My impression (without having thought about it too hard) is that the case against Adam and Eve is harder to make from recombination than from mutation. Linkage disequilbrium will extend much farther in the YEC model than in the scientific model (although YEC LD may be lower at very short distances), but it’s not so easy to predict exactly how far it should extend in the conventional model. If you just take a naive recombination rate and apply it uniformly, I think YEC LD would extend about 100x as far as predicted while observed LD extends 5x or 10x the predicted range. The clustering of recombination into hotspots (which can change over time) makes modeling much harder.
Oh for goodness sake, @Eddie… the material I read (including one of her quotes) came straight out of CreationWiki !!!
Please note the special touch that page added to the tabs of their URL pages - - an upside down (aka: Dead) fish-like tetrapod !!! Fishes with legs must have died in the flood?
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One allele if you’re talking about the Y-chromosome, which was reduced to a single copy via Noah and a global flood.
Tight bottlenecks would be similarly expected in essentially all terrestrial animals that traveled on the ark.
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A misuse of the Bible by some of us Christians is assuming it is the total report of God’s work. The Garden of Eden Story with Adam and Eve is assumed to be the only creation story that could have happened. Step back and think about it. If you were God introducing human life to this planet wouldn’t you create “Gardens of Eden” all over the planet and place humans there? Wouldn’t that give a better chance that humans would survive? Did the native Americans get here because God created “Gardens of Eden” in what is now North and South America?
Based on archaeology, @Walt_Huber, it looks like God set up an Eden on the Bering Strait … and then kept moving it every few generations to get humans into South America. Is this what you mean?
It is sort of funny that in trying to stay to literal text, it is tempting add so much stuff to what the Bible actually says, that it ceases to be true to the meaning. While interesting to speculate, we should keep in mind that that is what it is: speculation.
No, that is not what I mean. Perhaps God created many Gardens of Eden (colonies of humans) in various locations around the globe. No need to move a Garden of Eden. Just create them in place and let them develop as a culture. Isn’t that what you would do if your job was to put human life on this planet and have it survive? Gardens of Eden in the new world, Asia, Africa, Australia wouldn’t get reported in the Bible. It is the story about one culture in the Middle East. That could account for the various races today. They didn’t evolve from each other. They were created as a separate “race” from the beginning.
I have a creation model that might also fit the data. I propose that the lineage leading to humans was specially created 10,000 years ago with a starting population of exactly 17 individuals with varying genomic heterogeneity and spread out across various geographic locations. That’s never been specifically disproved by science and probably could explain the relationships and migrations of human populations better than the 'two individual, one location, model. Thus we can’t rule it out.
Well, actually we can rule it out. We have fossil and archaeological evidence indicating that millions of humans roamed the Earth much longer than 10 K years ago. We have multiple, strong lines of evidence that decisively argue against a global flood, a young universe and a young earth. I suppose that leaves the Last Thursday model of creation undamaged, however.
Here’s my observation: Knock the latest down and you’ll see two more ‘untested, therefore possible’ claims. This is akin to creating two new ‘undiscovered’ intermediate species for each new one identified.
- Adam and Eve created. Miracle.
- Their genomes contain massive heterogeneity: Miracle.
- There is a Global Flood: Miracle
- Noah and his family are chosen to survive, also retaining massive genetic heterogeneity: Miracle.
With all these miraculous, direct interventions how is it that genetic recombination, spontaneous mutations and mate selection are happening in the background ‘naturally’ to yield results that match so well with models where humans are geographical distributed, have populations in the 100K-1M range and have existed as a species for well over 100K-250K years?
So many posts ago, @Swamidass asked if BioLogos has an official position on the “Historical Adam” question. The answer is no…and yes. Here’s what BioLogos officially affirms:
- The scientific evidence is strong enough to conclude that all humans did not originate with two individuals. We never numbered less than the thousands, as a species.
- Death and disease existed before the arrival of humanity.
These are indeed very bold and controversial statements, given historical beliefs about Adam throughout church history. We are well aware that human origins is the most difficult part of evolutionary theory, for many Christians. We’re not trying to downplay that.
However, within the BioLogos camp there are a large variety of positions as whether there were ever two historical individuals (or groups of individuals) whose roles align in some way to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. For more, I strongly recommend reading our official statement on the subject: Were Adam and Eve Historical Figures? - Common Question - BioLogos.
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It’s admirably honest for Biologos to state this so clearly. Where I think you start to lose people is in playing up the credibility of the YEC “two-people-only” position, and failing to provide a robust explanation of how the official Biologos position can be reconciled with Scripture. Every time I read Biologos staff addressing this issue (formally or informally), or other issues like it (such as the challenge of the immortal soul), I find it takes the reader right up to the point at which orthodox theology has to be altered, and then promptly backs away and hastily assures the reader that you’re just not going to go there and there’s no need to change the orthodox position anyway.
It’s like you’re caught in the trap of wanting to tell people the facts, but being scared of telling them they’ll have to change their reading of Scripture as a result of those facts. So in effect you just end up back in square one with the YECs. It’s quite a mixed message. Peter Enns on the other hand just bit the bullet and went through to the other side. I don’t agree with where he ended up, but I admire his honesty in acknowledging that the journey had to be taken.
Hello Steve,
Great explanation. There are two of your points that deserve emphasis:
This also leads me to doubt Carter’s sincerity. It’s well known that there’s far more polymorphism in an isolated African population than there is in a large European population (I’m using African and European in the genetic sense).
There’s simply no justification for using data from only Europeans while trying to test a hypothesis about all of humanity that involves polymorphism–unless Carter is assuming that Africans are not descended from Adam and Eve.
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Hello Walt,
That doesn’t account for the genetic data, which clearly show that we are all descended from an African population.
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I understand that we sometimes come across this way. Our desire is to give people a fresh look at something (evolutionary theory) for which many have been indoctrinated to dismiss out of hand. And it makes much more sense to say, “here’s how evolution and orthodox theology can be understood together” at the front of the conversation. This isn’t a ruse. We honestly believe evolution and orthodox theology are compatible. We affirm every part of the Nicene creed. I suspect what you mean by “orthodox theology” is the areas in which BioLogos pushes on “traditional” readings on Scripture. But those things aren’t in the creeds.
Part of the problem is in the details. We may well be able to say all people have a literal Adam and Eve in their ancestors, even though there may have been a population of 10,000 or more. All those with my surname can be traced to a guy in Scotland who was run out and moved to Ireland, but I am equally related to a couple of thousand others of that generation as well. One exception is of course through adoption or the taking of surnames by slaves who were freed, and if you look in the old testament with the customs of brothers taking their late brother’s wives to give a heir, genetic descent is sort of problematic with bibical genealogies also.
Makes me think that perhaps we place too much importance on this issue. Why do we make it an issue? (Knowing that ultimately it is on views of bibical interpretation)
This may be an apt description. However it may be categorized, I endorse the approach in general. It explores the limits of what can be deduced, but it doesn’t become “imperious” or “imperial” in requiring an orthodoxy.
BioLogos appears to be a Big Tent. I like it as a Big Tent. And I think it will do the most good as a Big Tent movement.
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How do you decide who the arbiter is of these categories, Eddie? What does “binding teaching” even mean, outside the bounds of a particular sub-tradition of Protestantism that holds to, for instance, the Heidelberg Catechism?
BioLogos can let Rome do what it wants to do. We are generations past Bruno … and Rome has done an about-face with the Protestants (at least the Evangelical wing of the Protestants). Rome now leads in the idea that there is nothing in science that can truly contradict the positions of the Church. (Wow! That’s bracing!)
BioLogos, as a Big Tent, explains to all, but contends mostly with the Evangelicals, and does a very good job of staying out of the way of the myriad points-of-view the Protestant denominations have been nurturing (intentionally and unintentionally) for centuries.