Is there more discussion at your link or just the single dismissal post? Maybe I need to log in?
Ummmmm... You realize these religions split off from Judaism less than 2k years ago?
Just because it spread across half the world by the later military and commercial success of its practicioners doesnt mean the "distant history" aspect of its mythology has any more basis in reality than gods manipulating lightning, the divinity of cats or tree nymphs (or indeed the same religious tradition's emphasis on creation as a six day process). Especially since a couple birthing children and a flood are near-universally experienced concepts that don't really have that much in common with tribal migrations and non-flood near-extinction events many millenia earlier.
I can't divine exactly what the OP meant, but it's a pretty common argument amongst nonbelievers that ancient religious myths (especially the Flood, also present in a handful of non-abrahamic traditions) were somehow inspired by even older oral traditions of stuff that actually happened in their dim and distant past (as opposed to the flooding they experience on a regular basis). It appears I'm not the only person that perceived that was being implied.
Regardless, I don't think "genetic bottlenecks scientists believe exist in the human evolutionary tree" and "religious stories that may or may not be interpreted literally" has much conceptual overlap, either in terms of modern people's awareness of modern bottleneck theories or in terms of links between prehistoric events and mythology which became popular much later.
Just because you learnt it in a fairy tale doesn’t mean you didn’t understand a concept.
Judaism obviously claims its story is continuous from the beginning of creation, but the timeline in its own narrative suggests approximately 7000 BC. At first this was oral tradition, but estimates as for when it was written down range from 900 BC to about 450BC.
As far as Christians are concerned, the last Jewish books chronologically were Ezra and Nehemiah, written approximately 400 BC. After the period recorded in this book, the Jews were waiting for their Messiah to arrive.
Christianity per se didn't start until after Jesus' death around (around 32 AD), and the first books were written between about 40AD and 70AD. But obviously, Christianity didn't even start until many centuries after the Jewish tradition was recorded in written form, because it needed Jesus to have been born first.
The selection of which books make up the bible today was decided upon by the Council of Nicea in the late 4th century AD, and is mostly unchanged to this day, although some religious groups also include some other books, collectively called the Apochrypha, in their bibles. Some argue these aren't important, others argue they are, but whatever in the 4th century, the leaders of the church from all around the world met up several times to choose to selection of books they felt were most important for people to know. It was mostly limited because paper was expensive then, and they wanted the minimal set that contained everything considered essential to Christianity.
The Jews continued writing and considered some books important after that point, but essentially 400 BC was the last significant event even in their canon.
Islam is much later than this, and certainly much later than Christianity. As I said above, the bible in its current form was decided on in the 4th century AD and the prophet Muhammad wasn't born until the 6th century AD. Most people date Islam to 610, which is when Muhammad recorded his first revelation. You can even see Islamic teaching that references Christianity - initially positive, recognising Jesus as a prophet from God, and later more combative when Islam was largely ignored by Christians as being unnecessary.
I've read more cynical interpretations that Muhammad was hoping to ally with Christians to avoid persecution, and when they all largely ignored everything he was saying, then he decided they too were infidels who oppose the will of God, and later parts of the Quran are distinctly anti-Christian in contrast to the earlier parts.
Muhammad also re-framed old Jewish stories (accepted as true by both Jews and Christians) in a way that tried to discredit their traditions, but paint Islam more favourably. The most contentious of these is regarding Abraham and Isaac - in the Jewish tradition, he and his wife Sarah had been childless for many decades after God had promised him that his children would have many children and become many nations. Finally had a son, and God asked him to sacrifice his firstborn as a test of his faith in God to provide another son. When God saw that he would be willing to obey him and perform the sacrifice, God tells him to stop, reaffirmed his promise to bless all nations through his son, and provided a substitute animal for the sacrifice. This is all in Genesis 22. The Islamic tradition, on the other hand, re-frames this as Abraham going crazy for some reason, trying to kill his only son after decades of being childless, and God having to stop in to stop him from murdering the son he'd been longing for for decades.
So, far from divergent history long before any written Jewish history, it's the complete opposite - Jewish history largely ends in 400 BC still waiting its Messiah; Christianity claims to be about that Messiah and covers the period from about 3 BC to around 40 AD, and was largely finished being recorded around 70 AD; Islam claims to have yet more revelation recorded between around 610 AD and 650 AD. If it wasn't for the fact that the previous believers didn't agree with the new revelations each time, you could consider them to be linear and not divergent at all, rather continuing from where the previous tradition finished.
There is only one requirement. And one caveat. The requirement is that both individuals need to be free of genetic defects in their alleles, so that no matter how many generations down you go you never end up with two defective alleles in the same descendant. That is impossible in practice. Eventually you would get some diversity from random mutation and at that point you would be back to "normal" state of affairs.
The caveat is disease resistance. All of their descendants would have the same immune system. If one gets sick, they all do. Any infection will spread like wildfire, if it spreads. And nothing short of total quarantine would stop it.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the bottleneck population also wiped their bottoms with leaves from a tree that grows only in natural uranium ore, thereby artificially boosting their genetic diversity as well as putting pressure on them to reproduce frequently and often before they reach their radiologically reduced life expectancy of 25.
All of this in light of the very literal form of survivorship bias.
Try a few billion or trillion planets to get the conditions JUST right and there will probably be at least one getting it right. Inhabited by folks who wonder why it was their planet that had everything going for it.
That's basically what is meant with "anthropic principle" (as mentioned by parent).
Never liked the anthropic arguments.
Even back with Leibniz, arguing this is the 'best of all possible worlds' because it is the one we exist in that god provided. It's circular, or calls for some mysticism or parallel universes.
This seems like such a contradiction with Christians. They just do lot of hand-waving and ignore it.
Then went and read the Bible and what did I find, there were other people at the time of Adam and Eve. The Bible actually discusses the other humans that were living in other lands At The Same Time As Adam and Eve. Totally blown away.
So then, why do Christians today completely believe that God Created Adam And Even and they were the very first humans and thus Evolution is Wrong. How can you argue that Evolution is wrong, because of Adam and Eve, when right in the Bible it discusses the other groups of humans?
There's some followup tweets:
> I don't like to be harsh about a paper, but the fanfare around this one makes it necessary to respond.
> There are many ways to go wrong when inferring past events from genomic data; the datasets are large and noisy, and computational methods get complicated.
> Thus it's essential to demonstrate clearly that your results are not an artefact of data processing or methodology, or the consequence of overfitting to a particular aspect of the data. Simulations are a vital tool for this, and they need to show that your results are robust..
> to alternative scenarios that violate the assumptions of your model. They also need to show that the observed data are indeed consistent with the model you have inferred. Sadly, it's not clear that these requirements have been met in the paper published in Science.
I can hardly describe myself as a specialist of any of this domain, but I definitely already heard about this hypothesis.
Now median average citizen might not know about it, but that’s a very different statement.
It doesn't mean it's true, but it's more information than nothing.
For example, joshua stopping the sun for three days, which would have been in the evening (you’d stop the sun at sunset, not at noon)… so you can look a Chinese history where it was dark for three days, or aztec history where the sun was about to rise.
He does play fast and loose with his source material (based on the ones I’m familiar with) but I think the general idea is interesting…
So tweets are true, but what someone just spoke to me is not-true.
Better to take stance that all communication is fallible and has noise.
Plato 'wrote' about 'Atlantis'. Written means true?
A lot of Roman Historians, like Livy, etc... Embellished or were Propaganda, or even pumped up travel guides.
Where some Oral Traditions put a great deal of emphasis on memorization and can be just as good at passing information, even if the information is also wrong.
They both have fallibilities. The Telephone effect exists in Oral. But in Written, it is wildly miss-interpreted.
But, if across continents, cultures, methods of communication, there are flood myths everywhere. It is ok to wonder if they are based on some common occurrence. Can we put money on an exact date and cause based on some myth? Maybe not, but we can't ignore them either.