I didn’t believe that, either, when I first heard it. But fortunately the math is so simple that anyone can understand.
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An important thing to emphasize is that this is population-wide. So using Jeanson’s numbers of 3 mutations per generation and a 30-year generation time, that’s 0.1 mutations per year that reach fixation. (There are problems with this that are beyond the point I’m making right here). Jeanson treats this as the rate, going back indefinitely, per lineage, rather than for the population as a whole. You can have a population of 10 people, 100 people, 10 million, whatever, you’re going to fix approximately 0.1 mutations per year.
Let’s take a population of 1,000,000 (Just making up numbers to illustrate the Jeanson’s problem) and say 10,000 males reproduce in a given year. How many Y-chromosome mutations are we going to get in that year? 30,000. But how many mutations are going to achieve fixation that year? ~0.1. How many of those 30,000 will ultimately achieve fixation? Not very many, if any at all.
Jeanson’s math implies all 30,000 of those mutations stick around forever.
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I may be being incredibly dense (per usual), but doesn’t this contradict what @John_Harshman recently wrote? The one remaining lineage’s mutation rate is the substitution rate (the mutations are fixed in the one remaining lineage, if I am understanding correctly), so why is Jeanson’s math wrong? Apologies for unraveling my misunderstanding here in this entire post in advance if needed. 
I was thinking about this in terms of genealogical science…I wondered if someone will correct/unravel my logic here. I take a look at this R1b tree below and M269, which belongs to 58% of western European men, and from what I could tell, it is mostly agreed by scholars that it comes from outside of Europe because the earliest branches of R1b are in Asia. In terms of genealogical science, almost everyone in Europe shares a common ancestor within about 600 years. But obviously that isn’t male lines only. But again in terms of genealogy, we also know everyone in Europe descends from Charlemagne. And again although Charlemagne’s male line has died out, doesn’t that mean someone’s male line around that time could have been the ancestor of all European males today because it would take the same number of generations?
I was also thinking discussing Europe and R1b is somewhat like the science of GAE, because at least one of the R1b men that is a universal genealogical ancestor will be the y-chromosome ancestor too. If Adam was a universal ancestor to everyone by 1 A.D., he was also the y-chromosome ancestor at least of Joseph, adoptive father of Jesus. Yes? No? It’s so late my sleep-deprived brain is feeling very muddled, and so I definitely couldn’t figure out the genealogical math on Europe and R1b-M269 men. Anyway, when I look at this and see
Western European sub-variants in the Middle Bronze age, that seems laughably early. Those seem easily A.D. era.
Finally, I kept pondering Jeanson’s hypothesis of the y-chromosome tree showing minimum population growth curves, and it seemed to me as if that was just another way of looking at the genealogical science of patrilineal ancestry.
Well, donations have paid for. 
But I agree, if YEC have scientific hypotheses that hold up, they should be able to convince their own house first.
In this book yes…it’s almost impossibly ambitious. But the small nature of the YEC community also means you have to start somewhere big to get anywhere I think…
I’ll watch your video. I’m definitely curious to see where this book takes the YEC community over time.
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Valerie, your response is more than a little tangled, and it is not clear what connection it has with my comment:
Were you intending your response to be an argument against this comment? If so, then your argument must fail, as any argument must fail that contradicts the evidence (unless of course it is presenting hard evidence that itself contradicts the previous evidence).
I had also (previously) elaborated on my quoted point here:
I have also provided evidence of multiple pre-Roman ethnic groups that carry the R1b haplogroup here.
There is therefore an abundance of evidence that R1b was already in Europe two millennia ago. I would also point out that you (and as far as I can tell Jeanson) have presented no evidence that it happened after this date (in the form of a migrant group from Central Asia in the last two millennia that were definitely known to have R1b in reasonably high concentrations). (It is of course possible that R1b entered Europe both before two millennia ago and after that date.)
Because of this, I will not attempt a point-by-point discussion of your reply, but will highlight a few passages that I find potentially problematical:
Citation please. (Also, a tighter definition of “almost everyone” is needed for this statement to be meaningful.)
It is possible, but very very unlikely. We have a large number of ancestors from 600 years ago, but only one strict-male-line ancestor (father’s father’s … father) from that time. The chance that, out of all our ancestors from that time, our common ancestor is this one is therefore very small.
A problem with this statement is that GAE (at least as far as I understand it) does not state that Adam (assuming he existed) definitely was a universal ancestor of everybody by 1 AD, only that it is possible.
I’m sorry, but your personal incredulity does not make a good argument against the evidence.
Unless you can impeach this evidence – which as I stated, would require you to present hard evidence of your own that directly contradicts it (not merely arguments against the evidence), this evidence remains a fixed point around which we must all build our arguments:
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
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I’m going to refer you to earlier posts rather than repeat myself. I don’t have anything to add.
No, it doesn’t. Genealogical ancestry doesn’t imply any genetic ancestry at all, including the Y chromosome. The most recent universal genealogical ancestor is much younger than the most recent genetic ancestor of any piece of the genome.
Yes if you believe the biblical genealogy. But that doesn’t make him the Y ancestor of anyone else. And if you believe the biblical genealogy but also that Joseph is the adoptive father, then that isn’t Jesus’s genealogy. Where did his Y chromosome come from? But I digress. The point is that genealogical ancestry and genetic ancestry are quite different things.
No worries. Aren’t you required to assume that the Bronze age is much younger than we think? And what about all those ancient genomes? Have you forgotten?
Jeanson doesn’t understand coalescence, unfortunately.
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Excellent question. When were the YEC Stone Age and Bronze Age?
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Tim corrected you on this a few days ago, but Jeanson’s actual claim is:
Today, 740 million branches exist. In a.d. 1400, only 60 million existed. To reduce 740 million to 60 million, you have to connect a whole bunch of branches. In terms of percentages, 60 million is just 8% of 740 million. Consequently, by a.d. 1400, you have to connect 92% of today’s branches. Prior to a.d. 1400 is when the remaining 8% of the branches connect.
So, Today’s Europeans don’t share a common ancestor 600 years ago. They share 60 million ancestors 600 years ago. Big difference.
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You seem to conflating common ancestry with founder effect, but the analysis that tells us everyone descends from Charlemagne also tells us every European descended from every European contemporary with Charlemagne excepting those whose lineage died out completely, so no one ancestor is necessarily more represented in the present population than another random person. [ I think. I’m learning this as I go here ]
The following is scoped to the global population, but the same principles would apply to Europe (Bold mine). Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans
As genealogical ancestry is traced back beyond the MRCA, a growing percentage of people in earlier generations are revealed to be common ancestors of the present-day population. Tracing further back in time, there was a threshold, let us say Un generations ago, before which ancestry of the present-day population was an all or nothing affair. That is, each individual living at least Un generations ago was either a common ancestor of all of today’s humans or an ancestor of no human alive today. Thus, among all individuals living at least Un generations ago, each present-day human has exactly the same set of ancestors. We refer to this point in time as the identical ancestors (IA) point.
The MRCA therefore would not be a funnel which excludes the downstream admixture of other male ancestors who would mate with that persons female descendants, and when you go further back, eventually everyone who contributed surviving descendants is ancestral to everyone alive. So we would not expect one prince to sire all of Europe’s Y chromosome.
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In relative terms, I think they might have been somewhere around the time of the Nixon and the Clinton administrations, respectively.
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Given that YEC suggests that Noah has access to metal tools and technology to build the ark, it would seem that any stone age had to be the result of some collective post-babel amnesia.
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Actually, having done a quick calculation, I was way off there.
If we are using the scale of the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years, then the Stone Age would have started just under three days ago, and the Bronze Age would have ended sometime around midnight yesterday.
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If you went through a population genetics textbook and highlighted everything Jeanson understood, you could return the highlighters unopened.
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This is actually basically exactly what Jeanson argued towards the end: humans were created in an “advanced” state, Babel caused a reversion to a “primitive” state, and it’s taken millennia to recover.
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Yep, this is a common them among YECs, all those billions of stone tools scattered over Africa were the result of language being confused and people scattering. Since only a few apparently knew the secrets of the technology of the day most were thrown back into the stone age, well to an age that in their minds had never existed before. With little taken away from babel they had to learn to survive again so they went into caves and used rocks as weapons. But within just two generations (how those two generations managed to make billions of stone hand axes and other tools so quickly has always eluded me:-) most had relearned how to build homes and make metal tools except those unfortunate souls that traveled to the New World who took longer to find new technologies.
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The problem being that AiG dates the Tower of Babel at 2246 BC. This already puts it in near to the end of (the mainstream chronology of) the Egyptian Old Kingdom period (2686–2181 BC) of recorded history – the period during which they built the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx – impossible, I would think, without metal tools. Building in a lengthy Stone Age before the Old Kingdom as well would seem to require to compress dates even more ludicrously.
I return to my analogy of:
a demented amateur taxidermist, who is attempting to stretch a zebra’s hide over the skeleton of a rhino. It simply doesn’t fit!
Though I’m not sure that even that analogy will stretch far enough (pun intended).
It’s quite possible that YEC requires their equivalent of Terry Pratchett’s Monks of History to:
… store [time] and pump it from the places where it’s wasted (like the underwater – how much time does a codfish need?) to places like cities, where there’s never enough time.
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@Joel_Duff watched your video and read the paper described from Carter and Sanford here. "Y Chromosome Noah and Mitochondrial Eve" by Robert W. Carter, Stephen Lee et al.
Various things there I thought were important I thought were worth highlighting that are related to the book.
From the paper:
Using several different methods, researchers can create phylogenetic trees that reflect the genetic history of any given set of related people living today. The tree-building algorithms are forced to use approximations when comparing sequence data, and thus the nodes and interior branches do not necessarily reflect real individuals that lived in the past. However, as we will demonstrate, in the case of the human Y and mitochondrial gene trees, each branch point on each tree reflects a historical individual that passed one or more de novo mutations to a child. This means that any branch arises at a specific time, in a specific individual, and that event provides an informative reference point that enables the study of both the group founder and his or her descendants.
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@John_Harshman When you or @dsterncardinale mention that Y-chromosome genetics doesn’t imply or can’t be conflated with genealogy, it is a circular, and you’re saying creationism is false because evolution is true, unless what they’re showing is just outright false. So you rule out the hypothesis before you even see the result of its predictions.
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Carter and Sanford aren’t willing to root the tree in that paper although they give a suggestion.
@Joel_Duff I gotta think that you said there was nothing new in the book compared to the paper (besides the historical conclusions you were surprised by) because you hadn’t finished it. I think for the YEC community having a scientist root the tree is a big deal. It connects it to the tangible - who did I come from. So it’s a big part of AIG’s promotion because Jeanson himself has noticed that’s what people care about: how to get and use Ydna tests and haplogroup importance for sharing the Bible with indigenous populations so they can see their story on Genesis 10 etc. So the interesting thing will be if the rest of the creation orgs will come around and agree or not. Because obviously that’s a powerful apologetic, with the narrative it provides for each person. Jeanson’s hypothesis for the 3 branches isn’t hard to understand - a little bit of statistical analysis to get the line of Abraham and then some biblical textual analysis for the rest of the branches and their ancient accepted locations. I don’t remember all the details of the book even though I’ve watched all the videos and read the book, but I do remember that. If they do agree, then the scientists will just argue about mutation rates and statistics and ancient DNA, etc.
- I thought their mention of different mutation rates in the paper and Jeanson’s in the book is important. Are we seeing the end of neutral theory with recent mainstream papers and what they describe there with the LTEE? Creation scientists would do well to put some nails in that coffin, especially with original work.
Funny I was reading that paper last night, trying to find a source for @Tim.
Thus, among all individuals living at least Un generations ago, each present-day human has exactly the same set of ancestors. We refer to this point in time as the identical ancestors (IA) point. As with the MRCA point,
the IA point is also quite recent in a randomly mating population: Un , 1.77 log2n generations ago.
Let’s see if I can make sense of what’s in my head. The IA point is a genealogical bottleneck of sorts. In any given population, any patrilineal line that survives to this day has to make it through that IA bottleneck, by definition. There is a subset of those men that will be patrilineal ancestors of the present, surviving population. Some of that subset may be older than the most recent patrilineal ancestors. Some may be younger, but then they have to be closely related to another person in the IA subset that is also a patrilineal ancestor I would think. Mating isn’t random, so the patrilineal ancestors that make it through that bottle neck very likely won’t have similar patrilineal ancestors to each other. So the most recent patrilineal ancestor of a major haplogroup (haplogroup that has a plurality) in the current given population is very unlikely to be much older than the IA point, unless IA set is very large.
Let’s see if anyone can make sense of that, or if you call it word salad.
Edit: I suppose what I’m referring to applies to the indigenous population’s patrilineal ancestors only which is maybe what @RonSewell was saying.
Edit #2: if r1b is ancient/indigenous to Europe from the bronze age, then we should not see what we see. We should only see it branching from the IA point because of distant internal migration within Europe, or because population growth. But the branching doesn’t match population growth from that far back. Just wondering if anybody disagrees with that.
You have that backwards. Genealogy doesn’t imply Y chromosome genetics. All that talk about Charlemagne and the most recent common ancestor of Europeans has nothing to do with Y chromosome ancestry. What your quote says is true, but it doesn’t mean what you think and it doesn’t have anything to do with Charlemagne or any other specific, known individuals. I’m afraid you don’t understand the arguments here.
If they can’t root it, they can’t identify the three sons of Noah. But in fact there is no way to root the tree that would divide it into three pieces, each descending directly from the root. This is another example of creationists not understanding trees.
Perhaps, but it isn’t right and it isn’t even coherent. And I don’t think you understand it.
You know, facts. Facts are of course irrelevant, right?
No, it isn’t.
If you mean patrilineal ancestors of some of the individuals in that population, then yes. It’s very unlikely that any of the will be the patrilineal ancestor of the entire population, though, which you may have confused this situation with.
Confused sentence. The most recent patrilineal ancestor of anyone in the current population is that person’s father. What are you trying to say here?
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I would think of the IA point as more of a saturation than a bottleneck. A diminished population is not required to reach there.
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What are you talking about?
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