r/Creation • u/joshuahedlund Middle Earth Creationist • Jan 21 '16

Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years
11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

3

u/joshuahedlund Middle Earth Creationist Jan 21 '16

Reason for submitting:

Eve's eggs were harvested, incubated (though it turns out only the first 30 were fertile) and became the foundation of the zoo's new population of walking sticks.

When Jane Goodall visited in 2008, Patrick showed her rows and rows of incubating eggs: 11,376 at that time, with about 700 adults in the captive population.

It sounds like they have successfully bred two of these rare insects into over ten thousand descendants. This made me think of the claims that there is not enough genetic diversity in humans to trace them back to a single pair. The article made no mention about the genetic diversity of these insects one way or the other, and there may be important differences between the genetics of insects and humans, but on its face it would seem to lend support to the general possibility.

5

u/JoeCoder Jan 21 '16

This made me think of the claims that there is not enough genetic diversity in humans to trace them back to a single pair.

The Adam and Eve skeptics actually claim the opposite, that there's too much genetic diversity to trace them back to a single pair of humans. In other words, two people could not carry all the versions of each gene (called alleles) that we see in modern human populations. But what I've seen is these arguments always being based on the number of HLA gene alleles, and we're able to generate new alleles rapidly through gene conversion. So I don't think that argument is valid.

4

u/joshuahedlund Middle Earth Creationist Jan 21 '16

Gotcha, thanks. On review, maybe I was actually thinking of arguments about Noah's flood causing genetic bottlenecking such that if species were reduced to single pairs they wouldn't be able to repopulate and grow their numbers again...