Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1)

Not quite. The (now infamous) quote says the following:

“As our methodology becomes more sophisticated and more data are examined, we will likely further refine our estimates in the future. That said, we can be confident that finding evidence that we were created independently of other animals or that we descend from only two people just isn’t going to happen. Some ideas in science are so well supported that it is highly unlikely new evidence will substantially modify them, and these are among them. The sun is at the center of our solar system, humans evolved, and we evolved as a population.”

I also say this in the very next paragraph:

“Put most simply, DNA evidence indicates that humans descend from a large population because we, as a species, are so genetically diverse in the present day that a large ancestral population is needed to transmit that diversity to us. To date, every genetic analysis estimating ancestral population sizes has agreed that we descend from a population of thousands, not a single ancestral couple. Even though many of these methods are independent of each other, all methods employed to date agree that the human lineage has not dipped below several thousand individuals for the last three million years or more—long before our lineage was even remotely close to what we would call “human.” Thus the hypothesis that humans descend solely from one ancestral couple in has not yet found any experimental support,— and it is therefore not one that geneticists view as viable.”

So, I do discuss studies that go back past humans, and I show that there is not a case to be made from those studies that Adam and Eve are somehow not human and further back in time. The “heliocentrism quote” is more limited in its scope. It’s about humans.

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