Note: In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.
In the last few posts in this series, we have looked at the arguments of Vern Poythress as they pertain to human common ancestry, population genetics, and locating Adam and Eve in human prehistory. A second well-known apologist who has also interacted with these data is Dr. William Lane Craig. Like Poythress, Craig is an Old-Earth, progressive creationist who holds to the view that all humans descend uniquely from Adam and Eve – though Craig is more open than Poythress to the possibility of humans sharing ancestry with other forms of life. To his credit, Craig is aware that he is not an expert in this area, and often assumes a humble posture when discussing these matters:
So some sort of a progressive creationist view, I think, would explain the evidence quite well. It would allow you to affirm or deny if you wish the thesis of common ancestry and it would supplement the mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection with divine intervention. I find some sort of progressive creationism to be an attractive view.Again, I want to reiterate that on these issues I am like many of you a scientific layperson. I am someone who has an interest in these subjects, I want to learn and to study them further, and explore them more deeply. So these opinions are held tentatively and lightly and are subject to revision.
I have had the opportunity to meet Dr. Craig in person, and found him to be thoughtful, congenial and interested in learning more about how modern genetics plays into the conversation about the historical Adam and Eve. While Craig has learned about—and has correctly understood the impact of—the genetic evidence for human common ancestry, his understanding of the evidence from human population genetics is lacking in certain respects. These misunderstandings, unfortunately, lead him to make some basic errors. As he sees it, holding to a historical Adam—in the sense that all humans descend uniquely from an original ancestral couple—remains defensible, since the conclusions of human population genetics are based on assumptions open to critique:
[Geneticists] look at the amount of variability in the genetic structure and then you calculate how this could have arisen based upon mutation rates and the amount of time available. That will then give you these population estimates. But there are quite a number of assumptions that go into this kind of modeling that the defender of the historical Adam, I think, could challenge.
Craig’s defense of a historic Adam and human descent from an ancestral pair (i.e. genetic monogenesis) thus rests on the idea that there is reasonable uncertainty in population genetics measures:
What we need to understand is that these are genetic estimates based upon mathematical modeling and projections into the past. We know that that kind of mathematical modeling is based upon certain assumptions that may or may not be true, and can sometimes be wildly incorrect in their projections… It could well be the case that these mathematical models are simply incorrect.
Moreover, Craig advances the opinion that this uncertainty is great enough to allow one to hold to genetic monogenesis:
When you think about it, it is really quite remarkable, it seems to me, that with these models they are able to get the minimum human population size down to a couple thousand people. I mean, that in itself is astonishing. It wouldn’t take a great error to go from two thousand to two, I think.
So, what “assumptions” does Craig have in mind? Two major themes in Craig’s interaction with population genetics evidence are (a) that population geneticists assume a constant mutation rate for the human lineage, and that (b) population genetics models have been shown to overestimate real populations whose actual demographics are known. We will deal with these issues in turn.
Accelerated mutation rates?
Craig posits that mutation rates may not have been constant over human history, and that in the past mutation rates may have been much higher. Such accelerated rates, he argues, could indeed produce the genetic diversity we see in the present day starting from only two people:
The problem is the population size. In order to get this amount of genetic diversity, the claim is you needed to have at least 2,000 people originally to result in this. One of the assumptions that is based upon is that the rate of mutation doesn’t change. But if the mutation rates are changing then they could accelerate and that could produce greater diversity than one might expect. You might say that increasing diversity would have a selective advantage so this perhaps would be a kind of accelerating process. Again, we just don’t know that these mutation rates have been constant over all of these thousands of years.
There are, of course, several problems with this line of argument (not least that genetics indicates that we descend from a population of about 10,000, not 2,000). First, it is an ad hoc line of argumentation – the argument is made only because the evidence does not fit with Craig’s prior expectation that we all descend from an ancestral couple. Second, there is indeed good evidence that the mutation rate our lineage experienced has not changed appreciably in the last several million years.
There are several independent ways to estimate human mutation rates. An excellent overview of the various methods can be found at this series of blog posts by Larry Moran, a biochemist at the University of Toronto: the biochemical method; the phylogenetic method, and the direct method. For our question at hand, the phylogenetic method is of particular interest: it estimates the mutation rate on the human lineage since our separation from chimpanzees. In brief, we can compare the differences we see in the present-day human genome, the present-day chimpanzee genome, and using reasonable estimates of generation times, infer the number of mutations per generation in our lineage, as well as in the lineage leading to chimpanzees, with both lineages descending from a common ancestral population. This estimate is an average for our lineage over the last several million years – and it agrees well with the estimates we see using the biochemical and direct methods. Even the best-case scenario for Craig— that no mutations occurred at all in the lineage leading to chimpanzees, and every difference between the genomes of our two species resulted from mutations in the human lineage only—does not provide a mutation rate high enough to account for the diversity we see in present-day humans assuming they descend from an original pair.
Finally, only some techniques used to measure human population dynamics over time employ estimates of mutation rates. Other methods—which do not use estimates of mutation rates—return the same results as mutation rate-based methods. One such example is one we have discussed: estimating human population size over time using linkage disequilibrium. Craig’s argument thus needs to explain why these methods agree with mutation-based methods, since speculating about mutation rates does not affect these measurements. Craig also needs to address why the various independent methods used to measure the population size of our lineage agree with one another: if indeed we all descend uniquely from an ancestral pair, why is it that these independent methods all return the same values? The reasonable conclusion is that these methods are telling us something valid about our evolutionary history. These methods and their conclusions are subject to revision and refinement, of course—but unlike Craig hopes for, it is not reasonable to expect that that refinement will reduce our ancestry from 10,000 to two.
In the next post in this series, we’ll examine Craig’s second claim: that population genetics models have been shown to overestimate known population sizes.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://biologos.org/blog/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics-part-15-addressing-critics-william-l