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The Incest Problem

bilby said:
But 'deleterious' is contextual....
....
There are almost no statements about biochemistry or genetics that cannot be rendered more accurate by adding "...but in reality it's far more complicated than that". This is even true of the statement "biochemistry and genetics are far more complex than we can really grasp".
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Well Bomb#20 did say:
it is roughly "deleterious recessive allele".​
 
excreationist said:
bilby said:
But 'deleterious' is contextual....
....
There are almost no statements about biochemistry or genetics that cannot be rendered more accurate by adding "...but in reality it's far more complicated than that". This is even true of the statement "biochemistry and genetics are far more complex than we can really grasp".
Click to expand...
Well Bomb#20 did say:
it is roughly "deleterious recessive allele".​
Click to expand...

He did, and he's right.

You didn't, and you're not.
 
Elixir said:
I have yet to see any explanation for The Incest Problem.
Handwaving attempts do abound, but none of them actually addresses the fact that if A&E were the only two humans and all extant humans are their descendants, there was massive incest happening in the first few generations of humans.

Is there ANY explanation that relies on facts? AFAIK, everything offered thus far starts with a "perhaps" and has no supporting facts to support the "perhaps" offering.
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God works in mysterious ways beyond our comprehension.
 
Obviously the Homo sapiens breeding population was never as small as two. (Humans passed through population bottlenecks, but probably none smaller than a thousand individuals.)

But there is a sense in which a single man can be a major progenitor, much as the three sons of Noah supposedly were.

Some ancient societies documented patrilineal descents and used words like House, Clan or even "race" to describe the agnatic descendants of a single man. This did NOT imply in-breeding: Just going back three generations, 7/8 of a person's genome comes not directly from his agnatic ancestors but from the women they mated with.

Widespread DNA testing and particularly focus on the Y-chromosome has been eye-opening. I'll illustrate this by considering just the Stewart family that ruled Scotland and were in the R1b-L746 haplogroup. Among the hundreds of thousands of people with surname of Stuart or Stewart, a large fraction are in the L746 haplogroup. When you trace this haplogroup back through the phylogenetic tree, a common ancestor with Campbell appears. Tracing back further a HUGE clade comes into focus, all apparently descending from the Amesbury Archer, whose tomb was recently discovered near Stonehenge. (Read about the Archer here. Note that he was apparently born not in Britain, but "near the Alps," agreeing exactly with what can be deduced about his R1b-L21 haplogroup.)

TL;DR. So yes, a single man, perhaps the "Amesbury Archer" himself, was the agnatic progenitor of a VAST number of people in the British Islands; he "founded a race" quite akin to the Biblical legends which made the sons of Jacob founders of tribes, or the sons of Noah founders of great races.

(I am tempted to write much more about the L746 haplogroup but resist the urge! I am one of the worst offenders of thread derailment. If there's questions about this, let's please start a new thread.)
 
Swammerdami said:
Obviously the Homo sapiens breeding population was never as small as two. (Humans passed through population bottlenecks, but probably none smaller than a thousand individuals.)

But there is a sense in which a single man can be a major progenitor, much as the three sons of Noah supposedly were.

Some ancient societies documented patrilineal descents and used words like House, Clan or even "race" to describe the agnatic descendants of a single man. This did NOT imply in-breeding: Just going back three generations, 7/8 of a person's genome comes not directly from his agnatic ancestors but from the women they mated with.

Widespread DNA testing and particularly focus on the Y-chromosome has been eye-opening. I'll illustrate this by considering just the Stewart family that ruled Scotland and were in the R1b-L746 haplogroup. Among the hundreds of thousands of people with surname of Stuart or Stewart, a large fraction are in the L746 haplogroup. When you trace this haplogroup back through the phylogenetic tree, a common ancestor with Campbell appears. Tracing back further a HUGE clade comes into focus, all apparently descending from the Amesbury Archer, whose tomb was recently discovered near Stonehenge. (Read about the Archer here. Note that he was apparently born not in Britain, but "near the Alps," agreeing exactly with what can be deduced about his R1b-L21 haplogroup.)

TL;DR. So yes, a single man, perhaps the "Amesbury Archer" himself, was the agnatic progenitor of a VAST number of people in the British Islands; he "founded a race" quite akin to the Biblical legends which made the sons of Jacob founders of tribes, or the sons of Noah founders of great races.

(I am tempted to write much more about the L746 haplogroup but resist the urge! I am one of the worst offenders of thread derailment. If there's questions about this, let's please start a new thread.)
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No argument with that (see, “Khan, Ghengis”). But the plotline of this story claims a three-person bottleneck, which cannot be supported.

Indeed, the phenomenon is likely widespread, as the population has increased so much from the population that existed a thousand years ago, and that cerrtain plagues wiped out some families more than others, increasing the proportion of the survivors, and that the idea of “last names” will help collect the decendants for study.

But as real as that is, that’s not the claim of the bible tale.
 
For the record, many stories in the Bible are clearly fiction; I regard it as an utter waste of time to refute them. Many or most religious people understand that such stories are fiction. Those who don't are akin to those worried about Jewish space lasers: Arguing with them is pointless.

HOWEVER some of the stories about progenitors, while conjectural, are not far-fetched. Some ancient people were aware how large clans developed (cf. Genghis Khan!), and could hypothesize even when details were unknown. (And we know that the Insular Celts, for example, memorized agnatic lines orally.)

Jacob supposedly had a brother Esau mentioned in Genesis 36:
King James Bible said:
Thus dwelt Esau in Mount Seir: Esau is Edom. And these are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in Mount Seir ...
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The Hebrew people seem to have originated in this same Edom/Seir region, and — while it may be unlikely that Esau was an historic man — would have recognized their kinship with this tribe descending from Jacob's "brother."
 
excreationist said:
I think detectives who talk about "perhaps" can be considered to have explanations.
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So do ALL creationists. Semantics regarding the word "explanation" don't feed the donkey, if you get my drift.
MAYBE San Francisco Bay is made out of grape juice. Not useful in any way.
 
ideologyhunter said:
Y-y-yuh mean, twarnt no Adam nor Eve??? (Plugs ears.) I ain't a-gonna listen. I ain't!!
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Something I've wondered about.
How many ancient Israelites as this as literal history. Say, in Moses' day, how many competent adults took the Genesis stories more seriously than modern people take Santa Claus? Interesting stories, with symbolic meaning, but not literally true.
Tom
 
Inbreeding still does remain a problem in some areas of the world. It is common in Saudi Arabia for cousins to marry. And Saudi Arabia suffers from large numbers of disabled children resulting from such inbreeding.
 
TomC said:
ideologyhunter said:
Y-y-yuh mean, twarnt no Adam nor Eve??? (Plugs ears.) I ain't a-gonna listen. I ain't!!
Click to expand...

Something I've wondered about.
How many ancient Israelites as this as literal history. Say, in Moses' day, how many competent adults took the Genesis stories more seriously than modern people take Santa Claus? Interesting stories, with symbolic meaning, but not literally true.
Tom
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Psalm 14:1
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”

Apparently not all ancient Israelites took the OT tall tales seriously.
 
It would be the same with the alleged descendants of Noah and the crew on the Ark.
 
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