Reconciling RTB and BioLogos Biblical Creation Models

Merry Christmas! I think it is the nature of these blogs at times that leads people to make assumptions and see conflict when sometimes you are trying to just understand one another. We run into a fair number of folks with hidden agendas, and perhaps at times we enter into conversation in a defensive mode. I am sorry for any discomfort caused.

I have been somewhat more a lurker than participant on this thread of late, but have enjoyed the thought provoking ideas and numbers put forth. It is good to discuss and get a better idea of the problems and it makes us wonder at the providence of God, and how he works in creation. Thank you for your time and contributions!

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If you had started with this post I believe you would have received a different response.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

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Hopefully doing the math correctly . . . using the 15,000 effective population size, 5 million years since diverging from the chimp lineage, 22,000 total genes in the human genome, and 700 fixed gene duplications . . .

Since fixation is equal to duplication rate this would be 140 duplication events per million years. The per gene rate would be 0.006 per gene per million years. So each gene has a 0.6% chance of being duplicated and reaching fixation per million years. It would be interesting to here why this rate is too high.

@Bill_II,

Exactly!

@Mark_Moore, you used to be a teacher right? So how is it you think all the postings up to now said anything nearly concise enough as this post?:

Mark,

Why on Earth did you avoid saying all this, when this is what it takes to lay the ground work for the rest of your discussion?

Sometimes writers are so keen on the dramatic unveiling … they forget to unveil. I think some of them were burned at the stake in Rome… and later hung in the American Dakotas! (“Wait… wait…okay… I can give you the outline version …”) Too late.

I think you would do better to use more of @Swamidass 's scenario, then your picking/choosing/jumping all over the place in your historical narrative. Wayyyy to complex. Complexity can be nice. But not if it makes everyone on both sides say, why wouldn’t He just do the same thing like this?

I know you think you’ve thought everything out … but you have come to a set of rooms where Every One has spent years thinking it out. You are in a room of “Thinking-it-out-Athletes”.

If you want to reach BioLogos supporters, you are going to need a 5 billion year old Earth, and God-assisted Evolution at the very minimum.

Have a splendid Christmas!

A post was merged into an existing topic: Domestic Animal Breeding and Speciation

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Domestic Animal Breeding and Speciation

Moved to new topic on speciation and breeding. Enjoy!

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Incomplete lineage sorting produces a very specific pattern among closely-related species. Perhaps you’re not understanding that - it’s not an arbitrary pattern.

We share the highest similarity with our closest relatives - chimps. ILS predicts that we will some of the time have human sequences match our next closest relative - gorillas - and that we will share the next highest proportion with them. We predicted in advance of sequencing the gorilla genome that ~25% of gorilla genes would match humans more closely than chimps. We observe about ~30%, which is a very good fit to the prediction.

ILS also predicts that our next closest relative (orangutans) will match humans more closely than chimps or gorillas at a smaller frequency (predicted was ~1.2%, observed was ~1% - again predicted in advance).

This pattern matches exactly with what we see as overall genome similarity as well: humans are closest to chimps, then gorillas, then orangs.

Why is it that we have this specific pattern of relatedness among these four species if not for common ancestry?

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But speciation can often lead to reproductive incompatibility for different reasons. There can be physical reasons, or they might be active during different parts of the day, or their courtship songs might differ, and so on and so forth.

Yes. I agree. In fact, I’ve posted on that myself. And so, as your observation suggests, we can have bird speciation triggered by the novelty of a song… rather than an actual loss in physiological “Reproductive Compatibility”.

So, I should amend my sentence, which you quote, to read:

“In the context of potential speciation within the domesticated dog population, speciation is all about the continuum of Reproductive Compatibility.”

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This is the first I have ever heard anyone complain of too many transitional species! They clearly are saying that they all descended from a single genus: “Mainstream paleontologists ask whether all the carnivores above could have shared a single common ancestor. The answer? Absolutely! All these root species can be placed within the same kind (the technical term in biology is “clade”), tracing back to the miacids, a genus of small, arboreal placental carnivores which appear in the right strata and region to have been the ancestor of all modern carnivores.”

This immediately preceded your quote, which merely says that multiple species from multiple places and times are used to trace the whole clade’s evolution.

Interesting. Where is the references for this?

Given recent demands for reference in your life, I will clarify lest there be any doubt. I entirely believe your claims here, and I do not doubt you have these references. I am just curious to read them. Rather than plumbing the depths of google scholar, I wonder if you could help me out.

Thanks.

If your goal is to reconcile RTB (broadly speaking) with BioLogos, there is quite a bit about a Genealogical Adam that helps. It is not the RTB model per se, but allows for most (all?) the theology they say is important, and appears to fit the evidence better too.

I am doing to events with Hugh Ross end of January. One of these events, we will be taking a look at a Genealogical Adam together. Perhaps that could be the beginning of the rapprochement for which you are aiming. If you hope to learn more about this, read here:

A nice feature of this model is that it is entirely consistent with mainstream science. It is a minority theological position within BioLogos as a view of Adam, but is is affirmed as legitimate scientifically supported science nonetheless. Many of us think this could be the best way forward for rapprochement with RTB.

For example, it is consistent with all features of your proposal.

Moreover, Adam and Eve 13,000 years ago would be ancestors of us all, and could even be de novo created, without parents. You do not even need to dispute @glipsnort on population genetics to affirm this (trust me, you do not want to dispute him on population genetics).

It’s been a while, and perhaps @glipsnort will know for sure, but I think the data is in the original gorilla and orangutan genome papers. I’m giving those predicted/observed values from memory, so they might be a bit off.

As for why we expect more ILS with gorilla than with orangs, it’s because we share a common ancestral population longer with gorillas.

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First of all, @Mark_Moore, I’m in total agreement with @gbrooks9 (and other posters) that your post of 116/132 should have appeared at the beginning of this thread. So much of the discussion about gene counting in the gorilla/chimp/human lines and the improvements that cladistics make over Linnaean classification–these go over my head and I wasn’t sure of what differences actually separated RTB from BioLogos theistic evolutionary models. IMHO I have, very late in life, come to a worldview that does reconcile the two models, but it requires a significant reinterpretation of Genesis, in regards to both Original Sin (the Fall) and the Flood and the special importance of Noah’s lineage.

Those who have followed my posts on the forum, realize that I put a critical value on the anthropological evidence for the apparent Great Leap Forward taken by Homo sapiens some 40 - 50 K yrs ago, and IF this proves to be an illusion, then the unique portion of my world view disappears. Studies relating to the Theory of Mind (ToM) are still in their infancy, but as they progress, I believe it will become more apparent how humankind fits into Ongoing Creation.
Al Leo

Late to the party here, but if you were an educator, you do know that this is an unfair / inaccurate parody of evolution, right? Just checking.

To be clear, the last common ancestor of butterfly and blue whale was a tiny water-dwelling animal 550+ million years ago, when protostomes and deuterostomes split. It would be quite a while then before insects and amphibians would make their way on land, and much longer still till neopterans took to flight and cetaceans headed back to the sea.

If you’re going to invent theories like butterflies becoming blue whales, you might as well say that evolutionists believe in unicorns. It would be just as true, and a lot more fun!

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[quote=“Bill_II, post:89, topic:37468”]

Did @Mark_Moore fully appreciate this?

2 ^ 24 = 16,777,216.

So if a family split in 2 just 24 times, it would surpass your 10,000,000 families number.
543 million years / 24 splits = a split every 22,625,000 years.

We’re looking at an exponential function, not a linear function.

Does this make sense?

A post was split to a new topic: How to account for the difference in gene numbers between chimps and humans?

Oh I hope so. I did not want to be drawn into defending the same position as Ken Ham, just on the basis of not liking those odds!. For my model it does not matter when or where the Divine hand gave the earth its assist.

In a theoretical world where we started with only one family and they continued splitting with no extinctions, yes. But think about what we think happened in this world. I am starting at the Cambrian Explosion. That wasn’t just one family. There were probably more animal PHYLA that went extinct since then than exist today! Throughout history there were routine extinction of species and families. Then we have had several mass extinction events. The first wiped out 90% of all land animals.

Yes I agree that 10 million families is probably on the low end. But if you laid it out on a timeline it would look more like a linear than an exponential function overall on the broad scale. That it happens exponentially when there is not a mass extinction event probably helps my case. If they have been happening at an exponentially greater rate since 65 mya after being on an overall linear rate for the past 543 million years then new families should really be popping out all over!