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<DIV><FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2
face=Arial>From: Arie Folger <A
href="mailto:afolger@aishdas.org">afolger@aishdas.org</A><BR></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2
face=Arial>>>Brian Sykes, the geneticist who reportedly developed this
kind of genetic<BR>analysis, has studied the mitochondrial DNA of contemporary
people. By<BR>correlating know rates of mutations to the differences
between<BR>populations, one can make a fairly solid educated guess as to
how<BR>related different people are. As mitochondrial DNA is inherited
from<BR>the mother only (similar analyses with Y chromosome
sequencing<BR>confirms his findings on the paternal side), it implies that one
can<BR>guess when people had their last common great great n^x
grandmother.<BR><BR>Over time, some women have no kids, or only sons, and thus
their<BR>mitochondrial DNA line becomes extinct. Over hundreds of
generations,<BR>that extinguishes an awful lot of lines, and with his analysis,
he<BR>finds "seven mothers" of Europeans, hence the title of his book,
the<BR>Seven Daughters of Eve. The differences between those individuals
are<BR>fairly large, and hence it is useful to consider those women
genetic<BR>foremothers....<BR><BR><BR>...I was toying with the idea that the
ladies of family Noach were each<BR>very genetically diverse from the other, so
that mitochondrial<BR>diversity can be attributed to that, a Divine act of
social<BR>engineering, but AFAIU, this would be insufficient to account for
the<BR>full gamit of mitochondrial diversity, and doesn't
explain<BR>y-chromosome diversity at all.<BR><BR>I am hoping the responses will
not only be fancy new ways of<BR>understanding our trusted sources, but rather
that scientists among<BR>the chevre will point out where the above picture is
wrong, or right....<<<BR></DIV></FONT></FONT>
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<DIV>>>>>></DIV>
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<DIV>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:</DIV>
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<DIV>[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.</DIV>
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<DIV>[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.</DIV>
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<DIV>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.</DIV>
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<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff></FONT><BR><FONT color=#0000ff><STRONG>--Toby
Katz<BR></STRONG></FONT><FONT lang=0 size=2 face=Arial FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10"><FONT color=#0000ff><STRONG>
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