Re: Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor

On Jan 31, 4:00 pm, "Greg G." <ggw...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 31, 1:14 pm, Padmar Mushkin <x...@xxx> wrote:



On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:42:59 -0800, John Harshman

<jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Padmar Mushkin wrote:
On 31 Jan 2008 04:58:19 -0800, TomS <TomS_mem...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor
"ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2008) -- New research shows that
people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor.
A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked
down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years
ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed
humans alive on the planet today."

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130170343.htm>

-or-

<http://snipurl.com/1ynxh>

Cue Harshman with his science journalism rant.

Actually, this seems remarkably restrained. No claims that "Darwin was
wrong" or "this revolutionizes biology". Just a simple and fairly
obvious finding. What's the problem?

I guess I could be being overly pedantic, but "single common
ancestor" is a weak description. Everybody has a common ancestor; in
fact many common ancestors.

"Single common ancestor" is redundant in this usage. Any single
ancestor to the group specified is a common ancestor to them all.

Everybody alive today is probably descended from that same ancestor,
too. It is claimed that any person who lived more than 7000 years ago
and has at least one descendant alive today is an ancestor to
everybody alive today. I don't see how Australian aborigines fit into
that and I'm a little skeptical whether Native Americans fit into
that. Given that we are descended an average of 5 million times from
everyone who lived 2000 years ago and those people were descended
about 20 million times from the people who lived 2000 years before
them with the shuffling done by the trade routes of the Phoenicians,
Greeks, and Romans in between, I expect we all have the same
ancestors. It's all a matter of how many times they are our ancestors.

How ape-like looking would that ancestor be?

.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Questions about a universal common ancestor
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    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Questions about a universal common ancestor
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    (talk.origins)