Creationists: Why is Evolution Bad Science?

There's no reason to think that there was any natural selection involved in this process. If you look at any part of the genome, it is inevitable that everyone will share a common ancestor at that locus -- no selection needed. All humans are descended from any number of women who lived 80,000 years ago -- which one just depends on what part of the genome you look at. (Also, 80,000 years is a very low estimate for the ancestor in question, assuming you're talking about Mitochondrial Eve.)

The original poster is deeply confused about evolution, but this reply doesn't help much: the increase in height is the result of improved nutrition, not evolution.

The genetic evidence is quite strong that humans were not reduced to a very small population any time within the last few hundred thousand years. Tight bottlenecks in population size leave clear signatures in genetic variation, and those signatures are missing for humans as a whole. (They are present, to a modest degree, in non-African populations, which is usually taken as a sign that there were population bottlenecks in the Out of Africa migration.)

The evidence is quite clear (to me, at least -- it's still been controversial until the past year or so) that there was a bottleneck in non-African populations. The evidence is far from clear that there was a bottleneck in Africa. Some studies have suggested that there was, some that there wasn't. The only study I can think of offhand that found evidence for population expansion in Africa (presumably the result of some kind of bottleneck) and that also attempted to date it (a study by David Reich and David Goldstein) produced most probable dates that were a good deal earlier than you propose. But other studies (e.g. one by Frisse et al -- I can find references if you're interested) show that the best-fitting model is one with a constant-sized population. There is nothing resembling consensus in the literature that there was a recent bottleneck within African populations; if anything, the reverse is the case. Which studies do you mean? There have been very few large-scale surveys of primate genetic diversity, which is what you would need to draw this kind of conclusion. And what I've seen suggests the opposite. A study came out earlier this year by Molly Przeworski and company, showing that central chimps (but not western chimps) have more genetic diversity than humans and show no evidence of population expansion or bottlenecking.

Well, stop it at once. It's confusing me.

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Willow: Sarcasm accomplishes nothing, Giles.
Giles: It's sort of an end in itself.

It's worth noting that the origin of life is outside the scope of evolution not because biologists are sneakily trying to hide their dirty laundry from creationists, but because origins of life research studies different data, using different techniques, and is carried out by different people. Evolution is the province of biology, while the origin of life is part of chemistry (with maybe a little geophysics thrown in).