There are no known genetic differences between species or lineages that could not be produced by known and natural processes of mutation and selection, at least none that I am aware of. As Dr. Steve outlined in his article the other day, the genetic differences between lineages are completely consistent with known processes of mutation. We also see a phylogenetic signal in the genetic data which further illustrates that natural processes were at play.
When I say that nature is capable of producing these species I am not saying that it rules out God being involved in the process. It is the same situation with weather, where natural processes are entirely capable of producing the weather we see, but Christians have faith that God is involved in the process as God is within all of nature.
if God were designing his life forms by only manipulating the ecology, or by only using cosmic rays targeted on specific DNA, there is really no way you or anyone would be able to detect this activity as miraculous.
“Actually, Linnaean taxonomy has been largely replaced by cladistics because Linaean taxonomy doesn’t accurately reflect how biology works.”
He said that because it wasn’t “evolutiony” enough for modern tastes. Cladistics can offer some improvements if it sticks to what is known, just as you might expect things to improve over time as more knowledge is acquired, but the Linnaean system was useful for a long time for a reason…and it is still useful and still used. It is just that as long as you don’t take it too far cladistics is somewhat of an improvement on it.
Now g the part that really hurts is that after all of this time you seem to think that I believe in a global flood or YEC. Man I got people throwing stuff at me all in a huff and a lot of it is that I am proposing something outside of the categories that exist today, yet people just want to put me in one of those categories and go at me like I was in the other camp. I am in a separate camp all together. I may have posted this earlier to someone else but here is my position on the flood…this is what I will defend…
It’s the same thing. The only difference is fixation of a gene duplication. You still haven’t shown a shred of evidence that there are more gene duplications in the human and chimp genomes than there should be. All you can seem to do is say “IT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!”.
Where is your numbers based argument for the expected number of gene duplications in the chimp and human lineages? I don’t see it anywhere in this thread.
How is it a different thing? If humans differ from each other by a few score genes, then humans and chimps should differ by about ten times that number. A large majority of those differences should be fixed in both species, since the time scale for genetic variants to fix is something like a million years for humans and chimps. Again, you seem to be assuming something in your argument that isn’t right, but I’m not sure what it is.
That is not what I am saying either. I am saying that as the system gets more complex, as the genes start interacting with other genes and the systems operate with other systems, then you reach a point where you can’t change X without something negative happening at Y or Z. Maybe you can change it in a couple of ways, but not the vast number of ways required to go from whales to butterflies or vice versa. Once you have a complex organism there are only so many ways it can get fiddled with before you mess something up. You might say given “enough” time you can do that fiddling by adding and subtracting stuff. I reply that the fossil record and the things alive today show us how much fiddling was done and how much time there was to do it, and the time is NOT nearly “enough”. That is the heart of what I am trying to say.
That’s not how it works. New species are put in the families they descended from and the variation within that family increases. When a new bud forms on a tree it doesn’t disconnect from the brahch it is on, move down to the trunk, and start a new branch. New buds stay on the branch where they first form. The same applies to the tree of life. You don’t form new families since that would require the species to disconnect from its ancestry, go back in time, and then start a new group of species.
You don’t evolve out of your ancestry. Your ancestors never change, so the branch of the evolutionary tree you are on never changes. Descendants will always be in the same family that their ancestors were in.
No, it isn’t. The theory predicts the amount of incomplete lineage sorting we should see, and that is the amount that we see. @glipsnort already went over that topic in previous posts.
Do you know that there is a BioLogos supporter, named @Swamidass, proposing that the Earth is old… and that the great bulk of human genetic diversity comes from a hominid stock that evolved (as per God’s guidance)…
… but that 6000 years ago, God specially made a mating pair, Adam & Eve, that introduced God’s “image” into all humanity.
Which parts of this scenario is different from yours?
Your “local flood” theory is all well and good… but unless you connect your flood with a very very old Earth, you still do not have an answer for how Australia is full of marsupials and only marsupials!
Linnaean taxonomy was useful because it was close to accurate. Cladistics just happens to be more accurate along with being non-arbitrary.
What are the criteria for determining if two species belong in the same genus within Linnaean taxonomy? Well, there isn’t any such criteria. It is completely arbitrary. For example, there are thousands of diverse fruit fly species, and scientists have jammed them into the same genus. There are just a handful of great ape species with really not that much diversity between them, and scientists have put them each in their own genus. That is completely arbitrary.
Cladistics groups species by shared derived features which is an objective measure. It groups species into a single tree instead of breaking off a branch and putting it parallel to other branches as is done in Linnaean taxonomy. Cladistics fits the data better.
There are a few Linnaean families in that picture. If we trace those lines close to where they meet at each node, what types of species would we see? Those species close to the point of divergence would look very, very similar to one another. As we move up the line of descent along each line, each species close to one another in time would be very similar to one another. It’s not as if a new taxonomic family was produced just 1 million years after each of those lines of descent branched off from one another.
Instead, taxonomic families are simply the result of millions of years of divergence as well as extinction of species that fill the morphological gap between branches. As one example, the gap between chimps and humans would be nearly indistinguishable if many of the transitional species were still alive (e.g. Australopithecines and early Homo) and they may very well be put in the same genus if those species were still alive. Instead, there is an observed morphological gap between modern humans and chimps simply because those other species have died off.
The end result is that we shouldn’t be seeing new families form in modern times if evolution is true. If we went back to the divergence of the gibbon and great ape lineages and looked at the species just after that divergence there would be no way we would classify them as being in two different families. In fact, we would probably put them in the same genus. The only reason they are in two different families now is the amount of time that has passed since those lineages diverged.
If a new dog species formed today we would put them into the same genus. However, if we waited 40 million years those two lineages may diverge quite a bit and in 40 million years we would then put those two species into different families. What’s the difference? Time and extinction of intermediate forms. A few thousand years isn’t enough time to create a new taxonomic family.
Back to inchworm on the fence in the morning, then I find it in another city that afternoon. You say it crawled there by natural means and there is no need to invoke it hitching a ride on a car. I say “It’s impossible.” You seem to think that in itself is evidence that my time and distance issues are groundless…
I wish there was someone on this board who could show us the math for what had to have happened for a naturalistic explanation. A group of the common ancestor splits into two groups, say 50,000 in each group, probably a lot more in the line to chimps because they are so much more diverse than humans. Any lower than that and you are basically saying humans spent the first 5.9 million years of their existence in the edge of extinction, yet survived, so again you approach “miracle” territory. Both groups have a generation time of about 20 years. So 300,000 generations in six million years.
If the 700 genes came up all at the front end of that six million years, we are right back to “miracle” territory. To preserve naturalism, they should be somewhat spaced out. How long does it take a new gene- not just a variant of an existing gene but a new gene, to spread from one individual to EVERY individual in a population of that size when they have long generations and low fertility rates? To help them along it should provide somewhat of a survival advantage. How much? What if they were 1% more likely to survive with the gene than without it. For one new gene, that’s a lot.
Meanwhile, the line leading to chimps as to LOSE 700 genes which are in humans and every member of their population. They have to lose genes that hung around in both groups all along, so they could not have been deleterious. How long does it take for a population LARGER than 50,000 with low fertility and long generation times to lose 700 NEUTRAL genes present in every member of the population? And again these loses must be spaced out over time. They can’t be at the start or you are right back into “miracle” country.
Especially in that latter case, I can see it taking over a million years before a gene present in every member of the population is eliminated in every member. So yes I am incredulous even though I can’t do all of that math. Do you know someone who can that might be able to do that math and lower my credulity thresh hold?
Thank you for watching the video but it is very very frustrating to me that I have not been able to communicate to you and others what I am proposing even after many days of effort. Your prior post where you were asking if I thought God made every species and wondering if I was young earth were particularly depressing for me.
The post that started it all was supposed to be one that BROUGHT TOGETHER the RTB model and that of BioLogos, which apparently no one is interested in doing on either side. But just the fact that this is where I am going ought to make it clear that I am Old Earth. I believe I mentioned that I am old earth previously, and expressed discomfort with having to agree with Ken Ham’s outfit on a point about “kinds” earlier on.
I have to ask myself “why”? Why aren’t the intelligent people on this thread able to absorb even the most basic parameters of what I am trying to say? Perhaps I do have an organization problem. I still don’t know. I do know that no matter which place I start, I run into misconceptions about something in ANOTHER place which connects to it.
I think I will just compare my model to that of @Swamidass and then wish you all a Merry Christmas and take some time off from this windmill tilting. I can show what I am saying is in the text, but I won’t do so here, just describe the model relative to your queries
The earth is old
Genesis 1 is describing creation occurring in two realms at once on days 3,4, and 6 - land above and land below. In the land above, God speaks “and it was so”. Very much like Theistic Evolution. The LAND brought forth living creatures. Down here, the LAND needs help from God to do God’s will in a halting and imperfect manner- just like us. Down here, God had to help the earth along by subsequent interventions making “kinds”. The earth took it from there. It looks like theistic evolution in the record of nature because that was what the land below was attempting to do. It did so poorly and if we look closely enough we should be able to detect that it needed help.
There was an army of people created in Genesis chapter one, not just one couple (see Hebrew for 'host" in Genesis 2:1). Genes from previously existing hominids may have been borrowed for the event but all mankind is a special creation. Here I would differ from the model of Swami, though like him I agree they were not in the image of God, but only the likeness. Indeed Adam after the fall did not say he was in the image of God but just the likeness (Gen 5:1-2) but God had a plan to MAKE (a process) man in His own image. Part of that process involved a TEMPLATE of a man in His image, in heaven (Christ) and on earth (Adam).
Around 13,345 years ago (I read the genealogies different from Ussher) it was time to take mankind from innocence to accountability. Adam was formed, and Eve. He was formed and made into an agriculturalist- moving mankind from hunter-gatherers to true civilization builders. The animals made in chapter two were only a small subset of the categories from chapter one related to domestication and agriculture. As far as moving man from hunter-gatherer to civilization builder, Adam got it done as this is the right time and place for those things to begin in human history.
The flood was local, around 6,500 years ago in an area near to the Turkey-Iran border. It wiped out the animals created in chapter 2, not 1, except for those on the ark., and the Adamic race - in particular the line of Seth. The flood did not kill all the descendants of those humans created in chapter one. The reason the text talks about the entire earth going to ruin is because the line of Messiah would be wiped out, not because everyone would drown. Some of the things in chapter 7 are from the perspective of Noah’s sons. To them it did seem like everything was wiped out.
I lay out a detailed case that this is what the scriptures are saying in the book, but judging by what I am experiencing here it is of no avail. The human condition is to leap to what we think a man is saying so that we cannot hear what he is actually saying. Merry Christmas!
Chimpanzees are about twice as diverse as humans. Humans have had an effective population size of something like 15,000. The census size for both species was almost certainly larger, but there’s nothing wrong with 50,000 as an estimate.[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:114, topic:37468”]
To preserve naturalism, they should be somewhat spaced out. How long does it take a new gene- not just a variant of an existing gene but a new gene, to spread from one individual to EVERY individual in a population of that size when they have long generations and low fertility rates?
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With no selective benefit, it takes on average 4 times the effective population size for a new genetic variant to reach fixation – call it 60,000 generations for ancestral humans. What you seem to be missing, though, is that is also takes the same amount of time for 10 variants, or a hundred or a hundred thousand, to reach fixation. Millions of genetic variants and thousands of new genes (most but not all duplicates of existing genes) are circulating at any given time, and some of them drift to fixation. In a constant-sized population, the rate at which variants fix is the rate at which new mutations occur in a single individual. So for most of our ancestral history, something like forty mutations would have fixed every generation.
So why do you think it would take too much time? How many new genes do you think are circulating at any one time?
Well, no, I’m not interested in bringing in the RTB model, since I think it makes no sense biologically and discards things for which we have good evidence. Why would I want a model that incorporated ideas that I think are completely wrong?
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!
