Hi Dennis,
Thanks for your brief reply. I look forward to Part II of your response.
It would be great if @glipsnort were to join in the discussion - I would like to see more detail of the argument from allele frequency distributions.
Some of the citations you're looking for are just working familiarity with published data sets.I think I must check at once that I am not misunderstanding or reading too much into your statement here. Do I understand you to be saying is that you will not be giving me citations to the peer-reviewed literature to back up certain of the claims in Adam and the Genome that I am querying? If so, I have to reassess somewhat my expectations for our discussion.
If you really are saying this, does it apply to this statement in chapter 3?
…scientists have many other methods at their disposal to measure just how large our population has been over time. One simple way is to select a few genes and measure how many alleles of that gene are present in present-day humans. Now that the Human Genome Project has been completed and we have sequenced the DNA of thousands of humans, this sort of study can be done simply using a computer. Taking into account the human mutation rate, and the mathematical probability of new mutations spreading in a population or being lost, these methods indicate an ancestral population size for humans right around that 10,000 figure. In fact, to generate the number of alleles we see in the present day from a starting point of just two individuals, one would have to postulate mutation rates far in excess of what we observe for any animal.This is a key passage in the chapter, and, as I have said before, I am very keen to read the details of the work.