[Avodah] Mitochondrial DNA and the Mabul

[T613K at aol.com]

From: Arie Folger _afolger at aishdas.org_ (mailto:afolger at aishdas.org) 


>>Brian Sykes, the geneticist who reportedly developed this  kind of genetic
analysis, has studied the mitochondrial DNA of contemporary  people. By
correlating know rates of mutations to the differences  between
populations, one can make a fairly solid educated guess as to  how
related different people are. As mitochondrial DNA is inherited  from
the mother only (similar analyses with Y chromosome  sequencing
confirms his findings on the paternal side), it implies that one  can
guess when people had their last common great great n^x  grandmother.

Over time, some women have no kids, or only sons, and thus  their
mitochondrial DNA line becomes extinct. Over hundreds of  generations,
that extinguishes an awful lot of lines, and with his analysis,  he
finds "seven mothers" of Europeans, hence the title of his book,  the
Seven Daughters of Eve. The differences between those individuals  are
fairly large, and hence it is useful to consider those women  genetic
foremothers....


...I was toying with the idea that the  ladies of family Noach were each
very genetically diverse from the other, so  that mitochondrial
diversity can be attributed to that, a Divine act of  social
engineering, but AFAIU, this would be insufficient to account for  the
full gamit of mitochondrial diversity, and doesn't  explain
y-chromosome diversity at all.

I am hoping the responses will  not only be fancy new ways of
understanding our trusted sources, but rather  that scientists among
the chevre will point out where the above picture is  wrong, or right....<<




>>>>>
 
Like RAF, I am very interested in seeing what scientists have to say  about 
this, but there are at least two possibilities that have been  suggested.  
To summarize them:
 
[a] Chazal did not hesitate to suggest exceptions that are not even hinted  
at in the written Torah -- e.g., that not the whole world was covered by 
water  (E'Y was exempted) or that not everyone in the world died (Og 
survived).   So it's possible that the mabul did not cover the whole world and did 
not kill  every human being in the world.
 
[b] Another possibility is that just as the world could have been made to  
look old at the time of Creation, so the post-mabul world could have been 
made  to look much older than it was.  Just as newly created trees could have  
been created with many rings, new-born girls could have been born with more 
 diverse mitochondria than would happen today.
 
 
I have long wondered about a somewhat related question:  how could the  
teiva possibly have held every species in the world?  And one speculative  
answer I thought of was that it held one feline, one canine, etc, each with an  
inbuilt genetic diversity that allowed the feline to quickly branch off 
(after  the Flood) into house cats, lions, tigers, leopards and so on.  The one  
canine quickly developed descendant branches of domestic dogs, wolves and  
coyotes.  There was just one butterfly pair, from which all moths and  
butterflies descended.  This would still have required evolution to proceed  at a 
much faster clip than science would recognize, but it doesn't defy the laws 
 of physics -- how so many species could all have fit into the small space  
of the ark.
 

--Toby  Katz
GCT
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