Is'Mitochondrial Eve' as an evidence for Biblical monogenism?
"in genetics, popular term for a theoretical female ancestor of all living people, also known as mitochondrial Eve. In 1987 biochemist Allan C. Wilson proposed that all living human beings had inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a single woman. Using statistical and computer analysis of mtDNA”which is almost always inherited by a child from the mother”from people of various ethnic groups and assuming a slow, constant rate of genetic mutation, Wilson concluded that the oldest mtDNA was African and that every person's mtDNA stemmed from one woman who lived about 200,000 years ago. (He did not suggest that this woman was the only female ancestor alive 200,000 years ago.) Critics questioned the appropriateness of the mtDNA samples used in the study and argued that computer analysis of the data was flawed and that Wilson's conclusions were not supported by the fossil record. A further study using more diverse mtDNA samples and supporting Wilson's theory was published in 1991, but other computer analyses of mtDNA samples have indicated that several different “family trees” can be constructed from the same data and that the order in which samples are analyzed by the computer program affects the results."
Just a moment...
While Wilson himself did not suggest that this woman was the only female ancestor alive 200,000 years ago, what would prevent other rational persons from arriving at this conclusion? In an area of knowledge where absolute certainty is impossible, it is not surprising that different people would arrive at different answers.
"But if we shared common ancestry in Africa only 200,000 years ago, then these older Homo erectus populations in Europe and Asia are not ancestral to Homo sapiens, and we evolved from a later branching event in Africa."
Steven Jay Gould,
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/7261/eve.html
If H. erectus became extinct 250,000 years ago, from whom did mEve (or the ancestral population formally known as mEve) come from?
Even if this were a small ancestral group instead of one woman, wouldn't that rule out fossil forms that existed much earlier than 200,000 years ago as our direct ancestors? If there is a substantial gap between our own species and the nearest fossil ancestor, would that not pose a problem to Darwinian gradualism? In other words, if H. erectus became extinct 250,000 years ago, from whom did we come from?
This message has been edited by Pensees, 12-24-2005 03:52 AM
™ Version 4.2