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Okay. That's a valid hypothesis. Genetic information from only 1280 identified alive during this particular time seems evidentiary of a low population during a
by daveguy 3y ago
Okay. That's a valid hypothesis. Genetic information from only 1280 identified alive during this particular time seems evidentiary of a low population during a specific time more than something that "just happened". For instance, if the 8 billion alive today only propagated through 1280 alive sometime in the future you would expect a near extinction event to be the cause (we know near extinction and extinction aren't particularly rare). Is there evidence that it just happened to be 1280 from a thriving population of hundreds of thousands or millions?
Edit: otherwise I'm not sure you can claim the hypothesis that a near extinction bottleneck is somehow more "misleading" than it was something that "just happened" to appear as a common event among species. Note -- near extinction does not have to be cataclysmic.
- 22c 3y agoPerhaps it would help to give an overly simplistic scenario. If you have 12,800 critters all alive at one point in time, they each spread evenly to 10 different regions and then each 10x their population sizes before 9/10 of those regions experienced some cataclysmic event which wiped ALL of that group out. At no point did you have less than 12,800 critters alive, however all critters alive now show as descending from only 1280 critters.
- totetsu 3y agoIf 9/10ths of your population is living in doomed regions isn’t that a state of near-extinction?
- 22c 3y agoThe overly contrived/simplistic scenario would have catastrophic events happening to 9/10 populations certainly seems doomsday-ish but it's just meant to illustrate how overall a thriving species can still end up originating from only small subset.