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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