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hoviariel
New Member
20 Posts |
 Posted - 12/31/2007 : 02:01:06
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A shrinking date for ‘Eve'
by Carl Wieland
edited to remove cut-and-paste and provide link to source. See the comments here -Cune
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Edited by - Cuneiformist on 12/31/2007 07:09:27
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 12/31/2007 : 04:19:32 [Permalink]
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Cut/paste, no link, no attribution... /sigh
Why don't you try making a point, arguing for it, and then defending it?
Aren't you capable of such a thing?
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 12/31/2007 : 04:56:17 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
Cut/paste, no link, no attribution... /sigh
Why don't you try making a point, arguing for it, and then defending it?
Aren't you capable of such a thing?
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Dude, I rather suspect that much of this comes from either Creationwiki or Conservapedia. Unfortunately, I am too lazy to dig for it this morning, and shouldn't have to anyway.
In any event, here's Wikipedia's article on Mitochondrial_Eve: Mitochondrial Eve
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Mitochondrial Eve (mt-mrca) is the name given by researchers to the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for all living humans. Passed down from mothers to offspring for over a hundred thousand years, her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is now found in all living humans: every mtDNA in every living person is derived from hers. Mitochondrial Eve is the female counterpart of Y-chromosomal Adam, the patrilineal most recent common ancestor, although they lived at different times.
She is believed to have lived about 140,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia, Kenya or Tanzania.[citation needed] The time she lived is calculated based on the molecular clock technique of correlating elapsed time with observed genetic drift.
Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all humans via the mitochondrial DNA pathway, not the unqualified MRCA of all humanity. All living humans can trace their ancestry back to the MRCA via at least one of their parents, but Mitochondrial Eve can only be reached via the maternal line. Therefore, she necessarily lived much longer ago than the MRCA of all humanity.
The existence of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each lived within a large human population at a different time. Some of their contemporaries have no living descendants today, and others are ancestors of all people alive today. No contemporary of Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam is an ancestor of only a subset of people alive today, because both of them lived much longer ago than the identical ancestors point.
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And TO's: One of the best indications that a scientific and mathematical statement has not been explained properly is the many different (and incorrect) ways people interpret it.
Excellent discussions of the Mitochondrial Eve are to be found in:
Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, Bantam Press, 2001.
Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, Basic Books, 1995.
Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon and Schuster, 1995.
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Here are some points to note:
The name Eve, in retrospect, is perhaps the worst possible name to give to the entity in question. I believe that this is probably the cause of so much confusion in understanding what the significance of this entity is. People think that this title has some deep theological or religious consequences. Nothing of that sort. Someone you come across who claims that the bible (or the book of Genesis) has been validated by the discovery of the Mitochondrial Eve, is talking crap---you should feel free, and even obligated, to tell them so.
The Mitochondrial Eve of 200,000 years ago (ME for short henceforth) is NOT our common ancestor, or even common genetic ancestor. She is the most-recent common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect to matrilineal descent. That may seem like a mouthful, but without even a single one of those qualifying phrases, any description or discussion of the ME reduces to a lot of nonsense. |
It all seems pretty straightforward to me, but then, I am not a genetic scientist. Perhaps someone who is will jump in and comment.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 12/31/2007 : 05:03:37 [Permalink]
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Nope, I suspected wrongly. Neither site has an "Mitochondrial Eve" article. We'll just have to wait for enlightenment, I suppose.
And now, with due apologies, back to being lazy.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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tw101356
Skeptic Friend
USA
333 Posts |
Posted - 12/31/2007 : 05:17:22 [Permalink]
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Cut and pasted from this article by Dr. Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International.
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- TW
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 12/31/2007 : 05:56:01 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by tw101356
Cut and pasted from this article by Dr. Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International.
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Just found it myself and ya beat me to the post! (scowl!)
CMI is the former Answers in Genesis, Australia and Wieland is an MD who, with his henchman Jonathon Sarfati, expounds upon everything except medicine, usually incorrectly. It is another Christian apologetics site.
Sarfati holds a PhD in some branch of chemistry but, to my knowledge, he has not peer-review published in his field in years.
Good catch, tw...
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 12/31/2007 : 08:18:11 [Permalink]
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From Talk Origins (usually a good source for countering old creationist "research" [often quote mining]):
1. The claim is founded primarily on the work of Parsons et al. (1997), who found that the substitution rate was about 25 times higher in the mitochondria control region, which is less than 7% of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA). Revised studies of all of the mtDNA find that the control region varies greatly in substitution rates in different populations, but that the rest of the mtDNA shows no such variation (Ingman et al. 2000). Using mtDNA excluding the control region, they placed the age of the most recent common mitochondrial ancestor at 171,500 +/- 50,000 years ago.
Gibbons (1998) refers to mutations that cause heteroplasmy (inheritance of two or more mtDNA sequences). This does not apply to mitochondrial Eve research, which is based only on substitution mutation rates.
2. A study similar to the mtEve research was done on a region of the X chromosome which does not recombine with the smaller Y chromosome; it placed the most recent common ancestor 535,000 +/- 119,000 years ago (Kaessmann et al. 1999). Since the population size of X chromosomes is effectively three times larger than mitochondria (two X chromosomes from women and one from men can get inherited), the most recent common ancestor should be about three times older than that of the Mitochondrial Eve, and it is.
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METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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A shrinking date for ‘Eve'
