Purpose Nation: Fazale Rana (RTB) on Genealogical Adam

It turns out the answer is “no”.

First, keep in mind every part of our genome coalesces at a different time. First off we need to define coalescence using TMR4A for Autosomal, TMR3A for X, and TMR1A for mitochondria and Y. Because of recombination X Autosomal actually Correspondens to greater than tens of thousands of measurements.

What we know is that:

Time of Bottleneck > Maximum(Time to Coalescents)

Here, the “greater than” sign means “more ancient than”. There is a catch that helps you. Practically speaking we can’t directly measure Coalescence time, but have to estimate it based on mutational distance. For this reason we expect some of our estimated Coalescence times to be too high, in error. Therefore it is valid in this context to relax this constraint to:

Time of Bottleneck > Median(Time to Coalescents)

If the bottleneck is more ancient than this median time, we don’t expect to see any impact on the data. It could be there, but we dont know from genetic evidence.

No contradiction unless you want a bottleneck more recent than this bound.

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Thanks for posting this @swamidass. If folks want to hear the interview (vs. just reading it), here’s the link (and would very much welcome the Peaceful Science folks to subscribe):

The parts where @swamidass is mentioned start at ~26 minutes into it.

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One thing I’ll say, in partial defense of Dr. Rana (I’m not a scientist, so cannot comment on the scientific issues), is that he seems to be pretty reasonable guy (a peaceful scientist) when it comes to being open to many potential sides to the issues.

After all, he did affirm evolution at first, but then later came to another viewpoint later on. And I have to also admire that in the 2015 update to his book, “Who Was Adam?” he and RTB were quite bold to say “we were wrong” on some of the conclusions they had reached in the original 2005 version of the book.

So, hopeful that @swamidass and the RTB team can meet up to go through these aspects together.

As Dr. Rana said in the interview, things have been in chaos on these issues the past decade or so. But I for one am thankful that @swamidass, Dr. Rana, @AJRoberts and many others on this forum come at these questions with a spirit of patience, gentleness and respect, just as we should in Christ’s family of believers.

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I definitely agree with this. I have a very good relationship with RTB, including with Dr. Rana, @AJRoberts, and Dr. Ross. Dr. Rana did nothing in that interview that should be construed as close mindedness or misrepresenting me intentionally.

This is just a very complex area, and there are several proposals floating around right now, and we are finding ourselves in the center of it.

I hope so too.

This is very true, especially the last two years.

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