RE: Adam never met Eve

From: Preston Garrison (garrisonp@uthscsa.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 01 2000 - 23:14:28 EST

  • Next message: glenn morton: "FW: Adam never met Eve"

    Glenn wrote:

    >True, but this is really nitpicking. Genetics neither supports a recent
    >Adam/Eve nor a Genetic bottleneck of the magnitude of the Biblical Flood.
    >Why? There are up to 107 alleles found in certain genes in the major
    >histocompatibility complex. Here is what one study of the DRB1 site in the
    >MHC showed. It compared us with other animals and found common alleles with
    >other critters--so much so that the authors concluded:
    >
    >"The coalescence theory of population genetics leads to the conclusion that
    >the DRB1 polymophism requires that the population ancestral to modern humans
    >has maintained a mean effective size of 100,000 individuals over the
    >30-million-year persistence of this polymorphism. We explore the
    >possibility of occasional population bottlenecks and conclude that the
    >ancestral population could not have at any time consisted of fewer than
    >several thousand individuals. The MHC polymorphisms excluded the theory
    >claiming, on the basis of mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms, that a
    >constriction down to one or few women occurred in Africa, at the transition
    >from archaic to anatomically modern humans, some 200,000 years ago." ~
    >Francisco J. Ayala, Ananias Escalante, Colm O'hUigin and Jan Klein,
    >"Molecular Genetics of Speciation and Human Origins," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci,
    >USA, 91:pp6787-6794, July 1994, p. 6787.
    >
    >This is the biggie of things unexplained by any Christian apologist
    >including me.
    >

    Question for any real population geneticists here:

    Is it possible that something like population level selection for polymorphism at these loci could throw this estimate off?

    Preston G.



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