Do you see anything wrong with this table?
It’s bizarre, and it’s posted on the BBC site. There have never been only two human beings on the planet. The “births since previous date” column is absurdly precise — I could see estimating the total at 100 billion, but 107,602,707,791? Jeez, was that 6:21pm tonight, or 6:25?
I hope the problem isn’t that the data comes from an American source.
(via Further Thoughts for the Day)
Yeah, and it wasn’t Adam and Steve, either, smartypantses.
My brain screeched to a halt at 50,000BC – 2 and refused to go any farther.
Gad.
My HS Chemistry teacher was a stickler for rounding to the correct significant digits. This was a deep metaphysical issue for her as she was something of a logical positivist.
Great teacher and was second runner up to go on that shuttle flight. Good thing she didn’t win.
How many people have lived? All of us…
*ducks and runs*
When I worked in the California civil service, a university math professor sent my agency a proposal related to the indexing of income tax brackets. The prof’s paper was quickly routed to me for my evaluation. It was immediately obvious that the professor had no idea about the nature of his audience. The illustrative example in his paper said, “Assume an annual inflation rate of 4.01379744%” (or something like that). Ha, ha! He had assumed a simple inflation rate of 50% over a decade and worked out to several decimal places what annual rate that would entail. Of course, no one in the legislature or on its staff would be likely to appreciate the professor’s “elegant” example. Instead they’d say, “Oh, yeah. Like that is ever going to happen?”
Goofball or naive assumptions can discredit even the most careful work. (But if only Adam and Eve had deposited one dollar at compound interest while they were still in the Garden of Eden, imagine what it would be worth today!)
Well see, it was the two first H. sapiens ever, even if they lived with H. ergaster (or whatever).
Luckily, they appeared at the same time, otherwise there’d be no humans.
IOW, it’s this kind of bunkum that primes the stupidities of a Ray Comfort. While he seems determinedly stupid, others might think better if they’d been taught real evolution in the first place.
Glen Davidson
Have they left out the most interesting parts of human population history?
Ok this may be a stupid question, but I read through the first part of that article wondering what “births/1000” meant. Births per thousand what? Anyway the guy was claiming that our earlier ancestors would have had to maintain a birth rate of 80 births per thousand people just to keep the species alive. Which sounds…. wrong. That sounds like serious population decline to me. For every thousand people, there were 80 people born… per year? Over the course of their lifetime? Are we only counting the people that lived to reproductive age in the thousand people or are we counting people that might have died in childhood as well? Wtf is he talking about?
I don’t see 4004 BC on that table.
At some point the population of ‘humans’ must have been 1.
Any thinking person can reason that the egg came before the chicken, right!?
A lot of the statements in the linked article about early human history aren’t even wrong.
No, the population wouldn’t have been 1, for a start, who to mate with?
Biology is wonderfully fuzzy – it’s not easy to say when one species has become another. If every mother stood arms outstretched, with her fingers touching her own mother, right back to our common ancestor with chimps, you would be hard pressed to point to the spot when one mother wasn’t human but the daughter was. You would see the chances over *many* generations.
No. Evolution and population genetics does not work that way.
I wonder if number 1 was wearing flower boxers or white briefs.
My guess is that 50000 YA is their guestimate that the direct descendants of both Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve surviving a population bottleneck, which may have occurred 50000 to 100000 YA. Or perhaps a later date for the dispersal out of africa and the current main population groups were geographically established?
Except Adam and Eve do not share the same bottle neck IIRC
There is a similar – and much more familiar – instance of going too far past the decimal point: Body temperature in healthy humans. The 98.6 Fahrenheit was arrived at by an overly precise conversion of an approximation made in Celsius. Most Americans have probably noticed that their temperature is almost never exactly 98.6. That’s why.
I also found the 2 people @ 50k puzzling recognizing (in fact, thanks to Pharyngula) that there was never a time when there were just “2 people” no matter how far back you go. But, I don’t think they meant that there were literally only 2 people alive 50k years ago. As I understood the article they were demonstrating the ridiculousness of the UN claim that there are more people alive today than have ever lived.
The question is: So what? I don’t understand why it mattered to demonstrate this point, other than to thumb noses at the UN PR department over the hype around hitting the 7 billion mark and provide grist for a BBC news story. I understand even less why the number is so precise…perhaps Mr. Spock was involved…other than to make it seem more statistical and sciencey.
Perhaps there’s a hidden political agenda here to suggest that the world population isn’t so large after all.
Or, perhaps this is just one of those half-baked “Beautiful Data” exercises that have become popular recently.
In any case, Edward Tuft would be amused at the confusion the chart caused.
From the article:
And yet somehow the table’s creator was able to estimate births since the previous date to 11 digits of precision? Based upon essentially no data at all. Somebody clearly needs a refresher course in basic mathematics.
And how do we view the mitochondrial thingy if Eve was cloned from male cells?
I woke my cat up from my laughing at the population of 2 thing.
Fundies. So stupid you have to laugh, to keep from crying.
Also, where was the reduction down to 8?
Or shouldn’t they have started from there?
This is why I could never be religious. Trying to get things to add up right is too much work, and I’m lazy.
Yikes! It all started with 2? BBC? Are there any competent journalists left?
Anyone else reminded of Invader Zim where the computer gave hilariously stupid predictions because it told Zim it didn’t have any data and Zim told it to do the calculations anyway?
Yeah…this.
@littlejohn #17:
I remember the 1st time I converted 98.6oF* to Celcius and it came out to exactly 37oC*. I did have a lightbulb moment when I realized, “Oh, 37oC* is just an estimate or approximate average of body temperature. So now I can stop worrying that my usual body temperature is 98.0oF*.”
*Sorry, I don’t know the code for superscript to make a “degree” symbol. Apparently it’s not (sup) (replace the regular brackets with angle brackets<>).
°
=
°
It’s bizarre, and it’s posted on the BBC site
It is bizarre, but please remember, it is on the BBC news website. Not a Beeb nature doc (Cthulhu be praised).
Allvirtually all newsmedia outlets are lying reprobates who should never be taken seriously. Couldn’t be that anyone working there has ever had a bias or agenda could it? Wouldn’t be the first time. <—– Cited from the Torygraph, sorry, not the Grauniad, but via wikileaks so I hope that doesn't offend bien pensants ;)…. To be generous, perhaps it was human error (or just someone none too bright) who did the table, because the Yank data do make sense – "Births Between Benchmarks" is not synonymous with "Births since previous date". So your attempts to pin this asshattery on your lot have come to nothing PZ (Whyd'ya hate Amurka? lol).Scrub that. All newsmedia outlets are lying reprobates. Almost all are villainous scum.
If you really had a temperature 270 degrees above the boiling point of water, you may be in trouble. It’s not just significant digits that are important. Orders of magnitude are as well.
[…]
I’m not sure of the significance of 52K YBP … I recall reading an interpretation of genetic diversity in humans that said there was a pinch point some time ago where Homo sapiens was reduced to a few small groups in Africa. I think that was further back than this point.
And yes, it would be difficult to know when speciation happened. It would be a population thing, not individuals.
At least in my discipline, the BBC science section is known for getting a lot of things wrong. Wouldn’t be surprised if that held true for other disciplines as well…
Yes indeed We Are Ing@16. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Adam lived about 50,000-80,000 years apart (and their existence is still a subject of some controversy).
It is sad to see that some idiots still use BC and AD instead of CE(common era) and BCE(before common era).
Even Mass Effect 1,2 uses CE/BCE.
I’ll give the author (Carl Haub) some credit for acknowledging that this is just a back-of-envelope calculation, or as he puts it “a highly speculative enterprise” because there is “absolutely no demographic data available for 99 percent of the span of the human stay on Earth.” As such, I think it should be seen as a quick-and-dirty exercise in dismissing the oft-quoted but absurd estimate that 75% of people who have ever lived are alive today.
So I’m happy to cut Haub a lot of slack…but it’s still a sign of a rather deep lack of understanding to project the human population back to the number 2 in the year 50,000 BC. And although he clearly didn’t mean his figures to be taken as accurate, I still found it amusing to see his estimate of the total number of humans who have ever lived as 107,602,707,791 but his estimate of current world population to be 6,987,000,000. That is, he used four sigfigs for the estimate we have some actual confidence in, but twelve sigfigs for the estimate that was highly speculative. Minor stuff, but funny nonetheless.
Ignoring datasolution as per what they wrote on the other thread, but others here might be interested that the BC/AD debate has come up before for the BBC:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/sep/26/1
This is written like one of my first year grad students – the first time they got their model to pump out some numbers – and they go and prepare a slide of the ‘interesting’ results to impress the PI.
Only in the haste to put together the presentation, all forms of critical thinking, and good writing style, have been thrown out the window at this point. Then I have to get out my mighty red pen and start slashing away.
I could spend 30 minutes just talking about the presentation style of this data, which is truly bizzare and looks like a direct cut-paste from a middle-school project made using MS Excel.
Time column: why arbitrary choice of 50,000 as a starting point? Why is the year written 50,000BC (not using BCE and at least put a space between the number and the unit). Then I’d have to ask why instead of writing 1 AD or 1 CE, it is written AD1. Then in the rest of this column, the AD/BC designations are dropped altogher, as are the use of commas.
After exploring several years made of even numbers, that while not equally spaced, at least attempted some uniformity (50 or 100 year) spacing. Then all of a sudden we have 1995 and 2011. Was this the last time he got laid or something? What is the relevance of 1995?
Then there is the births per 1000 what? as indicate already above. And I like how in the 1950s it had to be 31-38, whereas
all the other decades got by haveing just on rate. Finally, somebody got real happy with significant figures in the last column.
Anyway, when I see data like this, I don’t even try to understand it. The defense is over until this is fixed. Please tell me this is a report for a college class and not a real published paper, or else I may lose faith in the publishing establishment altogether.
I also can’t help but be extremely bothered that the author uses the term “Guesstimate” in a supposedly scholarly explanation of his graph.
See the section on guesstimates on the source page. I agree with PZ about the precision used — my primary question: Who cares? What possible use can this ratio of current living to all births of a species have?
Additionally, does this take into account infant mortality? It would have of course been much higher in the past and at some times and places, based on specific environmental factors.
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
Guesstimates
Guesstimating the number of people ever born, then, requires selecting population sizes for different points from antiquity to the present and applying assumed birth rates to each period. We start at the very, very beginning—with just two people (a minimalist approach!).
One complicating factor is the pattern of population growth. Did it rise to some level and then fluctuate wildly in response to famines and changes in climate? Or did it grow at a constant rate from one point to another? We cannot know the answers to these questions, although paleontologists have produced a variety of theories. For the purposes of this exercise, it was assumed that a constant growth rate applied to each period up to modern times. Birth rates were set at 80 per 1,000 per year through 1 A.D. and at 60 per 1,000 from 2 A.D. to 1750. Rates then declined to the low 30s by the modern period.
This semi-scientific approach yields an estimate of about 108 billion births since the dawn of the human race. Clearly, the period 8000 B.C. to 1 A.D. is key to the magnitude of our number, but, unfortunately, little is known about that era. Some readers may disagree with some aspects—or perhaps nearly all aspects—of the table, but at least it offers one approach to this elusive issue. If we were to make any guess at all, it might be that our method underestimates the number of births to some degree. The assumption of constant population growth in the earlier period may underestimate the average population size at the time. And, of course, pushing the date of humanity’s arrival on the planet before 50,000 B.C. would also raise the number, although perhaps not by terribly much.
So, our estimate here is that about 6.5 percent of all people ever born are alive today. That’s actually a fairly large percentage when you think about it.
He does say “you might want to round that number off” in the video on this page:
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
Still, why not have that in the original data set?
For some keyboards Alt-248 gets you the ° symbol.
But for this sort of thing ° works just as well.
@jaycee
That’s actually correct (with a space between the AD and the 1, of course). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini
Knowing how many people have been alive before us tells me that in a zombie uprising, we are totally screwed.
Even Mass Effect 1,2 uses CE/BCE
yes, because of course all usage standards rightly should be set by how they appear in a fucking video game.
dude, leave your Mom’s basement and get some fresh air. There’s a real world out there waiting for you.
Gosh! I’m so confuzzled. I’m pretty sure that the paleontology shows, books, websites, etc. all had some sort of data suggesting that at some time between 90K and 260K years ago there were as little as a few hundred humans, from where everyone inherited their mitochondrial genetic material. The chart’s starting date and starting number of humans is wrong. How do you suppose that happened? The starting number of 2? That just sounds like a number some idiot would pull from his ass…or another equally shitty source.
Knowing how many people have been alive before us tells me that in a zombie uprising, we are totally screwed.
naw.
haven’t you seen Army of Darkness?
all you’ll need do is to convert your car into a giant lawnmower.
oh, and make sure you get the incantation right when you grab the manual.
According to my calculations, the 100 billionth person to be born in human history was approximately Bill Buckner, former baseball player and goat of the 1986 World Series.
Really, I calculated it.
approximately Bill Buckner
so, what’s the margin of error on that?
Where are my H. neanderthalis ancestors? I demand they be included at once or I’ll only be 98% present.
And if you aren’t H. Sapiens, you aren’t people. Nice.
±ner
2 ?
2 ? ? ? are they gone in the head ?
There could not have been just 2. it doesn’t make sense.
We’ve either had or will get both those times. Unless you’re using a 24 hour clock in which case it’ll be 18.21 hours & 18.25 hours respectively! ;-)
@32. datasolution :
You might want to read what Richard Carrier also part of the FTB
(what-ya-ma-call-it – blogverse maybe?) has to say about this topic. See :
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/166
Blog post tited : B.C.A.D.C.E.B.C.E.
Posted 2012 January 26th (Australia day!) at 9:04 am on Richard Carrier Blogs.
@47. maureenbrian :
I could be mistaken about this but don’t we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees? So shall we include them – & bonobos? – along with Neandertals, Australopitheciens and so on?
As I understand it, we diverged from our common ancestors with the chimpanzees etc quite some time ago and cannot be said to be descended from them.
You would have to check with Dr Marjanović for the latest word on this but, again as I understand it, different lines of research have come up with two new facts –
* that those of us whose ancestors exited Africa at the time when Neanderthals inhabited Europe and the Middle East – that’s Europeans and quite a lot of Asians – have an admixture of Neanderthal DNA of up to 2%, something other peoples do not have. Ergo, descent.
* that populations of Neanderthals survived in Europe for longer than had previously been thought – dated specimens are giving 30,000 years ago and there may be more work to be done as not every specimen had been dated – so they were alive and breeding if not exactly dominant well beyond the start of this table.
I stress, you would have to check with someone who does all this for a living rather than me, a laywoman. (And now you see what a silly term that is outside the monastic context.)
Joshvankiel:
Certain enquiring minds would like to know if there is still a sufficient supply of human souls in the pool of those now dead, and presumably waiting for reincarnation, or whether humans are now being incarnated from among the better behaved higher mammals, or even some ingenious invertebrates.
It is important to be able to rely on mathematics and statistics and demographics in reliably determining such things.
/poe
I heard the 5 minute segment related to this on BBC World. In all fairness, it wasn’t all that bad.
If it works for non-Brits, you can hear the original broadcast (from BBC World Service) here.
The crappy story in the BBC Magazine was ‘based’ on the broadcast.
The use of “Orwellian” in that blog post is probably not the most gratuitous of all times, but the bar’s set pretty high on that.
I can’t find anywhere to leave comments on the BBC website to complain about this sloppiness and poor science.
And so “50,000 years ago” joins 4004 BC as another arsehole-derived figure, useful only for confusing the issue! Why didn’t the silly man ask her where she got it from or point her to wikipedia even?
To leave a comment for the BBC, you can click on the “Contact Us” link at the bottom right of the webpage and select “Website”.
I’ve sent a comment to the editor regarding the table. I don’t expect them to change it, but perhaps they’ll be more careful next time. (I love wishful thinking ;)
@jaycee #35
That’s because once you’re past AD 1 in a time series, it’s always going to stay AD so there’s no need to mention it every single time (it would just create a clutter and it’s a waste of ink).
Speak for yourself. I may be alive, but, as Kids often point out, I have no life.
You can also tweet @BBCNews to express your bafflement and disgust.
The Toba Catastrophe Theory argues that between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago the Toba volcanic supereruption reduced the human population to 10,000 or possibly even 1,000 individuals.
Not only that (and 4% was the figure I heard IIRC), but more recent evidence indicates that various Asian and Pacific populations have inherited DNA from the “Denisovans”, who are known only from a couple of skeletal fragments found in Siberia, and some African populations have DNA inherited from non-AMH (Anatomically Modern Human) populations living in Africa between 35,000 and 20,000 years ago. So basically, it looks like wherever our main ancestral AMH line spread, they interbred with whoever else was around if it was physically and genetically possible. Which, looking at modern human behaviour, should be no great surprise.
Wesley Stephenson is the producer of the usually wonderful “More or Less” radio programme. I’ve sent an email pointing out the errors in the table, both the initial population of 2 and the misleading precision of the numbers.
It might well get a mention in a future programme.
I wonder what David Attenborough had to say about that little gem when he learned about it??
I can’t quite see him saying, “!*$&^!*!&!!!” but perhaps, “Oh, No! That’s all WRONG!”
As it’s the BBC I was inclined to write off the “2” as a wry comment on biblical (and other origin) myths, but listening to the podcast I think I’d put it down to what Cohen, Stewart & Pratchett call ‘lies to children’; that is, simplifications of the truth put in as a stop-gap to aid the didactic point the speaker is trying to make, rather than obscure it with explanations of explanations.
When you examine the concept of ‘the Human species’ the question ‘How many people have lived?’ can get pretty meaningless unless you draw some arbitrary lines and make some arbitrary assumptions so that you can actually address the original factoid of there being more people alive today than have ever lived.
And as I’m in a forgiving mood today, I’ll even allow that to a hack writer charged with turning a two-minute podcast item into a written piece in a magazine, the concept of precise numbers looks shinier and more attractive than the concept of rounding-off. Sadly, the kind of people who become journalists aren’t typically the kind of people who pay attention in maths classes. And I’ll note that I only found out this week after several years use that my spreadsheet app hides the significant figures format as a function rather than as a formatting option, weirdly, so I can see that it may have been easier for the writer or original researcher to leave the figures precise rather than hand-round.
Didn’t you know that Betty and Barney Rubble were the first real humans.
But the obvious way to do that is to work backwards. Start with an estimate of those who were alive in 1900, all but a few hundred of whom (at most) are dead. Then add population estimates for 1800, 1700, 1600… This way you will double-count very small numbers, while missing much larger ones. Even so, and leaving out those who have been born and died since 1900 as this procedure does, using the estimates of McEvedy and Jones with a couple of simple interpolations for 300 CE and 100 CE, I reached 7.74 billion at 0 CE, comfortably more than the current population.
I don’t get it. Has this guy ever read any basic anthropology texts?
The figures he gives are, I believe, births per 1000 people per year. He assumes very high birth rates and a tendency over time to decline. In this case 80 per 1000 declining to 23 per thousand. He makes the assumtion that in huntergather times the birthrate was very high. Anthrpological evidence does not indicate that the birthrates of huntergathers was astronomical.
If the birthrate was 80 per 1000 that is a 8% birthrate and considering that c. 50% of the population is female that means that 16% of the female population is pregnant any given year. (This doesn’t take into account miscarriages, abortions, infanticide.) excluding the old infertile and those too young to become pregnant that means well over 25% of the fertile female population would have been pregnant at any given year. That is absurd. The evidence seems to indicate that huntergathers had low birthrates.
The figures of population growth are nonsense. I rather doubt for example that the birth rate in 1900 was 4% per year and all the figures given of that date and before are absurd.
Nah, Betty and Barney weren’t the first real humnans. That was Pebbles Flintstone and Arnold the paperboy. Fortunately for all Bamm-Bamm didn’t find out about their affair, and thought their child was his.
“Two people at 50,000 BC” establishes a clear lower-bound on the number of dead people, and all we need is a lower bound on the number of dead people to reject the assertion that 75% of all people are alive today. Since there are no (as far as I know?) young earth creationists that accept an Earth that old, I suspect the original source was just looking to establish an extremely conservative lower bound that falsified the assertion.
…You do realize that the whole point of CE/BCE is to remove Christian connotations from dates, right? As I recall, BC and AD respectively stand for “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini,” which is “In the year of our Lord.”
Also, Mass Effect is probably one of the smartest video game series in history, alongside Deus Ex. Hell, if anything that *is* a “fucking video game” that you should set some standards by. By the way, not all gamers are basement dwellers. Friggin’ Robin Williams is a Legend of Zelda nerd to the extreme, even naming his daughter Zelda.
Errrrrrr let’s not use Robin Williams as an example to defend one’s dignity
might I suggest a less anecdotal source (however awesome Mass Effect may be, it is but one data point)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era#Contemporary_Usage
Looking good:
Also ME’s scale of time isn’t the exact high point of it’s game.
I personally found credulity stretched that so much advanced in such a short amount of time
Weren’t we taught that half the humans who were ever alive are alive today? Or at least 35 years ago? I had felt that those who came up with that figure failed to consider the much higher infant/young child death rate in days gone by, leaving us with approximately 43.086517064834928467183%.
for German speaking countries:
v. Chr. (BC) used to be the norm in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
In 1988, this was dropped, also the EU norm that was subsequently drawn up in 1992 doesn’t mention either v.Chr. (BC) or v. u. Z. (BCE).
A typically European solution: let’s just not mention religion at all. I wish they’d make v.u.Z. the official norm…
(but of course the problem being that v.u.Z. at some point was made mandatory by the Nazis. And anything the Nazis did is anathema. Well except for the electricity law of 1937 which has led to the biggest energy cartel the country has ever seen. But I digress)
Also, Mass Effect is probably one of the smartest video game series in history
get. out. of. the. house.
I’m bored already, let’s not do another of these
Of course it’s not 37 °C for most people either. That’s rounded from 36.6°. If you actually have 37 °C, you’re probably ill.
First, ° is not a superscript o. It’s a completely separate symbol that has its own key on, for example, German keyboards (capital ^, to the left of 1).
Second, super- and subscript don’t work on Freethoughtblogs yet. I hope this is being fixed!!!
And not just because you’d have to pick a definition for “speciation” first. As of three years ago, there were 147 of them; depending on the definition, there are from 101 to 249 endemic bird species in Mexico…
FIFY. Whether you want to call them H. neanderthalensis or H. sapiens neanderthalensis depends on the definition of “species” you happen to prefer this minute.
Not necessary, you’re right, except where KG says otherwise. :-)
Thread resoundingly won.
…without the “our” part.
That’s called “not even ignoring it” in Austria.
Ah? Was it? I thought it was an East German = evil commie thing.
(I’ve seen books from the German Anything But Democratic Republic that consistently used v.u.Z..)
David,
yeah, the GDR used it too, and also after the war, Jewish publications have used it as well.
How do you say that in German, “we don’t even ignore it?”
(BTW tonight’s Tatort is from Vienna, with a lot of Serbian dialogue in subtitles because the case is about the genocide in former Yugoslavia)
By the Emperor, sorry. Didn’t think that an RPG would cause people to get so riled. And yes, ME’s whole timeline thing is a little strange, but it does somewhat make sense given how fast advancements are getting combined with finding a cache of stuff 50,000 years more advanced than ours. Somewhat.
Rip Steakface, you may not know this, but datasolution already made hirself persona non grata with their rape apologetics. Also, the usage of either BC or BCE is totally irrelevant to the topic of this thread.
Shame they didn’t have children of their own – Bamm-Bamm was adopted. So humans were just one of those dead-end species. Interesting.
Not to rain on the self righteous parade here, but I think you’re all overamping on a rather open-ended calculation to basicaly refute the assertion that ‘75% of everyone who ever lived are alive today’. The 2 people at 50,000 BC is, as JohnPate notes above: “… establishes a clear lower-bound on the number of dead people, and all we need is a lower bound on the number of dead people to reject the assertion that 75% of all people are alive today. Since there are no (as far as I know?) young earth creationists that accept an Earth that old, I suspect the original source was just looking to establish an extremely conservative lower bound that falsified the assertion.”
In the source document, he lays out his asumptions, discusses the problems with his assumptions, acknowledges that many will question those assumptions, and suggests areas where mortality data could impact the assumptions, but still demonstrates, if not exactly elegantly, that the assertion is in all probability, false.
Now,instead of bad science I suggest it’s actually an instructive example of thinking through a problem when you’re trying to refute a commonly held assertion and empirical evidence is not available. Are there problems with the assumptions? Yes, assuredly. If we modify the assumptions does it invalidate the argument that the assertion is false? I’ll leave that to better statisticians than I, but I’m suspecting not.
I don’t think there’s an agenda here, either in terms of making a hard core scientific assertion, or making a religious argument. His estimate is not exactly elegant, certainly as the author indicates, open to reinterpretation, and certainly not deserving of the Free Thoughts Blog equivilant of the monty python skit “burn the witch”
Just sayin’ …
Yeah, I remember being disgusted by that. I don’t remember it being decided that a video game series was also apparently worthy of “die in a hole” status here. I have lurked for a long time and seen most of what’s okay and what’s not (you know, stuff like gendered insults), but never saw video games on the shitlist.
I always take that phrase, or “Just my 2 cents” as an acknowledgement that whatever preceded it is pointless drivel of some sort.
I must be permanently ill, then, at 37.4C… :0)
It does rather depend on where you measure your temperature.
As to AD/BC and CE/BCE, a curse on both of them. The first is an ugly mixture of the religious and English/Latin. The latter is meaningless, and English. I demand that years since 1BC are not labelled at all. Today is 2012, not 2012 AD or 2012 CE. I also demand that the years 1 BC and before become -1, -2, etc. And no, we don’t need a year zero.
I know I’m late to the conversation, but I’m with NotAProphet (#10): the initial population had to be 1. Let me explain.
Bigdavesb (#12) is certainly correct to say that “If every mother stood arms outstretched, with her fingers touching her own mother, right back to our common ancestor with chimps, you would be hard pressed to point to the spot when one mother wasn’t human but the daughter was. You would see the changes over *many* generations.”
But let’s imagine we could do DNA tests on each individual in that chain. At some point along the line, enough mutations would have accumulated that we would say we were now looking at a human, not a common ancestor. Let’s call that “x” mutations. By definition, that human’s mother would have had “x-1” mutations – making her almost, but not quite, human.
That first human would not have been alone, but rather a part of a community of hundreds of almost-but-not-quite humans like her (or his) parents. When that first human had his or her first child, the human population in the world at that moment would then have doubled to 2.
The chart estimates that that moment happened around 50,000 BC. Arbitrary? Sure. But then, this is all a question of arbitrary definitions. Even if we could go back in time and do all the DNA tests I mentioned, we’d still have to decide what exact set of mutations we would define as “human.”
The choice of the number 2 is also arbitrary; one could just as easily have pointed to the moment a few years later when the human population was 17. That’s why I agree with NotAProphet that using the population number 1 would have been a better choice, since it would not have the same “Adam and Eve” religious resonance.
Nicht einmal ignorieren, or rather [ˌnɛd̥ɐmɒ̈ɪ̯ɪg̊noɐ̯ˈʀɪɐ̯n]. (Nasal release on the voiceless [g].)
Cool – I don’t have a TV here in Berlin.
Quite. Don’t know why I forgot to mention that at the last minute – I remember thinking of it.
Having one does make a few things easier, though.
Still, I like the idea of going radiocarbon and defining 1950 as “Present” and 1949 as 1 BP (Before Present). First, the hilariousness of “After Present” is hard to beat. Second, 1950s arrogance simply must be enshrined forever. :-)
Whoa. At how many or which mutations would you draw that line?
(I’d draw it at a split in the population, a cladogenesis, instead.)
You have no reason to assume it uses such a definition of “human”.
Indeed, you have no reason to assume it uses any definition of “human”.
Blockquote fail, but you (and you know!) get the point.
David Marjanović – I confess that I was picturing speciation through anagenesis in my speculation above. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the human race did branch off through cladogenesis.
We could obviously then define “human” as “a member of the population group that separated from the common ancestor” – in which case the members of that group *became* human when the geographic split happened, and that there was not a single first human being.
But we could also say that speciation happened sometime after the geographic split by defining it as the first time there was a mutation making the new population unable to reproduce with the old population. In this case, the first time that mutation occurred in a fetus, the resulting birth made the global population of human beings 1.
With regard to the chart, you are correct that I have no idea what the author had in mind. Maybe it really was a sly reference to Adam and Eve. I’m just pointing out that the idea of there only being 2 human beings alive at a certain point around 50,000 BC/BCE is not necessarily an absurd one.
As long as the first 2 people had no navels I’m cool with the bottleneck claim.Particularly if they were both hermaphroditic.