Not true. That is a misconception encouraged by some questionable writers, but is a misrepresentation of what a “Mitochondrial Eve” or a “Y chromosome Adam” means. As I recall, there is no evidence that the population of humans ever fell below a bottleneck of an effective population of 1000 or so around 50,000 years ago, Effective populations are sometimes far less than actual populations. And, while different counts give varied numbers, even the lowest I could find was 450, and some calculations are in the 10,000 range.
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No such model exists within the consensus scientific model. What you are referring to is Y chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. Both are understood to be part of a larger human population that freely interbred and were part of a continuous human population of thousands and thousands of humans.
This wrongheaded argument can be illustrated by looking at your own family just a few generations into the past. Let’s go back to your great-grandparents. You have 8 great-grandparents. Of those 8 ancestors only 1 of them gave you your Y chromosome and only 1 of them gave you your mitochondrial genome. The Y-chromosome came from father’s, fathers’, father. Your mitochondrial DNA came from your mother’s, mother’s, mother. Does this mean you only had 2 great-grandparents instead of 8? No. Does this mean that all of your DNA only came from those 2 great-grandparents? Absolutely not.
On a larger population level, there is pedigree collapse. This is due to the simple fact that if you go back in time you might think that there should be an exponential increase in ancestors. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on. However, there weren’t an infinite number of humans in the past, so what is going on? Well, we all share ancestors. We are all cousins at some point. This is pedigree collapse. Part of that process is the elimination of pedigrees. As time moves on a pedigree of mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA will die out, leaving fewer and fewer pedigrees as time marches on. In another 100,000 years there may well be a new Y-chromosome Adam or Mitochondrial Eve, and they may be part of our modern population. It looks a bit like this:
Just remember, only women pass on mitochondrial DNA to their children, and only men pass on the y-chromosome to their male offspring. If a woman doesn’t have daugthers, her mitochondrial lineage stops. If a man doesn’t have a son, his y-chromosome lineage stops.
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That seems very odd indeed since ‘the evolutionary model’ doesn’t say anything like that.
Not seeing a lot of resurgence here.
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I don’t think it’s worth my time responding to Adam any further. It’s abundantly clear he’s not here to have a reasonable discussion, but to point fingers, make accusations, and generally act like a jerk. He seems to think that he can win arguments by shouting rather than by reason and evidence. He can’t.
Deuteronomy 25:13-16 is something of a litmus test for YECs. If they really are approaching the subject in good faith, they will respond by either attempting to defend their approach to measurement or by admitting that it’s beyond their pay grade to do so. But if, as Adam has done elsewhere, they reject it even in principle on any grounds whatsoever, whether by telling me that I’m taking it out of context, or that I’m overthinking things, or that I need to balance it with other verses of Scripture, or by making ridiculous comparisons to David Koresh, it’s a clear indication that they’re approaching the subject in bad faith. Honesty and factual accuracy when discussing science is non-negotiable, and I shouldn’t even have to quote the Bible to make the point, let alone fight to defend it. To suggest otherwise is to demand the right to tell lies.
There are times when one needs to apply Proverbs 26:5 in the hope that the other person will come to their senses, and/or your response will be helpful to onlookers. But there comes a point at which one needs to switch to applying Proverbs 26:4 and just let their bad behaviour speak for itself.
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I don’t know about yelling, but he does seem to think that calling people heretics somehow trumps the scientific evidence. It didn’t work with Heliocentrism, and it isn’t going to work in the fields of biology, geology, physics, and cosmology.
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Play nice, guys. You are talking like he is not here in the room. Sometimes you have to work out these things over time, and Adam seems like he is fairly early in the journey. It is good for me to revisit some of these questions and assertions to make sure I am on the right track. I doubt if we will change his mind or him ours, but it is good to be challenged.
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now that is a white lie…modern synthesis is a joining of the original Darwinian theory with evolutionary biology…it has not thrown out the Darwinian model at all!
What was dishonest in what I said? Plus, you’re wrong again, the modern synthesis is the joining of the Darwinian understanding of evolution via natural selection with Mendelian genetics at the population level. It definitely changed how evolution was conceived of. Adding in concepts like neutral drift, mutation pressure, and gene flow changed the model significantly. When you say “Darwinian evolution,” that is a term that has a meaning from the history of science, and it is not synonymous with the evolutionary model of modern synthesis, so maybe you should try harder to use terms correctly around here where most people actually know what they are talking about from studying real science books and aren’t just cutting and pasting things they read on Creationist indoctrination websites.
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What do you think the Darwinian model is?
Then what is the objection to using “modern synthesis”? Is there some bogyman value in Darwinian?
I dunno, it wasn’t me who brought up the idea that its not the prevalent model nowadays…a new name has emerged called modern synthesis. There must have been a change of government recently, a new name to old things???
Politicians are great ones at changing the names of things…a personal legacy i suppose. Or is it, the old one (Darwinian) was so flawed we had to come up with a new one?
The new name was necessitated by new concepts which were an extension of the previous theory.
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Interesting graph…and from a Christian perspective, the rise in dark green line (agnosticism/atheism) is sad.
I do note is that the grey line is on the up from 2017 onwards…interesting that it also illustrates a sharp decline in TEism over the same period.
My understanding from bible prophecy is that there will be a decline in Christianity in the last days.
i assume the Gallup poll here is sampling the “general population”?
One thing i think that we can both agree on, the dark green line is most concerning. I know that our two world views fundamentally disagree, and that mine claims yours cannot be saved due to your rejection of the basis for our need of salvation (ie that sin and death physically and spiritually entered this world through rebellion of both Lucifer and also of Adam and Eve). However, even your world view must be alarmed at the rise in belief in the view of the dark green line (that God plays no part in our origins or evolution)?
I accept that position no problem, however, if you are allowed to take on new concepts that are an “extension of the previous theory” that originated roughly180 years ago, why then are YEC’ers not allowed to use those same modern sciences to promote a theory that has remained unchanged for thousands of years?
Lets face it, science has really exploded over the last few decades, it should come as no surprise that very intelligent YECer’s are equally as interested in using that expansion in knowledge in their efforts to study our existence. what i do see here is that TE’sm has simply figured (and that is about the extent of what they have done) “lets join Darwinian theory with Christianity”. I see the error here as fundamentally at odds with the Old Testament narrative. There were numerous movements around a few decades back who would refuse to study Old Testament writings…only the New. It seems to me that the reason for doing this was due to a large quantity of very self-evident OT passages of scripture discrediting some very dubious doctrines! The rejection of the Seventh Day Sabbath is an example here, the O/T fully supports the Seventh Day Sabbath beginning with the creation story…that is one very significant reason why creation so important to the biblical narrative, and that is also why i cannot ever discount the literal creation account.
It is my position that without a solid belief in a literal 7 day creation, we destroy the very foundation of all Christianity…the Sabbath. People from many other denominations often condemn Seventh Day Adventists for taking such a strong view on the Sabbath. Here is why we take such a strong position. It is our belief that the Sabbath and Jesus are synonymous, they are a unified doctrine…one cannot exist without the other…to deny one is to deny the other…and to do that is to deny salvation!
Out of the two world views, YEC has the historical evidence, the written record, and now the science that when used in a manner whereby its assumptions start from a position “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them” our whole theology is harmonious…it does not conflict with itself in any way.
I don’t disagree with the claim that the are issues in YECism’s science, however, i genuinely believe that if an error is to be made, it’s better that the error is made in favor of biblical narrative and theology than to go the other way and elevate science above the bible account.
I do not see any evidence where God would condemn us because we get our science wrong, but based on a very deep study of the bible I am confident we most definitely will be condemned if our theology is wrong!
Work on the Modern Synthesis started in the 1920’s and was largely finished by the 1940’s. It’s hardly a new name.
I am still curious to hear what you think the Darwinian model is.
All theories are flawed, and are refined over time. That’s what science is. Unlike religious dogma, scientific theories are held tentatively, are open to challenges, and are expected to be refined.
However, flawed doesn’t mean wrong. Newtonian gravity was replaced by Relativity, but Newton still got a lot of things right and his equations are still used to guide spacecraft to this day.
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YEC’s are fully allowed to use the scientific method. The problem is they don’t.
When you reject evidence because it leads to a conclusion you don’t like, you aren’t doing science.
They are joining reality with Christianity. If reality is at odds with your interpretation of Genesis, it isn’t reality that is wrong.
You stop doing science when you start with the conclusion.
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Absolutely. And Biologos is actually part of the response to that, in that in the traditional young earth view voiced by AIG and the like, it forces youth and those who are interested in the sciences into abandoning faith with positions like,”If Genesis is not historically and scientifically true, then the whole Bible is false.” Unfortunately, many people have agreed with AIG on that and rejected the Bible. Of course, your proposal and AIGs is to prove that it is indeed scientifically accurate, but in doing so, have made the situation even worse by having outlandish just-so explanations that are laughable when examined, and having no coherent alternative to mainstream science findings.
So, yes, it is a problem to see the rise of atheism, but we see the cause as being the adherence to a woefully poor interpretation of the Bible. EC integrates faith with our knowledge of how reality works to allow a rational basis for faith to exist.
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Could you elaborate on that? My reading of the Bible plainly states Jesus is the foundation. It appears from your word choices, you are coming from a SDA viewpoint, and I respect the SDA church for their many good attributes, though my church meets on Sunday, and I have not problem if you wish to meet on Saturday… Who knows if the calendar is consistent since the first day of creation, so what does it matter.
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On what basis is the historical-grammatical method the way to interpret Scripture. Please demonstrate this biblically from Jesus to all NT authors; otherwise, your foundation is anti-biblical and merely man’s interpretation.
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You may want to check this essay out:
I have also found the YEC Todd Wood to be a breath of fresh air.
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