They offer a couple of ways we could have a founding human pair:
There are a couple ways you could have a founding human pair. One is a slender evolutionary bottleneck. First, ancient apes evolved into proto-humans. Then, due to a migration or catastrophe, a larger population was reduced to two. And from that pair came all humans. A second scenario involves a first human pair created from scratch — Adam and Eve, if you will.
Many Darwinists insist the “Adam and Eve” scenario is wrong because it cannot be reconciled with human genetics. But Gauger and Hössjer say an Adam and Eve model fits with the genetic data they studied.
When testing an Adam and Eve scenario, there’s a follow-up question. Were Adam and Eve genetically similar or dissimilar? Gauger and Hössjer plugged both possibilities into their model. If similar, then the founding couple lived much longer ago. If the first pair were created with genetic diversity built in, then they lived more recently, near the time that Neanderthals appeared on the scene.
Gauger says that her and Hössjer’s work is ongoing. They plan to add other things to their model, including the effects of natural selection.
To learn more about the paper and its back story, go here, here and here. And here. Jonathan Witt , “New Research: Our DNA Doesn’t Rule Out Adam and Eve” at The Stream
Paper. (open access)
Wow. The Darwin trolls’ll miss Halloween to go after this one.
See also: Controversial claim: First humans came from what is now Botswana One is tempted to wonder, how would “storytelling” differentiate the Garvan team from many other human evolution researchers?
and
We could have come from two parents
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While it is certainly good that Ola Hössjer and Ann Gauger have shown, with the mathematics of population genetics, that the present genetic diversity in humans can be explained via an original couple, i.e. via Adam and Eve, it is interesting to point out that the use of mathematics itself by Darwinists to try to, ultimately, prove that their reductive materialistic worldview of Darwinian evolution is correct is itself a self refuting exercise in science for them to make.
Simply put, Darwinian evolution and the world of mathematics are completely incompatible with each other.
The main reason why Darwinian Evolution and Mathematics are completely incompatible with each other is that Darwinian evolution is based on a Reductive Materialistic worldview in which it is held that only matter is real, that the world is just physical and that there is no supernatural (or metaphysical) existence, or that if there is, it has no impact on our physical world.,,,
That is to say that Darwinian evolution is based on a reductive materialistic view of reality which holds that all possible scientific explanations for reality in general, and for biology in particular, are ultimately exhausted by, and/or reducible to, purely material explanations.
And yet, Mathematics itself, which provides the backbone for all of science, engineering and technology in the first place, Mathematics itself exists in a transcendent, beyond space and time realm, a realm which is not reducible any possible material explanation. This transcendent mathematical realm has been referred to as a Platonic mathematical world.
As David Berlinski states in the following article, “There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time…. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects.”
And as M. Anthony Mills states, “In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities.”
Simply put, Mathematics itself, contrary to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, does not need the physical world in order to exist. And yet Darwinists, although they deny that anything beyond nature exists, need this transcendent, i.e. beyond space and time, world of mathematics in order for their theory to be considered scientific in the first place. The predicament that Darwinists find themselves in regards to denying the objective reality of this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics, and yet needing validation from this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics in order for their theory to even be considered scientific in the first place, should be the very definition of a scientifically self-refuting worldview.
Moreover, as should be obvious by now, the fact that man himself can use this transcendent, beyond space and time, world of mathematics, offers proof that man must also have a transcendent, beyond space and time, soul. As Charles Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace himself stated, “Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation.”
Thus while it is certainly very good that Ola Hössjer and Ann Gauger have shown, with the mathematics of population genetics, that the present genetic diversity in humans can be explained via an original couple, i.e. via Adam and Eve, it is also very good to step back to get a good look at the bigger picture of what it actually going on. In this case, when we look at the bigger picture, we see that the use of ‘immaterial’ mathematics itself by Darwinists, in order for them to try to prove that their reductive materialic worldview of Darwinian evolution is true, instead turns around and refutes their entire reductive materialistic worldview and, in actuality, proves the existence of a soul in man instead.
It appears to be similar to
“The genetic effects of the population bottleneck associated with the Genesis Flood”, Robert W. Carter and Matthew Powell, JOURNAL OF CREATION 30(2) 2016
Skeptics familiar with the field of genetics claim the Creation/Flood/Babel model is unrealistic in terms of population
genetics and demographics. To address these claims, we created a population modelling program designed to examine
changes in allele frequency within ‘biblical’ populations. Our model included an artificial genome consisting of 100,000
alleles within 40 independent chromosome arms of variable length. We start with two individuals, set their alleles to
a heterozygous state (to model ‘created diversity’), and allow children to be born according to a set of predetermined
population parameters. We control the average number of recombination events per chromosome arm per generation
and track all alleles in all individuals. At a set year, we can introduce a ‘Flood’ by reducing the population to a single couple
with three sons. Wives are assigned to these sons either by choosing randomly from available females in the population
or by allowing the parental couple to produce three sisters. Population sizes of 100–500 individuals caused extreme
levels of genetic drift and fixation, as expected, but these effects were minimal in populations between 4,000 and 50,000.
The Flood had a demonstrable effect on reducing heterozygosity (due to inbreeding), but average fixation rates were low
for moderate to large population sizes (an average of 0.76% loss with random wives, 3.07% if the wives are sisters to the
parental couple’s sons). After comparing to real-world allele frequency data, we conclude that the effective population
size of humanity was at one point very small and that models with small antediluvian population sizes are more likely
to reflect human history. The small early population size produced a significant amount of genetic drift in the original
alleles and possibly led to a significant loss of created diversity. Thus, skeptical claims that biblical models are excluded
by population genetics are unwarranted.