The Hidden Clock of Humanity: A pedigree-based coalescence and fixation analysis of the human mitochondrial control region

Donny Budinsky; Matt Nailor

doi:10.67690/6xymfd05

The Hidden Clock of Humanity

A pedigree-based coalescence and fixation analysis of the human mitochondrial control region

Authors

D. Budinsky

Author
M. Nailor

Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67690/6xymfd05

Abstract

We test whether the pedigree, or germline, substitution rate of the human mitochondrial control region is compatible with a recent origin of humanity. Pooling the deeper-rooted, HVR-compatible pedigree studies used in our principal high-rate subset; Moreau et al. (2009), Madrigal et al. (2012), Howell et al. (1996), and Santos et al. (2005), yields an exact unweighted harmonic mean of one substitution every 19.947 generations per lineage. We deliberately describe this as a high-end mean: it represents the faster portion of the observed pedigree-rate distribution, but it is neither the single fastest reported rate nor an average of the entire literature. Projected across the candidate biblical interval of approximately 225 to 380 generations, this pooled rate predicts roughly 22.6 to 38.1 pairwise substitutions between two descendant lineages. Both of the deepest empirical comparisons considered here fall within that range. The African American maximum of 32 differences lies comfortably inside the predicted interval, while the all-database maximum of 36 differences, the single deepest pair among the eight regional databases examined, also remains within the upper end of the pedigree-rate expectation. Thus, at the pooled high-end pedigree rate used in the principal analysis, neither the representative 32-difference comparison nor the maximum 36-difference comparison requires a coalescence age older than the upper chronological limit being tested. At the population-average level, an African American mean pairwise diversity of 14.1 is generated within 6,000 years by a rate of approximately one substitution every 42.6 generations and within 7,600 years by approximately one substitution every 53.9 generations. Both values have close analogues in published pedigree work. We set these genetic results beside further lines of evidence developed elsewhere in the study: the recent origin of most human protein-coding and deleterious variation and the maximum-likelihood onset of accelerated population growth (Tennessen et al. 2012; Fu et al. 2013), the arithmetic of population growth from a small post-Flood founding number, the recent genealogical convergence of all living humans (Rohde et al. 2004), the abrupt onset of documented history within the last 5,000 years, the internal chronology of the Biblical genealogies, and a decay-kinetics test in which the fragmentation of DNA from a non-frozen, temperature-known Middle Pleistocene specimen reads thousands of years rather than its assigned 430,000 (Lindahl 1993; Allentoft et al. 2012). Across all of them the recent-origin model accounts for the data with one founding plus bottleneck event, where the standard model requires a separate auxiliary mechanism for each. We address the principal objections, that a mitochondrial most recent common ancestor need not coincide with a population's origin, and that selection can reconcile pedigree rates to deep timescales. These results align the mitochondrial clock, and the demographic, historical, and biochemical record around it, with a recent, creation origin rather than a deep-time one.

Author Biographies

D. Budinsky

Donny worked as a Registered Practical Nurse for many years. During his time working as an RPN, he converted to Christianity and became a Young Earth Creationist.
M. Nailor

Sindonologist and gerontologist specializing in the biology of aging and disease, Matt Nailor holds a Doctor of Divinity. His research focuses on the evolutionary theory of aging, which accounts for senescence through mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy, and disposable soma theory. This work engages origins science, with particular attention to molecular aging, mutation rates and accumulation, biological evolution, genetic variation, and historical linguistics.

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