Dennis Venema, associate professor of biology at Trinity Western University, and Scot McKnight, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, have written a book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science , that addresses the question of human origins. Venema defends the standard scientific narrative on neo-Darwinism and human origins, while McKnight attempts to reconcile Christian theology with the science. Because the book argues that science disproves the existence of a historical A
One of the claims Venema makes in his book is that the effective population size of our last common ancestor with chimps has never been fewer than 10,000. In fact, he equates the certainty of that statement with our certainty about heliocentrism. That is an extreme claim that needs justification. Assuming no bottlenecks, this would exclude the possibility of an original human pair as the progenitors of the human race.
Effective population size is very hard to determine. In fact, in some situations the effective population size cannot be determined (On the Meaning and Existence of an Effective Population Size P. Sjödin, I. Kaj, S. Krone, M. Lascoux and M. Nordborg (2005) Genetics 169: 1061–1070). So any estimates concerning effective population size should be taken a bit skeptically.
Signature in the Cell | By Stephen C. Meyer