At the main page of the website, Sanford and Carter argue for the possibility of a de novo Adam and Eve. One of the main issues they address is the scientific evidence that the current human population has much more genetic diversity than two sole progenitors 6,000 years ago would allow.
What would prevent God from engineering 25 million variants (heterozygous sites) into Adam from the very beginning? If we assume Eve was assigned her own unique genome, this would double the amount of potential designed diversity. If that was not enough diversity, God could have created different genomes in each of Adam and Eve’s reproductive cells. There really is no limit to how much diversity God could have designed into Adam and Eve, but we do not need to invoke anything more than simple heterozygosity. Adam’s potential heterozygosity alone is sufficient to explain nearly all human genetic diversity.
I have read similar arguments before and have tried to explain that the number of haplotypes is more relevant than the number of individual SNPs. So I’m asking for feedback in a couple of different areas:
Am I actually correct about the relevance of haplotypes to the issue of a sole progenitor pair in the 6kya time frame?
Is there an easier way to explain why the explanation from Sanford and Carter is wrong?
I would say yes. Sanford discuss this point in chapter 8 of the piece below entitled « The chromosomal components of the original human population are still evident, despite genetic recombination »
What original human population was that? Anatomically modern humans have been around for 200K years and their close hominid ancestors for millions of years before that. What you call the “original human population” is purely subjective, like trying to define the first French speaking population.
I disagree. They are putting forward a testable hypothesis. We would expect to see a particular distribution in those variants if that is what God did. We don’t see that distribution.
I don’t see how TMR4A is relevant to this model, since in this model chromosomes do not go through a bottleneck of size 4; the bottleneck is 2x(however many children Adam and Eve had).
Personally, I think Sanford and Carter’s model is unnecessarily restrictive. As long as your goal is, ‘genetic data should look exactly like humans are the product of millions of years of evolution’, and you are willing to invoke an indefinite number of miracles to accomplish this outcome, why restrict yourself to God creating separate genomes in each of Adam and Eve’s reproductive cells (genomes that just happen to look like exactly like they’ve evolved)? God could be introducing new genomes every generation, or individually tweaking the results of every sequencing run to make genomes look like something they’re not. That way you don’t have to worry about even the remote possibility that your proposal will have any kind of encounter with reality.
Well, with a 158 genomes, about 80% would be a lineage at 6 Kya. Add more genomes and that number is going to increase. How many lineages do you think are active at 6 Kya from extant DNA?