Reconciling RTB and BioLogos Biblical Creation Models

So now it’s evidence. I see.

Paging @sfmatheson ! Please help explain to Mark_Moore the problems with his calculations.

Woah there, @T_aquaticus !

How would you even know this to be true?

Some pro-Evolution Christians are quite convinced that God is nudging evolution along all the time. Most philosophical treatments of this allows for the understanding that it is impossible to know when or where God is doing this.

While, conversely, some pro-Evolution Christians believe God can make everything work by natural lawful means … but unlike Deism, God answers prayers, and speaks to his followers.

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That was the number when I did this on a forum years ago and let evolutionists pick all the numbers except the start of the Cambrian Explosion, for which I used 543 million years- a non-controversial date. And I had to dog the main guy for days to even give a number. He did not want to put anything out there by which we could see if rate was reasonable given what happened. My number, which I showed on this thread, was much lower and I showed where I got it and I think its pretty reasonable, but it makes it hard for the idea that evolution by known mechanisms did it all.

Still, when I said that I was referring to the squishiness that would be in evidence at the sub-family and genus levels were evolution really operating at the inferred rate. One new family every 1,500 years would mean new sub-families more often and new genus yet more often. If evolution operated at that rate by the time you got down to species things would be changing so fast by the time you got done categorizing it all it would be time to start over!

@Mark_Moore,

What?

Anatomical Diversification at the level of “families” takes millions of years to develop. How exactly are you going to live long enough to see the answer to your question?

If you are an Old Earther, you can at least do retrospective analysis, and find the most recent diversifications…

Let me add that species can undergo changes in a relatively brief time frame- I think it is a variable dance around a mean for the type and someone who thinks evolution did it all thinks those dances are unmoored to such limits and turn butterflies into blue whales. That’s all.

If it happens at all, I agree that it would take that long. I have seen studies that show diversification within a genus takes at least a million years. But if that’s the case, then my point is that evolution is not powerful enough to be responsible for the amount of change we see in the earth, including the fossil record. Too many different families of creatures show up too fast. Ergo, that is not the only mechanism, and may not be the mechanism at all for some new types. Instead of being able to go from butterflies to blue whales, species just dance around a mean for their type that can only produce so many outcomes.

@Mark_Moore,

Well, I think you have a couple of things you need to work out:

  1. BioLogos is not a bunch of atheists (though there is more than a passing few who like to chat here); so the role of God is already embraced by BioLogos.

  2. If you are keen on debating the slowness of Godless Evolution, you should probably go to an Atheist forum, yes?

  3. There is no internal brakes in chromosomes that tell a population it won’t be allowed to evolve any further. What can slow down any potentially massive changes in a population’s gene pool is the free-exchange of genetic information between individuals of the population.

  4. So when behavior, geographical barriers, or sheer distance interferes with the free-exchange of genetic information within the full extent of the population… sub-populations start to experience increasingly levels of reproductive in-compatibility. One sub-population of birds might innovate mating songs, that only a small group of prospective mates are attracted to. Or a river may change course, and what was once a single population is now two populations. Over time, with genetic drift, two or more groups reach a point where they can no longer successfully reproduce “a kind” with members of another group.

The Bible pretty much spells it out… once genetics are sufficiently different that you cannot reproduce with animals that used to be your neighbors… you have a brand new kind.

So, if you really understand the science of genetic exchange within a population, then you know that once a population divides into two separate and independent reproductive groups… each population is set free to develop more exaggerated traits as their environment pushes them to.

So not only do we need more time… especially if we are talking taxonomic families instead of just species… you also need dramatic swings in the environment to continue to push populations into new situations.

Evolution doesn’t say Whales became whales by accident. There were vast areas of shallow seas… where a water-friendly land animal could avoid land-based predators and still get something to eat.

And with the extinction of marine reptiles during the Age of Dinosaurs, the oceans became teaming with giant populations of fish! And land animals that spent more and more time in the oceans could exploit a huge supply of food - - on their way to becoming rivals of sharks as alpha predators of the seas.

This argument makes no sense to me. Species diverge over millions of years until they become different enough that they pass some arbitrary threshold for humans to classify them as belonging to different families. Assuming that your numbers are correct, that should have happened roughly once in the last 1500 years. Great. How could you possibly test this hypothesis? Do you have detailed historical records of all species in all animal families for the last few thousand years, or even the majority of them? If you don’t what’s your basis for deciding that a new family hasn’t arisen?

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This may not be an “Atheist forum” but see above, it is a forum with atheists. But I do not want to debate atheists per se. I am trying to advance a model for understanding creation and early Genesis that has the power to bring BioLogos and Reasons to Believe types together, though it is not clear that this is something that either camp is interested in. Re-read the top post again for that model if you don’t see what I am getting at.

I taught public school science for 12 years, so yes I am familiar with the basics of evolutionary theory. It has no bearing on what I am saying here for this reason:. Say one set of organisms splits into two. They are unmoored from each other but are they unmoored from any inherent limitations on how much each group of organism can change? If there is no way to get from butterfly to blue whale by naturalistic (including theistic evolution without further Divine intervention once the first domino falls) means in a group of butterflies, does it matter if that group splits into two? Each group may also be incapable for reasons unrelated to their unmooring from each other.

On the other hand I think the record of nature will look very much LIKE theistic evolution. Diversification WAS theistic evolution. There will only be a few clues in the record that something more was going on. I am sharing what I think are a couple of those clues.

Since the rest of can’t see how it could happen without common descent, could you please explain it?[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:53, topic:37468”]
More evidence mitigating against your hypothesis is that a big slice of our DNA is closer to Gorillas than Chimps!
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That is entirely expected under the hypothesis of common descent. In fact, we did expect to find it before we sequenced either the chimpanzee genome or the gorilla genome. This is not an argument against common descent. [quote=“Mark_Moore, post:53, topic:37468”]
Some researchers say that we are more closely related to Orangs based on physical traits and challenge the DNA evidence you are citing…
[/quote]
You can find crackpots even among scientists.

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But you haven’t made that argument. All you’ve done is count how many had to have arrived. Since we’re talking about a highly branched tree of life, the diversification you’re talking about is going on in parallel – massively parallel, in fact. The reality is that the diversification we see in the fossil record is much, much slower than what we see happening in real time in species in the wild and in the lab.

This all seems a little wonky to me, and let me explain. Perhaps ‘wonky’ is not the best word and I’m not sure if it’s even a real word, but it is funny how the argument for the hand of God has gone from big things (like animals in general) to retreating down to invisible to the naked eye base pairs. And other arguments have retreated even further into random quantum events underlying even these genetic mutations. It would be amazing if the argument actually could go the other way around, i.e. a theist position actually predicts and quantifies the hand of God instead of making an argument in some of the unknowns of scientific inquiry. And then retreats their argument further and further back, always focusing on the weakest areas of natural explanations in any given era.

The ICR article specifically mentions the particular experiment on Drosophila:
http://roselab.bio.uci.edu/Publications/97%20Burke%20Dunham%20Shahrestani%20Thornton%20Rose%20Long%202010.pdf

This is very important to me at least, and I think it should be for everybody…
The authors write: There are several possible explanations for our failure to observe the signature of a classic sweep in these populations, despite strong selection.

Now I have no idea what that means personally. I’m not a biologist, but what they write next is very important… they propose three hypothesis for why they do not observe such a classic sweep despite strong selection. AND then, ICR comes in and says, ‘God did it.’ Now, all Christians could agree with ICR’s statement, BUT they did not perform any experiments to test their hypothesis. They did not perform further tests to affirm to deny such alternative hypothesis, they just pointed to an unexpected result in one paper and used it as proof for their viewpoint. That is rubbish! And it’s definitely not how science works.

Interesting stuff though, I am learning a lot! For fun, here is the 50,000 generation experiment from 2016:

Their phylogenic tree is pretty:

If it has then evolution is as powerful as a naturalistic reading of the fossil record would indicate. But that has not yet been observed. And while our records for the last several thousand years are far from complete we do have access to quite a bit of information, particularly on domesticated species for which selection pressures should be the strongest. Everything we know from domestic breeding indicates that there are limits to how far you can take a species before viability is affected.

If evolution does take “tens of millions of years” to get a new family, then I would suggest that evolution is too slow to explain all the organisms in the earth’s history. Some unseen hand was also at work.

How many families do we have good historical evidence for? What fraction of all extant families does that represent? These are not rhetorical questions – they’re questions you have to have answered already if you’ve made a mathematical case based on the appearance of new families.[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:74, topic:37468”]
Everything we know from domestic breeding indicates that there are limits to how far you can take a species before viability is affected.
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And that rate of change is many orders of magnitude faster than the typical changes seen in the fossil record. So what is your argument, exactly?

So the fact that chimp genome is closer to us than gorillas is proof that we shared a common ancestor with them more recently, except that places where gorillas are closer don’t disprove it. What on earth then would indicate against it? If not an argument against common descent then it is at least an argument against his argument FOR common descent. The results are also what should be expected from a common Designer of course.

Small changes around a theme common and fast, but only so far they can vary from the theme. New types arrive suddenly in a general form and then diversify. You say its slow, but when I put the numbers to it then it happened enough that that we should be seeing some organisms “walking away from their theme” now, not just dancing around it.

The fact that most of the chimp genome is closer to us than the gorilla genome is evidence that we’re more closely related to chimps than to gorillas. Obviously, if most of our genome was closer to gorilla, then that would be evidence against chimps being our closest relatives. I don’t see the difficulty.

As I said, this was expected. I was first introduced to the concept of incomplete lineage sorting – the reason that humans and gorillas are more closely related in some places – when Svante Pääbo was proposing the sequencing of the chimp genome. He told us that we would find it, and we did.

So far, what you’ve offered are not actually arguments against evolution.

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At least since the appearance of the animal phyla, new “types” always look like variations on earlier types. Why do you suppose that is? There are indeed limits to how much a given body-plan, say, can vary; a human is not going to evolve into a starfish. But those limits encompass a great deal, since sharks and humans, for example, are clearly variations on the same plan.

I don’t say there was no evolution. Evolution was the model, this creation just needed more help. So what I am arguing isn’t that there was no evolution, but that it is inadequate to explain all the changes that we see within the time we see it. Not on a small scale, it moves within the bounds of its wave form easily, but not too far from the mean.

And again, with the ape stuff I am only trying to show why that data is not necessarily evidence for the position that we descended from a common ancestor with chimps closer than gorillas. I don’t claim it as evidence for proving something different, I am only showing how it does not offer the support for his position that he claims. When the evidence could be incomplete lineage sorting or it could be explained by common Designer then you simply don’t know which it is. We would need some evidence FOR the one that also RULED OUT the other.