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Bad assumptions. On what basis do you assume all but one line died off? Why is that a logical assumption? Isn't it just as likely that any/all of the orignal women would have their line increase? Also, you chose small numbers of children for each woman. Women had more children way back when which increased the chances of having a female child. While some would not, most would. This would keep most of the original lines going.
Mitochondria DNA is passed only from a woman to her daughters. If a woman has only sons, then her line of mtDNA is lost.
Passed down from mother to offspring, "Eve's" mitochondrial DNA is now found in all living humans. Every mtDNA in every living person is derived from hers. Mitochondrial Eve is believed to have lived about 170,000 years ago, or roughly 8,000 generations ago. This places her shortly after the speciation of homo sapiens, and long before the migration out of Africa.
The questions you ask aren't that hard to answer...what is difficult is getting you to listen to the answers.
I've wasted my time answering the kdbrich question-of-the-week. My aim now is to encourage others not to feed the troll until:
1. The troll goes away.
2. The troll wants to enter into some sort of quasi-intelligent discussion about the topic they started (i.e. NOT act like a troll).
Don't want to discuss? Then go back to the Christianity forum and join in on all of those "What does this bible verse mean?" threads.
Or do you save all of your trollish posts for us?
cuz that's easier to just call names and ignore me?
Just give me an answer to post #47 above. I'm honestly asking for an answer here...if that's your definition of a troll--someone that you can't answer, then I'm sorry.
Can you explain to me how in that graph if the mutation started in another branch, it then made it over to the line from "mitochondrial Eve"? I don't see it.
That's all I'm asking for. I'm trying to understand this.
What mutation are you talking about? Her graph explains how mtDNA is passed, or not passed down to future generations. Mitochondria is not a mutation, but is an essential part of everyone.
Mitochondria are structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use. Although most DNA is packaged in chromosomes within the nucleus, mitochondria also have a small amount of their own DNA.
What mutation are you talking about? Her graph explains how mtDNA is passed, or not passed down to future generations. Mitochondria is not a mutation, but is an essential part of everyone.
Mitochondria are structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use. Although most DNA is packaged in chromosomes within the nucleus, mitochondria also have a small amount of their own DNA.
On the graph, the 4th from the right, we see a mutation in the top row.
How does that mutation get into the general population?
I still don't think you quite understand what I'm getting at. Basically with each mutation, the species had to "start over", in effect. The line had to die--except for the ones from the parent with the mutation.
A successful mutation doesn't mean that the previous line died out. You don't seem like you understand evolution, mutation, speciation, et cetera at all!?
Can you explain to me how in that graph if the mutation started in another branch, it then made it over to the line from "mitochondrial Eve"? I don't see it.
One of the guys with the mutation (on the right) boinked a woman in the line of the mitochondrial Eve's line. That is how humans exchange DNA, you know.
One of the guys with the mutation (on the right) boinked a woman in the line of the mitochondrial Eve's line. That is how humans exchange DNA, you know.
Try harder.
exactly. The graph is showing offspring from those woman, it does not show who those women had sex with to produce those offspring. Those mutations showed up either as spontaneously and just happened to be the same mutation carried by other members or was "bred into" the offspring by having sex with a male who was a carrier for that mutation.
cuz that's easier to just call names and ignore me?
Just give me an answer to post #47 above. I'm honestly asking for an answer here...if that's your definition of a troll--someone that you can't answer, then I'm sorry.
Oh come off of it. As I said, you have asked variations of this question before and its been answered. Either you are pretending to be dense in order to stir the pot (my guess) or you lack the fundamental understanding of genetics and biology. If its the latter, then don't blame the science for your lack of understanding. Just because you don't understand doesn't make the science incorrect.
On the graph, the 4th from the right, we see a mutation in the top row.
How does that mutation get into the general population?
Sorry kdbrich...I must be blind or over tired...I completely missed her coloured mutation dots. There is must be a lot of cross boinking going on in that graph, but I'm too tired to wrap my brain around it right now....I'm going back to bed...
Can you explain to me how in that graph if the mutation started in another branch, it then made it over to the line from "mitochondrial Eve"? I don't see it.
That's all I'm asking for. I'm trying to understand this.
Through mating with males from another branch. I couldn't make it clearer without making the graph a lot uglier (or spending twice as much time), but here goes:
There are other possible combinations, some less incestuous than others, but you get the idea. I've also assumed that a mutation will always be transmitted to all children, but real genetics are more complicated. In real life, the spreading of the mutation would be a lot slower. If the mutation is absolutely neutral, it could spread through the entire population, or disappear, or anything in between (see Genetic drift).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler
Whether Eve was a creation or evolved, it's likely there was an Eve. What's debatable is whether or not there was an Adam.
According to mathematics at least, there was. The reasoning that demonstrates the existence of a mitochondrial Eve works just as well for an Adam (called the "Y-chromosomal Adam", apparently). Though the mitochondrial Eve and the Y-chromosomal Adam may have lived in completely different times (100 000 years apart, according to Wikipedia).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler
Bad assumptions. On what basis do you assume all but one line died off? Why is that a logical assumption? Isn't it just as likely that any/all of the orignal women would have their line increase? Also, you chose small numbers of children for each woman. Women had more children way back when which increased the chances of having a female child. While some would not, most would. This would keep most of the original lines going.
Of course, my graph was overly simplified. The group should be a lot larger, there should be a lot more children (but also a lot more women dying without children), and it'd take much longer than 4 generations to erase all but one line. It has to happen eventually, but it may take a very long time (200 000 years for us, as far as we know).
You may have missed the mathematical proof I quoted earlier, I'll repost it:
Quote:
Consider all the humans alive today on Earth. Put them into a set S.
Next, consider the set of all those women who were the mothers of the people in the set S. Call this set S'. A few observations about this new set S'. It consists of only women (while set S consists of both men and women)---this is because we chose to follow only the mother-of relationship in going from set S to set S'. Also note that not every member of set S' needs to be in set S---set S consists of all people living today, while some of the mothers of living people could have died, they would be in set S' but not in set S. Third, the size of set S' is never larger than the size of set S. Why? This is because of the simple fact that each of us has only one mother. It is however overwhelmingly more likely that the size of set S' is much smaller than that of set S---this is because each woman usually has more than one child.
Repeat the process of following the mother-of relationship with set S' to generate a new set S''. This set will consist of only women, and will be no larger (and very likely smaller) than set S'.
Continue this process. There will come a point when the set will consist of smaller and smaller number of women, until we finally come to a single woman who is related to all members in our original set via the transitive-closure of the mother-of relation. There is nothing special about her. Had we chosen to follow the father-of relation, we would have hit the Y-chromosome Adam (more on him later). Had we chosen to follow combinations of mother-of and father-of relations, we would have hit some other of our common ancestors. The only reason why the mother-of relationship seems special is because we can track it using the evidence of mitochondrial DNA.
Thus there must exist a single woman whose is the matrilineal most-recent common ancestor of every in set S.
A few others points to keep in mind. One might say that if each woman has only a single daughter (and however many sons), the size of the sets will be the same as we extrapolate backwards. But also note that this backwards mathematical extrapolation is an extrapolation into the past. This process cannot be continued indefinitely because the age of the Earth, life on Earth, and the human species is finite (this argument comes from Dawkins).
Also important to keep in mind is that while the final set S'* has only one member (the Mitochondrial Eve), she was by no means the only living woman on Earth during her lifetime. Many other women lived with her, but they either did not leave descendents or did not leave descendents via the matrilineal line, who are still alive today.
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