----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Former student of Pyrrho of Elis
Date: Feb 23, 2006 3:16 AM

so you have all the answers eh?

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: RATIONAL RESPONSE SQUAD
Date: Feb 23, 2006 12:23 AM

Heck no!

----------------- Message back to the squad-----------------
From: Former student of Pyrrho of Elis
Date: Feb 23, 2006 3:16 AM

I don't. Atheists must lack belief in god, not make
an affirmative guarantee that no god can exist, however some atheists do say that. I will however tell you that there is no Christian God.

You want to go over evolution and then discuss abiogenesis? Get your terms straight. Spontaneous generation has NOTHING to do with evolution.

Yes, I knew that. Did you know that this is proof of evolution?

"The limited genetic variability of human mtDNA has been explained in terms of a recent common genetic ancestry, thus implying that all modern-population mtDNAs originated from a single woman who lived in Africa ~0.2 Mya. (200,000 YEARS AGO) This divergence time is based on both the estimation of the rate of mtDNA change and its calibration date. Because different estimates of the rate of mtDNA evolution can completely change the scenario of the origin of modem man, we have reanalyzed the available mitochondrial sequence data by using an improved version of the statistical model, the ?Markov clock, " devised in our laboratory.

Our analysis supports the African origin of modem man, but we found that the ancestral female from which all extant human mtDNAs originated lived in a time span of 0.3-0.8 Mya. Pushing back the date of the deepest root of the humans implies that the earliest divergence would have been in the Homo erectus population."

mya = Millions of years ago.

Information taken from here.

One can tell how distantly someone is related to another by noting how many changes have accumlated. You will get a different common ancestor, depending on how far back you choose to go, but all humans can trace their MtDNA to one woman, who probably lived in Africa ("Eve hypothesis". It does NOT mean that she was the only woman alive at the time, it is just she is the one that we can trace our ancestry back to. Other women of her time may not have had kids. Some may have died before they could reproduce. Some of their daughters or granddaughters may have had sons etc. It is sort of the kind of thing that happens with last names in small villages where everyone becomes a "Smith" over time.

She was also not necessarily out LAST common ancestor. Richard Dawkins makes a beautiful argument in his book "A River Out of Eden" that our LCA (last common ancestor) was probably an "adam" not an "eve". She is the last ancestor on our female-only line (mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc). Think about if you wanna trace back your lineage, lets say 4 generations, to a single female ancestor, think of how many ways it is possible for the lineage to go back. It could be through your mother, grandfather, greatgrandma, gg-grandma or mother, grandma, ggrandfather, or father, grandmother, ggrandmother and many more possiblities. It gets worse than that the further back you go. MtDNA "Eve" is only one lineage on your very extensively branching ancestoral tree. The most we can say about her is that she is the common ancestor of our (modern human) Mitochondria.