A Dialogue with Nathaniel Jeanson?

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@Toni_Torppa

Of course, bottlenecks eliminate variation. The point is whether it makes individuals too homozygous. If individuals are heterozygous enough then they can produce immense diversity through recombination processes. The point, then, is not what is lost, but whether the remaining individuals (e.g., in Noah’s Ark) are able to produce all that we now see.

That may be your point but it’s not mine. What recombination cannot create after a tight bottleneck is rare variants – and humans are full of rare variants, as are most other organisms. Human genetic variation is not consistent with a very recent tight bottleneck.