The flood and Ancient Chinese Documents

Althought our female common ancestor lived about 60,000 years ago, that does not mean that there was only one human female alive at that time. All that it means is that we all are descended from that one female and others.We could not have descended from one single couple because we are too genetically diverse. We have observed that species consisting of only a few individuals or species descended from a few individuals have very little genetic diversity and tend to go extinct. Genetic diversity does increase over time, due to mutations and what-not, but we have measured its approximate rate. The rate is far, far too slow to have generated the observed human genetic diversity in anything less than a few millions of years.Since we have these measures of genetic diversity, we can detect species that have descended from a few individuals; in other words, "passed through a genetic bottleneck". In species that have passed thorugh a genetic bottleneck, we can derive the approximate time when this happened. If there was a Noachian flood, all species should have passed through a genetic bottleneck at the same time. But they didn't all pass through a genetic bottleneck, and those that did, did so at different times.

Indeed? This subject has been studied extensively ... can you provide references to the scientific literature? Or are you just sure because you want it that way?

Hugh Ross is trustworthy on physics and astrophysics, he really knows his stuff there. He is not trustworthy in biology; he is pretty ignorant and lets his prejudices color his opinions. It's a shame.I find a Web reference that indicates that inbreeding has a significant effect on the first generation in humans. From Inbreeding Depression and the Evolutionary Advantage of Outbreeding:

Inbreeding depression can be defined as the reduction in fitness of offspring derived from mating between relatives (inbreeding) compared to offspring resulting from mating among unrelated individuals (outcrossing). The harmful effects of close inbreeding were widely recognized well before any formal scientific investigation into the phenomenon. Indeed, in humans about 42% of offspring from sister-brother marriages die before they reach reproductive age {emphasis added - JRF}, hence most, though not all, cultures have strong traditions with respect to incest. Plant and animal breeders have also known for centuries of the superior vigor and yield associated with outbreeding compared to inbreeding. The importance of inbreeding depression in evolutionary biology was established in 1876 with the publication of a book entitled The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom by Charles Darwin. His extensive experiments involving 57 species of plants indicated that inbreeding depression is a widespread and significant evolutionary force.

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The most likely cause for the reduction of fitness upon inbreeding involves the expression of deleterious recessive alleles. Recessive alleles are expressed in homozygotes but remain unexpressed when they occur with a dominant allele in heterozygotes. Deleterious alleles originate when the underlying DNA sequence of a functional allele is altered by mutation to code for a gene product which is either harmful or simply doesn't work. Since mutation is a universal feature of DNA, all plant or animal populations contain deleterious recessive alleles. At any given locus, however, deleterious alleles are usually so rare that offspring produced through matings among unrelated individuals are almost never homozygous for harmful alleles. With inbreeding the odds of producing an offspring homozygous for a deleterious allele are much higher. Because rare deleterious mutations are transmitted along family lines, brothers and sisters are much more likely to carrying the same deleterious alleles than unrelated individuals.

Now, there certainly could be other factors involved (e.g. perhaps brother-sister pairs who have children tend to be bad at caring for children) but genetic effects have to be part of the high death rate.Some pretty technical discussion at Inbreeding and Quantitative Genetics.

As was already pointed out, no, it wouldn't. The only known effect that can account for the observed genetic diversity is time ... millions of years of it. Mankind did not pass through a genetic bottleneck within the past few million years.Of course, if you want to make up ad-hoc hypotheses for which there's no evidence, you are welcome to do so ... but then you're not doing science. It's also pretty difficult to make up ad-hoc hypotheses that are consistent with all the observed data.

If it happened, it could have. Also, if an invisible pink unicorn created the universe last Thursday, with everything in place as if it were billions of years old, that would account for genetic diversity. And if magic pixies used telekenesis to manipulate our genes that would account for genetic diversity. There's no evidence (not even Biblical evidence) for any of my or your scenarios, and all that we know about how the universe works tells us that my and your scenarios are impossible. As I said, the only known mechanism that accounts for genetic diversity is millions of years.If you want to believe your scenario, fine, that's your right. Just don't claim that it has any scientific basis, or that it's consistent with what science has discovered about the world, or that it should be taught in U.S. public schools as science.

I was not being sarcastic. I was just giving some examples of analogous scenarios.

Oops.Sorry.I had heard of that, but had forgotten it ... and I exaggerated, too. Mea culpa.