I get email, still, and I get tired of it all. This is what I got last night.
Modern people are descended from their ancestors (surprising, I know), and we have scientific tools to trace lineages. The Bible has a story about modern people being descended from 8 ancestors who survived a global flood. You can’t wedge the myth into the scientific evidence, and no, that science has demonstrated lines of descent does not validate your petty, simplistic fantasy.
I blurred out their name because they were polite about it all, and stopped when I told them to. If only every Bible-thumper behaved that way.
You left their name in the first message :)
Fixed it! Don’t tell anyone!
(I realize PZ knows this, but …) This person talks about “DNA haplogroups”, probably Y-chromosome haplotypes. Those are for the large part of the Y chromosome which does not recombine with the X. They will have a genealogical tree. That genealogy was inferred in the 1990s by Luca Cavalli-Sforza and many colleagues of his. Such a tree will have a time early on when there are exactly eight lineages. But what about the rest of the genome? Each small region of each chromosome will have its own coalescent tree. And they’re going to be different, showing different relationships and different ages. Yes, each has some time ago when they have exactly eight lineages. But they will show many different genealogies and ages. With any sensible mutation rates, they will coalesce hundreds of thousands of years ago, not 4,400 years ago. The polite creationist should look at more of the genome.
“Invasive”?
Well in fairness, there are a lot of “sons of Gomer” out there.
Oh really?
What about the Lizard People UFO Shapeshifters?
Every time the police or someone sequences the genome of the Illuminati, Globalists, the leaders of the Democratic party, Nancy Pelosi etc., they come up with genomes that aren’t related to anyone or anything on Earth.
This happens a lot but since the Lizard People Shapeshifters control everything, it always gets covered up. Somewhere there is a database with a whole line of descent that starts on another planet.
This would all be true if Qanon were true and the Lizard People actually existed.
(FWIW, this is satire, although if I was a Lizard Person, I would say that anyway.)
@6, Yeah, yeah, yeah, but who controls the lizard people, the shapeshifters, the evil equine empire, and the peas, huh, huh? Gottcha!
I’d still be interested to be able to view the illustrations of the attachments (or the attachments themselves). I could use a good laugh.
How do we know that the Y chromosome haplotypes have diverged in a sequence of neat binary fissions? We have evidence that neanderthals seem lost their own Y chromosome to interbreeding with humans around 40-50K years ago, which doesn’t fit a fissioning tree model. Is it possible that Y lineages are more complex than our current models?
I liked “links all of the DNA Haplogroups in world to God of the Bible”.
You should have asked how they found out the DNA of their god.
Surely the many relics of the true cross should provide a sufficient sample.
Re: PaulBC @ #11…
Old (as in current during the Crusades) Islamic joke…
Q: Why are there no longer any cedars in Lebanon?
A: Because every Frank (European) in Christendom has a piece of the True Cross.
raven @ #6
Even more remarkable is that said database hasn’t been hacked, yet. What are the odds that’s true.
raven@6
Church of Scientology trying to outdo Mormons on genealogical records?
Neanderthals did not lose their Y so much as go extinct as a species. Modern humans do carry some Neanderthal sequences. Since interbreeding between species often results in sterile offspring, it’s entirely possible that alone accounts for Neanderthal Y chromosomes not being observed in modern humans.
Tethys — current research strongly suggests that neanderthals lost their Y chromosomes (and mitochondrial sequences) for human varietals. It’s not certain because we have very few good samples of male neanderthal DNA to test for Y haplotypes whereas we have quite a good stock of female neanderthal material (which yields autosomal and mtDNA sequences).
The interesting thing is that neanderthals are much closer to denisovans autosomally, but their Y chromosome and mitochondria are closer to modern human. The decisive step would be to find some very old male neanderthal tissue to probe for Y chromosome sequences, but no currently known samples are viable.
Ref: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/y-chromosome-from-early-modern-humans-replaced-neanderthal-y-67963
@chrislawson
Thanks for the info and the link. I was wondering how many Neanderthals have been sequenced to provide any sort of database.
I know that the recent work in sequencing ancient remains has had some surprising results, and that the sample sizes for some geographical areas are very small.
Glad to share those links. It’s really interesting stuff, although I feel like our understanding is only skimming the surface of our complex evolutionary history and expect a lot of hypotheses to be discarded in the near future.