Summations Only

This is a point I'd never considered. The animals on the ark would have needed to play host to every disease and parasite on the planet. And in the case of humans, Noah's small clan would have had to play host to plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc. And all types of genetic defects, too.Man, that must have been one miserable boat ride!--Percy

Hi Buz,Would you be so kind as to limit your claims to those you have evidence for? Thanks.--Percy

What a weird article! It reads like it contains made-up information, or as if someone completely garbled the correct information. For example: Genetic diversity cannot decline when you start from a single pair. With sexual species, a single pair is as low in diversity as you can get without going extinct. Diversity can only increase through mutation, so since mutational effects are generally minimal over short time periods one would not think that diversity could possibly increase. The article appears to be based upon this technical paper: Unexpected heterozygosity in an island mouflon population founded by a single pair of individualsWhat's missing is a clear definition of their use of the word "diversity." When starting from a single pair there cannot be more than 4 alleles per gene. Since they don't believe that mutation or infusion of new genes from the outside are factors, there can still be only 4 alleles per gene. By this measure diversity cannot have increased at all.But they're not measuring diversity this way. By heterozygosity they mean that alleles of genes and of interdependent groups of genes are combining in increasingly novel ways. It must be these permutational combinations that they're using as their measure of diversity.What this means for Noah's ark is that single pairs could give rise to viable populations (the individuals should probably be as distantly related as possible), but genetic measures of diversity would still reveal that there were only 4 alleles max per gene. This is not what we see today.--Percy

To Caffeine and Mr Jack,You are both right, of course, and I'm sorry I put you both to the trouble of explaining because I already know that there can be further loss of alleles when beginning from a single pair. I know what I was thinking but can't for the life of me figure out why I expressed it that way. I know I spent a period of puzzlement trying to figure out how they were measuring diversity.But the main point I was making was that that study could not have been measuring genetic diversity as measured by the number of alleles per gene, a point not clear from a reading of the popular press article. By this measure the genetic diversity of the mouflon population on Kerguelen *must* have decreased, and this is where that article went wrong, because it said the study contradicted this expectation. But the study didn't contradict it at all because heterozygous diversity is measured differently.Hopefully I've got it right this time... --Percy

I think one premise of this thread about how the animals would have repopulated the Earth is that only natural processes be invoked.--Percy

This is a science thread. Things that are scientifically true are true for everyone. Scientific evidence is replicable and available to anyone, though of course there may be technological requirements to viewing or reproducing the evidence.Do you have any scientific evidence for your position.--Percy

Hi ForEverYoung,No one on the evolution side is saying they can't be wrong. What we're saying is that we have evidence for our position by which we can argue for our position. When you were asked to present your evidence you instead replied that there was little point since we'd just reject it because it is a "pointless endeavor" and we are "blind" and have a "strong bias".I'm just trying to encourage you to actually discuss the topic instead of just telling us how our "philosophical commitment" renders us unable to honestly assess your evidence.--Percy