Scientist throw around words and phrases that are sometimes hard to understand. This is not one of them. Genetic drift is an easy concept. Dr Rob brings up the example drift among of human mitochondria, perhaps the most extreme form anyone has ever seen. And, since natural selection is generally weak, genetic drift overwhelms selection at critical junctures during development. This has profound implications for the creation-evolution debate, but first, the explanation…
Source paper under discussion: Árnadóttir et al. 2024, The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees, Cell 187(15):3904-3910.
Fig 1: Mutant mitochondrial frequencies in child (y) vs mother (x), from the supporting data of the paper above.
Fig 2: Histogram of frequency changes from mother to child, same source as above.
Fig 3: Histogram data for each frequency bin in the mother (legend) vs child (x). Same source as above.
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Hi Doctor. Please correct me if Im wrong on this, but is the implications of this findings. Means evolutionist cannot use selection to slow down mutation rate in mtdna? Since the bottleneck is so extreme of only about 3 copies being passed on. Which means its completly random per generation.
And since Most new mtDNA mutations occur at low heteroplasmy in the mother (usually 1–5%). That means through history in the mtdna, lineages never accumulated the same mutations in the same lineage for selection to slowly remove them.
Is all this correct? please correct me on anything, im very interested in this as I am a creationist myself.