Yes, looking back over it, I notice that Gauger stated:
In the 1990s a population biologist named Francisco Ayala set out to challenge the idea of two individual first parents, using sequence information from one of the HLA genes.
This reference to “two individual first parents” certainly makes it seems that Ayala was talking about a separately created Adam and Eve. However to my surprise, when I looked at Ayala’s paper, I discovered that he was explicitly talking about “The Mitochondrial Eve” and “The ZFY Adam”, and appears to make no mention of anything resembling Gauger’s “first parents”.
Given that even talking about Mitochondrial Eve and ZFY Adam would appear to get a scientist misrepresented, it would seem to be a hardy scientist who would willingly dive into the theological snakepit that is the historicity of Adam and Eve, particularly as any benefits of that engagement would seem nebulous at best.