Below is a surprising excerpt from Anjeanette Roberts’ recent ariticle,
How Can Christians Disagree over Adam and Eve?
How Can Christians Disagree over Adam and Eve? - Reasons to Believe) - DECEMBER 19, 2019
In it she discusses her participation in Jim Stump’s podcast, “The Language of God”. This is an excerpt:
"Venema addresses the genetic data, which Haarsma seems to indicate is what persuaded her not to hold an intermediate date for Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, I think the data and interpretation presented to listeners are filled with inaccuracies. Through multiple conversations over the past two years with computational biologist and founder of Peaceful Science, S. Joshua Swamidass, it has become clear to me that the perspective shared in this podcast is scientifically unsubstantiated.
Recently, in a lecture presented to the RTB scholar community, Swamidass, … explain[ed] how some of the arguments against RTB’s model have included misrepresentations of population genetics that cannot be found in the peer-review literature. For example, it was often reported that population genetics estimates of ancestral population size are the minimum population size, rather than the average population size.
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[The link immediately below a post that contains the video of the lecture she mentions above:
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/swamidass-a-way-forward-for-the-reasons-to-believe-origins-model/9071
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[RTB discussion continued…]
However, by modeling population diversity and dynamics (with many evolutionary, mainstream scientific assumptions considered), it is possibly consistent with the evidence that our ancestral population dipped to as low as 10–20 individuals at 200 kya…"
In fairness, the article does get a little confusing when it comes to using the phrase “sole progenitor pair” in connection with an evolving human population.
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But these two sentences rather jumped out at me a little further down the page:
“Stump admits the complexity of the discussion, and I readily acknowledge that the BioLogos hosts cannot address all the details. Nevertheless, the RTB model can account for all the points raised above, perhaps with some modifications to underlying assumptions. Yet the hosts do not consider the RTB model in their analysis.”
Was this exclusion an accident, or was it more or less unavoidable in view of the BioLogos position against the miraculous mixed in with Evolution?