adam and eve, stable genitic material?

by highdose 14 Replies latest jw friends

  • factfinder
    factfinder

    Gen.5:4 shows Adam became father to sons and daughters. Cain married one of his sisters.

  • chase
    chase

    everybody has a hot cousin. find yours now at incestery.com.

  • highdose
    highdose

    adam and eve, were not perfect though when they began having children, they had already sinned...

    ...so were does that leave the argument of "they had perfect genes"???

    surely for this story to be true, adam and eves offspring would have developed serious health problems and deformaties and eventually infertitly?

    to my mind it just ain't possible?

    and i'm making this point because they JW's like to use a line of " sciencists agree that human life could have come from just one pair of humans!" i can't remember if they attribute this to any one scientist or not. I doubt it somehow

  • Broken Promises
    Broken Promises

    What I'm curious about now are the Pygmies of Australia (?).

    Australia? I think you are thinking of another country. Australia's never had native pygmies as far as I know.

  • nolongerwaiting
    nolongerwaiting

    Actually, I've been researching this subject recently when thinking about the pairs of animals coming out of the ark after the flood. In conservation biology, the term "Minimum Viable Population" refers the minimum number of genetically unique individuals that are required to prevent a species from going extinct in the wild. Scientists create estimates of these numbers using computer models and use them to plan how to protect certain species from extinction (or to determine if they need protection). The zoo programs mentioned by TD use similar models.

    The minimum population varies by species and environment, but is often in the 1000s when you include the effects of imbreeding. If Noah really only saved two of each animal, virtually all of those animal species would have died off not long after the flood from genetic problems and shared susceptibility to common parasites and illness. The same would have been true for humans if our population size was effectively reduced to 5. (Noah, Noah's wife, and three son's wives.) This is called a "genetic bottleneck" in biology, and species do not recover.

    Looking beyond the effects of embreeding, the idea of starting from just two animals or two humans is not congruent with the enormous diversity we find in populations today. The genes which control the protein identification markers in humans have 100s of different alleles, there are 70 different alleles that fit into the blood type gene locus, and there are many other instances in the genome with similar diversity. This is not compatible with the human population starting from just two individuals, carrying at most 4 alleles in each gene loci.

    When I was a JW I used to point at the enormous diversity in dogs to explain how just two bears on the ark could produce all the bears, or just two dog-like creatures could produce all the dogs and wolves. The problem with this is that dog diversity is really a function of their great population with many different alleles being expressed, including genetic defects we have captured and bred for. You can take a large population of dogs and breed for a Chihuahua or a Great Dane, but you can't take just two Great Danes and produce a Chihuahua. What you will produce within just a few generations are stillborn puppies.

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