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

[Swamidass (Peaceful Science)]

@RichardBuggs

This remains accurate, even with our ongoing conversation. All methods employed thus far do indicate that we descend from thousands.

But as we have shown at length in this discussion, they do not…

That idea - 10,000 down to 2 in a single generation, followed by exponential growth…

I don’t think I have ever named 10,000 as the size of a pre-bottleneck population in this discussion – I have just been suggesting that it would be large enough for individuals within it to carry substantial polymorphism within them.

I agree with @RichardBuggs assessment here.

That is not actually the model that has been put forward. The substance of several AatG claims are no longer supported, or are now supported by analysis made after your book was published by other people. You were claiming to be presenting settled science, and the evidence that supported it, NOT a hypothesis that would eventually be supported by work on ArgWeaver. That claim turns out to be totally false. The data you were presenting as evidence was not sufficient to make your case. If had not helped you, you would still be struggling to make the case.

@agauger

Third, when you make a model to test something, you have to start with some assumptions. I was on record, along with my coauthors, as wanting to test the possibility of a first pair. Nobody had tested the possibility of a first pair yet, until Richard Buggs’ persistent questioning got Schaffner and Swamidass to make their own models. With the results we have seen.

Also @agauger to be fair, both @glipsnort and myself have been responsive to this and engaging it long before Richard Buggs entered the conversation. Back in Sept 2016…

1. Agreeing with a YEC critic, I wrote a fairly detailed acknowledgement of the failure to directly test for a recent single couple in the literature.
2. In response, @glipsnort ran his first SFS simulation for an outsider.
3. Not public but true, I’ve been engaging with scientists across the origins debate to help them start asking and answering questions here. I’ve always acknowledged that the ancient Adam model has not been tested, and have encouraged effort here.

So we have been testing this, at least since Sept 2016, long before @RichardBuggs entered the conversation. The real problem is that this is just hobby for us (we have other jobs), and there was very little visibility on those contributions.

The real contribution of @RichardBuggs has been to press more tightly in on the LD and population reconstruction data, bring some new information to the table (the website on the PSMC bottleneck detection), and also to draw visibility to this question. This is nearly the most read thread on the forums now, it took quite a bit of effort to bring @DennisVenema to the table (and he is only here now thanks to @RichardBuggs). I’m very grateful to his contribution, but @glipsnort and I have been thinking about this problem for a while. I have encouraged inquiry into it, and have put a lot of personal time into answering it as soon a new path forward to tractably test it became available. It is not merely that @RichardBuggs raised the question, or it would have been missed.

I want to emphasize also that @glipsnort is part of BioLogos, even though I am not. Moreover, several Biologos scientists have been following this, very supportive of @RichardBuggs and my correction to the scientific account. So it is important that full credit is given where it is due. There are alot of people who have been unsympathetic to the questions of the Church, but there are several (including with in BioLogos) that have been sympathetic.

@RichardBuggs

I am left wondering why you wrote a book on Adam and Eve at all, if the idea of the human race coming from a bottleneck of two polymorphic ancestors who had several children was not on your radar.

If you don’t mind me asking, what was on your radar? What hypotheses did you consider that would allow a sole pair of human ancestors?

Very good questions. Not sure there is a good answer possible.

Remember, he put forward the strawman of the homozygous clone Adam and Eve?

It does not seem he was terribly engaged on the science here. As has been clear for a while (henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/06/a-genealogical-adam-and-eve-in-evolution/), @DennisVenema presented a selective account that fit with his personal theological views.

@RichardBuggs

I am glad that you would write the book differently today, and that this discussion has not therefore been in vain. However, I am still very mindful of the fact that very few of the readers of Adam and the Genome will stumble across this discussion, and the few that do are unlikely to make it through the first 700 posts. I think that we all need to do all that we can to communicate to your readers that a single couple bottleneck in the lineage leading to modern humans is a possibility that is consistent with extant genetic diversity.

I agree. Which is why your public statement is a good idea @RichardBuggs. I hope Dennis is up for signing it.