Says a new paper at BIO-Complexity by Ola Hossjer and Ann Gauger.
It is definitely possible for us to have come from a starting point of two. Whether by a bottleneck or by a unique event the numbers say it is possible. 2 million years corresponds to the time of the first hominid to be called Homo, Homo erectus. His exact time and place of origin are unknown but are thought to be in Africa. The 500,000-year mark is near the time of the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
But these numbers are not fixed in stone. They are subject to change: a change in population structure, mortality, mutation rate, birth rate, migration, selection, all can influence the results. The amount of initial diversity, or its distribution, can as well. Changing the population size or time by half can be reversed by multiplying the mutation rate by two. In other words, we have a relationship than can be tweaked and studied, and its parameters can be worked out, but as one of its creators said, the model is “underdetermined.” That’s putting it mildly.
Once again, the precise age of the first couple is not the main point of this study. That there could be a first couple at all is the point.
Ann Gauger, “New BIO-Complexity Paper: We Could Have Come from Two” at Evolution News and Science Today
The authors looked specifically at two scenarios:
So you need to add the caveat that this is true if there are 16,000 people on this planet. I would advice Hossjer and Gauger not to go to see a Seahawks game when Hossjer is visiting, as the cognitive dissonance might not be good for their mental health.
Bob,
Might want to go re-read that….or maybe you intended a straw man argument.
More information here:
A First Couple? Here’s the Backstory
Hey Bob, what about the cognitive dissonance that arises in believers of blind watchmaker evolution?
Hey,
Some time ago I saw on UncommonDescent a quote about great complexity of cell. In that quote, the cell was compared to the city with a huge traffic. Could you help me find this quote?
Is this it, sherlock-
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/researcher-smartest-engineers-would-be-totally-stumped-by-a-cell/#comment-681375
One problem with looking into a single couple giving rise to all humanity is the mechanism that could do it. Given God or an Intelligent Designer the changes would have planned and not random/ accidental. Recombination could have been plentiful. Designed insertions, deletions and transposable elements could easily account for the many different alleles observed.
The point is looking at this scenario from an BWE PoV will never work.
ET,
BWE? Bundesverband Windenergie eV?
Maybe I need another cup of coffee…
Blind Watchmaker Evolution
ET
*slaps forehead*
You even used it in post 4!
In my defense I don’t recall seeing it as an acronym before. Then again I’m getting so old that I can forget the name of the woman that has shared my bed for the last 50 yrs. I smile and say good morning Honey. She smiles back so I guess her name is Honey.
Thank you, ET! This is the quote I was looking for. Thank you very much!
You’re welcome. I was pretty sure I knew the quote you were looking for so the site’s search engine led me right to it.
@Bob how is it part of Intelligent Design that humanity came from two people? Creationism says that, Intelligent Design DOES NOT.
Another thing is that in any Design scenario in which there are only two founding members there would be a high degree of heterozygosity between the two. That is the two founders would be as genetically different as possible at every locus (and still allow for successful mating/ fecundity).
And we haven’t even started with the immaterial information that drives it all.
@ Derek- Bob is just responding to the new paper @ BioComplexity
Can anyone give me some actual examples of non random mutations? I’ve seen people claiming that evo is false because of non randomness, yet I’ve been searching this site all over and I can’t seem to find a single example.
Massam- Read “Evolution: A View from the 21st Century”, for a start. Then consider transposons- they carry within their coding sequence the code for two of the enzymes required for the TE to be moved around.
Also ID is not anti-evolution. The debate is whether or not blind and mindless processes can produce what we see within biology.
ET
Thanks
My apologies for not being more specific- for one, there is a mechanism called the SOS response, of all things, that seems to activate a cellular mutagenesis that allows it to repair extensive DNA damage.
WOW, Stephen Meyer’s new video from PragerU has already received nearly a half a million views in only 3 days:
@Massam –
For directed mutations, I have several videos which are probably the most accessible way to communicate. The short-short version is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D720rzuIuv8
A longer discussion is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5_4ihFK8v8
Also relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwkde6xA-gs
And
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=744wv4V1VpM
Latemarch @ 2 – can you explain what you think is wrong with my comment at 1? I hope it’s clear that the insinuation that most Seahawks fans are imaginary was snark, but both scenarios assume the population now (or close to now) is 16000 people.
DerekDiMarco @ 13 – as ET has pointed out, I’m responding to Hossjer and Gauger, so your question should really be addressed to them. Latemarch has a link to the backstory @ 3. FWIW, creationism (including young earth creationism) are a part of ID: the “big tent strategy” was to allow them to argue amicably within the big tent.
@Bob; I am very annoyed by creationists mixing up their stuff with ID. CSI and the Explanatory filter etc have nothing to do with Adam and Eve, that is creationism. Nothing in the science of information and design detection say anything about any Adam and Eve. If creationists keep trying to sneak their stuff into ID, ID will never be taken seriously as a science.
Derek- Creation is a subset of ID. That is just the way it is.
Venema has argued:
And of course the counter proposition is that the genetic diversity was created by God in the first pair with a winnowing of genetic diversity from that initial pair.
In science, empirical evidence is SUPPOSE to have final say. What does the empirical evidence say? Well, as usual, the empirical evidence does not bode well for the Darwinian model:
Specifically, scientists find the differences of the ‘younger’ human races (i.e. Chinese, Europeans, American Indians, etc.. etc..) are losing genetic information when compared to the original race of humans which is thought to have migrated out of east Africa some 50,000 years ago.
At the 48:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Robert Carter comments on the surprising (non-Darwinian) findings he found in his detailed analysis of the genetic diversity of humans:
Of related note: In their imaginary mathematical models, Darwinists simply ignored the fact that the vast majority of random mutations are now known to be deleterious
Also of note: The real world is NEVER kind to Darwinian presuppositions:
Thus, Venema’s prediction that we are “so genetically diverse in the present day that a large ancestral population is needed to transmit that diversity to us”, simply does not line up with the empirical evidence. If Darwinian evolution operated as a normal science, instead of a religion for atheists, this SHOULD count as a direct empirical falsification of Venema’s prediction. But alas, Darwinism is far from a normal science:
Bob@22
They stopped the simulation at 16000. No need to go further.
For YECS types, another option to explain the genetic variability of humans is that God created Eve with each of her eggs having a different genetic makeup. Then, of course, all her children would be very different genetically, even though fertilized by the one man. I’m not saying I actually believe this, but it is an intriguing angle for YECS people.
latemarch – why not? The human population is much larger than 16000, and has been for a long time. They don’t give any justification for their choice of simulations – is 16k close enough to many millions to be a good approximation? They don’t say.
They also don’t say why they think any of their choices for their scenarios are reasonable. The consensus is that the human population has been growing at a faster than exponential speed, so why do they grow the population exponentially, and then slow it down? And then there’s the usual bugbear of panmixia.
All models are wrong, of course. But if you’re going to make some unrealistic assumptions, you need to justify them. I don’t see that here at all.
Bob, if you want unrealistic assumptions there is no need to look any further than blind watchmaker evolution. Blind watchmaker evolution doesn’t even have a mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes and evos can’t even create a computer simulation showing such a thing can be done.
“@Bob how is it part of Intelligent Design that humanity came from two people? Creationism says that, Intelligent Design DOES NOT”
How could it be Intelligent Design without a creator?
I believe in a Creator. I don’t believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. I go believe that life -whatever the first form was-came about through the intelligence of a Creator.
Information requires intelligence. Where did the instructions for the first one come from? Bill Gates once compared DNA to computer programs. We all know that someone put coding onto a computer or a DVD… DNA is far more complex than anything man is capable of. Who coded DNA?
Creation requires an intelligent Creator.
Bob O’H states
I wonder if Bob is willing to live by his own advise of justifying his assumptions? Bob believes in Darwinian evolution. Bob assumes that random mutations and natural selection created all the amazing diversity of life we see around us. Bob’s first assumption, i.e. random mutations, is shown to be a problematic assumption on several fronts. First off, the vast majority of mutations are now shown to be ‘directed’ mutations, not random mutations.
Secondly, the vast majority of mutations that have a measurable effect on a organism are now known to be deleterious. As Behe showed in ‘Darwin Devolves’, Sanford showed in ‘Genetic Entropy’, and Spetner showed in ‘The Evolution Revolution’, this overall tendency towards degeneration includes mutations that happen to increase fitness.
Thirdly, mutations to DNA don’t even determine the overall architectural plan of an organism in the first place as Darwinists had originally presupposed.
Thus Bob’s primary assumption of random mutations is certainly not ‘justified’.
As to Bob’s second assumption, i.e. natural selection. Natural selection is now known to be, via Bob’s own specialty, population genetics, to be grossly inadequate.
In fact, besides this monumental failure of natural selection within Bob’s own field of population genetics, Bob also has no empirical evidence that he can point to to support his assumption of natural selection.
Moreover, although Darwinists will often wax poetic in the literature about the supposed unfettered creative power of natural selection, the fact of the matter is that natural selection creates nothing.
Thus Bob’s assumption of natural selection, like his assumption of random mutations, is completely unjustified.
Again Bob said that “if you’re going to make some unrealistic assumptions, you need to justify them”. Will Bob heed his own advice and admit that he has no justification for his ‘unrealistic’ assumptions?