knowing that there must have been not infrequent intermarriage in the past, how many of us might be descendants of Abraham and not even know it??
?
Gordon Brown (ASA member)?
?
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with?
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.?

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Feb 26 12:01:52 2009