Could Eve have been a female copy of Adam?

ChetSinger said:

Also, I've read that copying mistakes have been measured to occur from parent to child at a rate of around 50 per human generation.

As an aside, if a generation is 30 years and we accumulate about 50 mutations per generation, then I've accumulated more than 6,000 mutations since my ancestor of Abraham's time. Yikes.

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gluadys said:

All variation (other than a maximum of 4 newly-created alleles in Adam and Eve) goes back to mutations. The standing variation in a population (which may or may not be what Skywriter is referring to) exists because of an accumulation of past mutations.

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ChetSinger said:

Hello! I'm not sure we're speaking of the same thing. The 50 mutations I'm speaking of are not related to the natural genetic shuffling that occurs from parents to their children (which is why brothers are not identical unless they're twins). Instead, these are genuine mutations, verified as copying mistakes from one generation to the next.

By modern reckoning, our present generation has accumulated about 6,000 mutations since Abraham's generation. Most mutations appear to be neutral. Of the ones that aren't, the deleterious ones outnumber the beneficial ones.

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gluadys said:

Genetic changes = mutations.

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