Dr. Robert Carter
Today, we’re talking about Y-chromosome molecular clocks, or rather, the lack of one.
Before you can come up with a date for a Y-chromosome Adam or mitochondrial Eve, you need to know how fast mutations occur. Then, you can look at all the people in the world and see how far apart they are. The next question is: how long does it take to build up all those mutations?
Well, if you knew the rate of mutation you could easily extrapolate backwards in time to put a date on Y-chromosome Adam, the father of all living people, or mitochondrial Eve, the mother of all living people.
Now, of course, the evolutionary Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochromal Eve are not the creationist Adam and Eve. The evolutionary version is basically a mathematical extrapolation. Once they realize there’s only one Y-chromosome ancestor and one mitochondrial ancestor of all the people in the world they invoked a population bottleneck where the other lineages or actually all the other lineages were lost except one.
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