What about Noah and Population Genetics?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@otto, welcome to the forums!

In addition to your link, a key place to look is here: Heliocentric Certainty Against a Bottleneck of Two?

These are great questions. There are a lot of people interested in these questions, and they require some time to fully address. I’ll try and separate them all out first; let me know if I missed anything.

@Otto

Would it be easy to define the TMRNA values for growing numbers of N? If you would plot the medians for each N, would this help in ruling out radical changes in mutation rate, or perhaps find other anomalies? I suppose you could use the same method for calculating the minimum bottleneck within the last 10 000 years allowed by the genetic data?

Yes, we can do that. I’ll caveat the reasons why this will be a large underestimate of the bottleneck limit 10 kya later, but I’ll compute a range of them and get back to you.

@Otto

A related question: how about modeling the anthropologically universal flood bottleneck? That would be TMR10A (Noah and his wife + the three wives of their three sons), and even front-loading Adam and Eve with a diversity of stem cells wouldn’t help with this challenge.

That is correct. Looking at the TMR10A is a great thing to plot. I’ll be doing that.

@Otto

When I wear my YEC hat, it seems my best bet would be to resort to higher mutation rates after the flood. There are already multiple lines of reason for why this might be postulated within the YEC paradigm:

You are right. Before we look at the data, however, think through what that would require. What would the date be that would be needed for TMR10A for this to be sensible? What should be the expected ratio between TMR4A and TMR10A under this hypothesis?

@Otto

So an increased mutation rate wouldn’t be so ad hoc, given the other postulates of the paradigm. But would this kind of a scenario leave a trace that could be seen (or ruled out) in the TMRNA values?

TMR4A per se does not rule this out, but other summaries of the data readily available to us do rule it out. Engage my earlier question to start to make sense of that.

We can and should look at other data too, to see what mutation rates we actually observe in the past, and how they line up with past events. There is an important body of work that presents a serious problem for the YEC paradigm, undermining any hypothesis of dramatically increased mutation rates in the last 10 kya.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/747

They build this website to display the results, which is really important to look at closely.

http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/

Notice this key and substantiated claim from the abstract:

We used this to produce an atlas of worldwide human admixture history, constructed by using genetic data alone and encompassing over 100 events occurring over the past 4000 years.

These are historical events that we know from historical records. Things like the Mongol invasion of China, and slave trade, and the Silk Road. They are identifiable in the genetic data, leaving an imprint they can detect, if and only if mutation rates are largely constant over the last 4000 years. You can see the data yourself on the website.

This is not TMR#A data, but it severely undermines any notion that rates were substantially different over the last 10 kya.