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Population Bottleneck

sfs

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What evidence? A time machine, a crystal ball, or a scrying bowl?
Genetics. See my other post.

I know for a fact he says the exact opposite of you.

Richard Dawkins claims in the Ancestors Tale that a population bottleneck came about as a result of the Toba supervolcano.
So he's wrong. Big deal. (Or were you actually under the impression that scientists view Dawkins as some kind of authority figure?)

You claim to know more about so-called "evolutionary history" than Richard Dawkins?
Yes, that's what I said, or rather, I said that I know more about the history of the human population size than he does. Dawkins is not a geneticist, has not done research on human genetics, is not a population geneticist of any sort, and has done no work on demographic inference. Why would anyone consider him an expert on the subject?
 
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Frumious Bandersnatch

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Genetics. See my other post.

So he's wrong. Big deal. (Or were you actually under the impression that scientists view Dawkins as some kind of authority figure?)

Yes, that's what I said, or rather, I said that I know more about the history of the human population size than he does. Dawkins is not a geneticist, has not done research on human genetics, is not a population geneticist of any sort, and has done no work on demographic inference. Why would anyone consider him an expert on the subject?
Further, Dawkins published this speculation in 2004 and the genetic data you quote would not have been available to him. There is also archeological data indicating a human population in India both below and above Toba ash layers. It is likely there were some severe local constrictions in populations outside Africa from this catastrophic event and there were probably hard times all over the world for at least 10 - 20 years but I agree the hypothesis that the human population crashed to 10,000 or less seems to be incorrect based on the latest genetic analysis.
 
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sfs

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Further, Dawkins published this speculation in 2004 and the genetic data you quote would not have been available to him. There is also archeological data indicating a human population in India both below and above Toba ash layers. It is likely there were some severe local constrictions in populations outside Africa from this catastrophic event and there were probably hard times all over the world for at least 10 - 20 years but I agree the hypothesis that the human population crashed to 10,000 or less seems to be incorrect based on the latest genetic analysis.
Good point -- I hadn't bothered to check the date on Dawkins' book.
 
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The4thrider

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Sure, or at least point you to the evidence.

The evidence is genetic. Changes in population size affect the frequency spectrum of genetic variation in that population in characteristic ways. Let's stick with variants that have only two alleles (e.g. single-nucleotide polymorphisms). If a population stays the same size for a long period of time, the distribution of allele frequencies is heavily weighted toward lower frequencies; specifically, the probability that a derived allele has frequency f is proportional to 1/f (or 1/(f(1-f)) if you don't know which is the derived and which is the ancestral allele).

A population that has expanded recently will have more low frequency variants than the constant-sized population, because the larger population can hold more variants, but the new variants haven't had time to drift to high frequency yet. (Note: "recently" here means any time in the last couple of hundred thousand years for humans.) A population that has been through a bottleneck, on the other hand, will show a deficit of low-frequency variants, since low frequency alleles often drift either to loss or to higher frequency during the bottleneck.

Non-African human populations show clear evidence for multiple bottlenecks. These include a bottleneck shared among all non-Africans, usually taken to reflect a small population migrating out of Africa, although there's nothing that says it couldn't include a contribution from Toba, since that's around the right time. It also includes additional modest bottlenecking in European population history, somewhat more in East Asia, and much more in native American populations.

African variation, on the other hand, shows modest evidence for a population expansion something more than 100,000 years, and no sign of a bottleneck around 70,000 years ago, or at any other time. For example, the first study to make a serious effort to fit human demographic models to variation data was published in 2005 (Genome Research 2005 Nov;15(11):1576-83.) It found bottlenecks in the history of European populations that amounted to an inbreeding coefficient of around 0.25, while for the African population studied the inbreeding coefficient was effectively zero (best estimate = 0.008). So the pattern really was inconsistent with there having been a population bottleneck in western Africa.

The next paper to do this kind of inference, by Alon Keinan and colleagues (Nat Genet. 2007 Oct;39(10):1251-5), found the same thing: clear evidence for expansion within the ancestral African population (by a factor of 1.8x, if I remember correctly), and no evidence for a bottleneck in the history of that population. Subsequent papers, using markedly better data sets as time has gone by, have been consistent in this regard. These include papers by Rasmus Nielsen, Carlos Bustamante and his group, and I think Gabor Marth. Probably others that I can't recall, too.

This is not to say that Toba could not have had any effect at all on the human population as a whole, but whatever effect it had was pretty small, and not a major determinant of our patterns of genetic variation.
Researching further..
 
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USincognito

a post by Alan Smithee
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Maxwell511

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There is a trick you learn in physics to make sure your equations make sense. It is basically replacing your numbers with their units and making sure they match.

This is his equation in units:

(unit of population)*(unit of genetic diversity)*(unit of genetic diversity)/(years squared)=(unit of population)

This requires that

(unit of genetic diversity squared)=(years squared)

The units on the right hand side have no temporal components and therefore their product cannot equal (years squared) therefore the equation is nonsensical gibberish.

That is before we get into his assumptions.

This:
So, the evolutionary rate for humans is about .01 or 1% a year. ( I think is is actually less, but its whatever.) That means that every year, 1% of the worlds population diversifies...
This goes against billions experiments on the issue. What this says that if a mother has three daughters, from the same father at distinct times, that the it is 99% likely that two of the daughters will share the exact same DNA. Same deal for sons.

I'm Irish Catholic so I can say I have observed this many a time and it does not occur. Ever.
 
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lucaspa

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After debating with a YEC he has provided me with this equation that has me kind of stumped. He says this is a clear example showing that the human population bottlenecked around 6000 - 10000 years ago reducing the ENTIRE population to below a 1000. Now, I know this is a load of rubbish but do not possess the calculus skills to beat him at his own game.

1. There never was a time when there was no variation between humans. There was always a population, never just a single human.
2. Population increase has not been linear. Up until recently, human population was flat.
3. The variation per generation is too large by a factor of 1,000.

There was a genetic bottleneck in the past. Human genetic variation is very low compared to most species. If you read this paper and follow it to the original article you will get a better equation:
7. A Gibbons, Studying humans -- and their cousins and parasites. Science 292:627-629, April 27, 2001. This calculates the bottleneck at 200,000 years ago.
 
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