What about Noah and Population Genetics?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@Otto

Why not give those vids a chance and we can talk about scripture and not just science…

For a fairly simple reason: the title of this topic is “What about Noah and Population Genetics”, and I really like taking things one at a time.

I totally agree. Take the rest on another thread.

@Otto

Perhaps this will help you see where I’m aiming at: I’d rather see @swamidass beat up a superman than a strawman.

I 100% endorse that. I have no use for strawmen arguments. If you can find a way to make it work, I’ll certainly make it known too. I have no motivation to mispresent the data.

Some Preliminaries

@Otto

Mutating about 2x faster is enough to substantially increase risk of autism. It is not plausible to imagine mutations at that high a rate. Such a high rate of mutation just kills us.

That sounds even worse than I had expected, but I’d like to see some evidence based baseline of how high a mutation rate makes a mammalian species infertile. After all, even Chernobyl is inhabited by wildlife that seem to cope quite well with the disaster.

Yes, but it is not likely that these animals were getting 100x times the normal rate of mutation in their germline. Remember, that somatic cells are going to get far more mutations than germline cells (because they are more exposed and dividing), so you are far more likely to die, than somehow live long enough to produce viable offspring.

Also keep in mind that every child is born with about 100 to 200 de novo mutations, and as the father ages, this can approximate double. However, that increase in mutation rate makes it much more likely that the child will have autism.

What you are proposing here is that there are 10,000 or more mutations per generation for several generations. We know of no mechanism that can increase mutations rates that high, and then magically return to the levels we’ve seen currently. It is hard to imagine a process that would mutate at this high a rate with out just leaving us dead. I know of no examples of any mammal that can survive that amount of mutation, producing viable offspring. Can you find any papers that do show anything like that?

@Otto

It seems tumor cells can have an increased mutation rate of four orders of magnitude, so at the cellular level even a 10 000x larger rate doesn’t lead to a total meltdown (yes, cancer cells are seriously malfunctioning, but they are still functional enough to reproduce wildly):
“The values of the baseline and raised intrinsic mutation rates are 10^−8 and 10^−4, respectively.”
(http://www.pnas.org/content/93/25/14800.long)

That is different. Cancer cells are not producing viable human offspring. That is an example of somatic mutation, which is far higher than germline mutation.

It is just entering the realm of science fiction to imagine mutation rates this high. I’m pretty sure we do not even see survivable mutation rates that high in insects and C elegans. I’m a medical doctor, by the way, and weeding out mutations in sperm is not going to work. What ever process is increasing mutations rates 100x in germline is doing much more in somatic cells. I’m just no sure how any individuals survive that degree of mutational load, let alone have viable offspring. Maybe I am missing something here, but that is a rate of mutation that we have just never observed.

The TMR10A Distribution

Here it is. It 181,000 years ago. So, this predicts a mutation rate about 45x higher than we directly observe in humans (if the flood was 4,000 years ago). That is really high. If we try and squeeze all the mutation into a window in the past. That means you are looking at >100x mutation rate than ever observed for >1000 years. That just boggles my mind. I’m very open to finding any models that might work, but this totally stumps me. I just do not see what could work.

@Otto

That is right. TMR10A should be close to TMR4A if that is the case. Actually, it should be nearly equal. TMR10A should be about TMR4A - 2,000 years.

Maybe you can help me with this one: it seems to me we could have, under the “special biology” option, an apparent bottleneck of way more than 10 alleles for the second generation from creation (Even without taking into account their longevity, Adam and Eve could have easily had 4-20 kids, giving a bottleneck of 8-40 alleles).
If we have only a vague guess of how different each created chromosome would be, it is hard to say how big a TMR4A or TMRCA we should expect. This would be “virtual history”, so it seems your equation of TMR10A ~= TMR4A - 2,000 wouldn’t apply here.

So yes, if Adam and Eve do not have our biology, then yes, TMR10A does not have to be close to TMR4A. However, for them to be far appart (180 kya vs 500 kya), that would require them to be genetic mosaics, it seems.

That option, however, is not available for Noah. I do not think that trick for them is playing fair. I’d hope you agree. This seems to strongly falsify the notion that there was a Noah bottleneck of 5 individuals within the last 10 kya. Do you agree?