"In the approximately 6,000 years since creation,
humans have gone through roughly 250 generations.
In each fertile female the embryonic sex cells undergo about 23 cell generations to produce approximately 7 million primary eggs in the developing ovary,
but this number is then selected back to about 1–2 million in the mature ovaries.
No more eggs are produced during the female’s lifetime.
Males, on the other hand,
continue to produce new sperm throughout life so they continue to accumulate mutations with age.
In the Hutterite family study mentioned above, 85% of SNPs came from fathers and only 15% from mothers.
Female DNA plays a foundational role in maintaining the viability of life in the long term because it is the egg-cell, with its high-fidelity maternal DNA, that becomes the first cell of the offspring.
Males only contribute chromosomes.
When Adam named his wife Eve, “because she would become the mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20), he spoke a biological truth that would only become known to science 6,000 years later. The cells of all our bodies are the lineal descendants of the cells of Eve’s body, but not of Adam’s.
Our current human population has therefore gone through about 23 × 250 = 5,750 germ-cell generations in the maternal line since creation. According to the findings of The 1000 Genomes Project we have each accumulated on average about 3.6 million SNPs in that time.
Some of these would have been built into our original parents (Adam and Eve) to provide a pool of potentially useful variation for later generations to draw on.
A recent example is the discovery that a single nucleotide change in ethnic Tibetans (compared with Han Chinese) has allowed them to cope with the chronically low oxygen levels that occur on the high Tibetan plateau. In the recent study of protein coding genes mentioned above, the 86% of deleterious SNPs that accumulated in the last 200 generations would amount to approximately 3 million if applied to this average genome figure (3.6 million x 0.86 = 3 million). Several ancient human genomes have been sequenced and the one with the fewest SNPs (i.e. our closest estimate of the built-in variation) at about 450,000 belonged to a Paleo-Eskimo. It seems reasonable therefore to assume that something like 3 million of our SNPs have accumulated since creation. With our 3-billion-nucleotide genomes carrying 3 million SNPs then one measure of the current state of our genomic health is that we each carry approximately 1 error per thousand nucleotides." CMI
* "Paleo-Eskimo (also pre-Thule or pre-Inuit) were the peoples who inhabited the Arctic region
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| Some of Mother Eve's offspring, dispersing far from Babel |
