"Like in the Creation story, there are only a few verses in the Flood
account that help us with our model.
---About 10 generations after Creation, a severe, short
bottleneck occurred in the human population. From untold numbers of
people, the entire world population was reduced to eight souls with only
three reproducing couples.
“So Noah, with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, went into the ark because of the waters of the flood.” Gen 7:7
“Now
the sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth…
These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was
populated.” Gen 9:18–19
We can draw many important deductions from these statements.
Q: For instance, based on Genesis 7 and 9, how many Y chromosomes were on the Ark? A: The answer: one.
Yes, there were four men, but Noah gave his Y chromosome to each of his
sons. Unless there was a mutation (entirely possible), each of the sons
carried the exact same Y chromosome.
*We do not know how much mutation
occurred prior to the flood. With the long life spans of the
antediluvian patriarchs, it may be reasonable to assume little mutation
had taken place, but all of Creation, including the human genome, had
been cursed, so it may not be wise to conclude that there was no
mutation prior to the Flood. The amount of mutation may be a moot
point, however, for, if it occurred, the Flood should have wiped out
most traces of it (all of it in the case of the Y chromosome).
Q: How many mitochondrial DNA lineages were on the Ark?
A: The answer: three.
Yes, there were four women, but the Bible does not record Noah’s wife
as having any children after the Flood (in this case, girl children).
And notice the claim in Gen 9:19,
“These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was
populated.” This is a strong indication that Noah’s wife did not
contribute anything else to the world’s population.
With no prohibition
against sibling marriage, yet,
one or more of the daughters-in-law may have been her daughter, but
this does not change the fact that, at first glance, we expect a maximum
of three mitochondrial lineages in the current world population. There
is a chance that there will be less, if there was very little mutation
before the Flood or if several of the daughters-in-law were closely
related. At most, we do not expect more than four.
Q: How many X chromosome lineages were on the Ark?
A: That depends. If you count it all up, you get eight.
If, by chance, Noah’s wife passed on the same X chromosome to each of
her three sons (25% probability), then there were seven. If Noah had a
daughter after the Flood (not expected, but possible), there could be as
many as nine X chromosome lineages. Either way, this is a considerable
amount of genetic material.
And since X chromosomes recombine (in
females), we are potentially looking at a huge amount of genetic
diversity within the X chromosomes of the world.
Q: Does this fit the evidence?
A: Absolutely!
---It turns out that Y
chromosomes are similar worldwide. According to the evolutionists, no
“ancient” (i.e., highly mutated or highly divergent) Y chromosomes have
been found.
This serves as a bit of a puzzle to the evolutionist, and they have had
to resort to calling for a higher “reproductive variance” among men
than women, high rates of “gene conversion” in the Y chromosome, or
perhaps a “selective sweep” that wiped out the other male lines.
*As it turns out, there are three main
mitochondrial DNA lineages
found across the world. The evolutionists
have labeled these lines “M”, “N”, and “R”, so we’ll refer to them by
the same names. They would not say these came off the Ark. They claim
they were derived from older lines found in Africa, but this is based on
a suite of assumptions It also turns out that M, N, and R differ by only a few mutations. This
gives us some indication of the amount of mutation that occurred in the
generations prior to the Flood.
Let’s assume ten female generations from Eve to the ladies on the
Ark. M and N are separated by about 8 mutations (a small fraction of the
16,500 letters in the mitochondrial genome). R is only 1 mutation away
from N. This is an indication of the mutational load that occurred
before the Flood. Given the assumption that mutations occur at equal
rates in all lines, about four mutations separate M and N each from Eve
(maybe four mutations in each line in ten generations). But what about
R? It is very similar to N.
Q: Were N and R sisters, or perhaps more
closely related to each other than they were to M?
---We’ll never know, but
it sure is fascinating to think about.
One more line of evidence crops up in the amount of genetic
diversity that has been found within people worldwide.
*Essentially, much
less has been found than most (i.e., evolutionists!) predicted.
The
general lack of diversity among people is the reason the Out of Africa
model has humanity going through a disastrous, near-extinction
bottleneck with only about 10,000 (and perhaps as few as 1,000)
people surviving.
-*-However, the reason for this lack of diversity is
twofold.
First, the human race started out with only two people.
Second,
the human race is not that old and has not accumulated a lot of
mutations, despite the high mutation rate.
Third, there actually was a bottleneck event, Noah’s Flood!""
CMI
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