And if you donât think that, if a NASA did make such a speech, the headlines would not say âNASA Searches for Tiny Pink Flying Elephans on Ganymedeâ, 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 âmisleadingâ is being kind.
Anyway, I think weâve gone over this enough. Feel free to have the last word in defense of your creationist friend.
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)
Agreed, assuming that your objections are correct, though I donât think they are. Isnât 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 isnât falsified (again, with the caveat of going far back in time).
Mostly in getting a sizable population sample from a dozen or so primate species. The sequencing of introns (presumably) wouldnât be such a big thing these days.
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.