The Theological Hypothesis of Adam in Science?

That is supposed to be a joke, right? Are any scientists seriously considering the possibility of tiny flying pink elephants on Ganymede?

No.

But would the words of my hypothetical NASA scientist suggest they were?

Yes.

How is that not misleading?

And if you don’t think that, if a NASA did make such a speech, the headlines would not say “NASA Searches for Tiny Pink Flying Elephans on Ganymede”, you are even more naive than I thought.

False. The weight of evidence is still overwhelmingly against that possibility. You yourself admitted there is not a single scrap of evidence for such a bottleneck.

Gauger deliberately suggests in her talk that is not the case. To call the “misleading” is being kind.

Anyway, I think we’ve gone over this enough. Feel free to have the last word in defense of your creationist friend.

Please produce evidence against a bottleneck 2 million years ago in the past.

Are you limiting humans to just modern homo sapiens? If you add in other human species, the single couple bottleneck moves back millions of years (say 2 mya with H. Erectus)

Meanwhile at the same time 2.1 million years ago many humans all over Africa.

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Exactly, which is why I’d like @Faizal_Ali to show us the overwhelming evidence against a bottleneck at 2 mya.

Who knows, maybe he has some. More likely, he does not.

That is one hypothesis. Produce evidence that never went down to a single couple.

A single couple in BOTH Africa and China at the same time?

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Ah, so now we’re going to play word games.

There is exactly as much evidence for a human bottleneck of two individuals as there is for tiny flying pink elephants on Ganymede.

If you think both are equally viable hypotheses, I’m fine with that.

HLA alleles are evidence. You may think there are alternative explanations (I don’t), but they’re still evidence.

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I agree. We have one line of weak evidence, that has disputable alternate explanations. That is not overwhelming evidence by any measure.

Agreed, assuming that your objections are correct, though I don’t think they are. Isn’t that the sort of scientific research creationists should be doing?

I totally agree and have encouraged @Agauger to take that direction. As you know, there is a lot of work to do it well, and this would be a great place for them to make a legitimate contribution.

If we are using current genetic variation to determine past population sizes then we can only go back so far. If you go back far enough you can get modern variation from a single couple. You can also get modern variation from a large population from that same point in history. The point is that a bottleneck of 2 is indistinguishable from a large ancestral population if you go far enough back in time.

In science, a hypothesis of a bottleneck of 2 would not be supported since the data also supports the null hypothesis. However, it is worth noting that a bottleneck of 2 isn’t falsified (again, with the caveat of going far back in time).

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Mostly in getting a sizable population sample from a dozen or so primate species. The sequencing of introns (presumably) wouldn’t be such a big thing these days.

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It is at least a $100k project, if not more, to do it well.

Student/technician salaries? Sampling expeditions?

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Yup. There will be a massive amount of work in just getting the samples. One of my colleagues got a bunch of samples for exotic meat purchases and from zoos. It was time consuming. It was not easy.

In this case, also, we would benefit from wild samples too, which are not bred in zoos. To do a definitive study would easily be over a million.

Are zoo animals even a good population sample?

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