At 10:35 AM 6/23/00 -0400, you wrote:
>glenn morton wrote:
> >
> > Many Christian apologists reject the notion that modern man has any genetic
> > connection with the ancient hominids, such as Homo erectus. This is
> > normally done based upon theological considerations in which they believe
> > that modern man was created within the past 60-200,000 years ago. If the
> > theological considerations are correct, then genetic data should show a
> > genetic bottleneck, it should show no human genes which require longer than
> > 60-200,000 years of coalescence time (the time for mutations to create the
> > present observed diversity in modern populations) and we should have no
> > non-functional retroviral insertions in common with the Old World Monkeys
> > and chimps. Modern observations falsify all these apologetical
> > expectations. Below are some quotes from two articles which examine the
> > genetics of primates. Each quote is relevant to the predictions made by
> > apologists noted above.
I haven't looked at these specific data, but just technical caveat. It is
not necessarily the true that a bottleneck would eradicate non-functional
(i.e., neutral) retroviral insertions that originated in the common
ancestor of humans and old world monkeys. For example, if the mutation was
fixed in the ancestral species, then the sampling caused by a bottleneck in
either daughter lineage is of little consequence for any particular
mutation. Likewise, considerable polymorphism can make it through even a
severe bottleneck as long as it is brief in duration. There are many
considerations. Nevertheless, once horizontal transfer is ruled out as a
possibility (which it can in many cases), these and gobs of other genetic
data support the common ancestry of humans with other primates.
Just another case where microevolution meets macroevolution and the wedge
of truth meets dose of reality.
Doug
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