George, you have ignored the evidence I have presented in quite a few of my previous posts:
True humans are NOT the exclusive product of Darwinian evolution. In all probability, the species, Homo sapiens, was produced slowly through natural selection. However, about 150K yrs after they appeared on the scene, Homo sapiens took a Great Leap Forward in behavior, in culture, in the realization that they were spiritual as well as material beings–all this with no evidence of a genetic cause. Who believes this? Well for starters, Richard Dawkins, Ian Tattersall, Simon Morris, Jared Diamond currently, and, of course, Alfred Wallace, co-dicoverer of evolution, who never agreed with Darwin on The Descent of Man.
The phenomenal increase in primate brain size was an EXaptation, but it did allow the Neanderthals to craft superior tools, to make the clothing necessary to survive northern winters during the Ice Age, and to hunt cooperatively as effectively as lions and wolves do. Same for the Homo sapiens who lived along side them. But after the GLF, and with a slightly smaller average brain size, H.s quickly out-competed the Neaderthals and became Masters of the Planet. This happened much faster than any sexually transmitted genetic improvement could have accomplished. What is your view of biology that will explain the evidence of the Frenchman who lives comfortably in today’s complex society but who has no more brain matter than Lucy, the Australopithicene, who lived some 3 million years ago?
You are correct on one point: Culture trumps Biology; or, if you agree with Teilhard de Chardin as I do, the Noosphere supersedes the Biosphere and the Universe is witnessing a whole new ballgame.
Al Leo
I will admit to being somewhat uncomfortable with exegesis of Genesis. Are you suggesting that the Neanderthals could possibly be the “people of Nod” and therefore not descendants of Adam? I would rather suggest that the ‘Nodians’ are Homo sapiens who have not yet had their Brains programmed into Minds.
I surely wish your link was to the entire article and not just the abstract. Sounds very interesting.
Al Leo
I thought the article sounded quite interesting, too. I can’t access it directly, but I should be getting it through interlibrary loan within a few days. I’ll be happy to pass it along if @Swamidass doesn’t beat me to it.
Update: the article arrived much more quickly than anticipated – send me a PM with your email address and I will pass it along
I simply point out that your outlook is not supported by evolutionary biology - your other points amount scientifically to wishful thinking. The cultural and related data simply show that humanity entered the scene in a time frame similar to that indicated by the Bible. If I took your argument seriously I would envisage another war in the US, a culture vs biology war. Let the US TE’s etc and atheists get a break from their battles.
I’m suggesting nothing here about theology or scenarios.
@gbrooks9 doubts there are non-homo sapiens with moral agency, and homo sapiens without moral agency. He thinks that human = moral agency.
I’m just giving examples that break his pattern. Moreover, the Genesis text itself appears counters to @gbrooks9 view of moral agency. Adam and Eve are fully human, with the Breadth of Life and the Image of God before they take fruit of the Tree Knowledge of Good and Evil.
I’d also point out there is subtle difference between moral law, moral agency, moral responsibility, moral knowledge, moral truth, moral language, moral awareness, etc. This is a deeply complex topic which is why I think he is surprised that there is actually very strong evidence that monkeys and apes almost certainly have moral agency.
At the same time, for example, one could argue that apes do not have moral law or moral knowledge. I’m sure it will take @gbrooks9 some time to process this one.
I’d be curious the take of our resident philosopher @jstump.
In order to solve the Human Diversity Problem of the current state of the human genome, we need to have a large population 4000 or 5000 years ago.
Because of @Jonathan_Burke’s interesting enthusiasm, I think it is Biblically conceivable that Adam & Eve can be seen as a specific subset of this larger population.
Because of @Swamidass’s own interesting enthusiasm, it is genealogically conceivable that Adam & Eve’s lineage can win the “pedigree lottery” and displace all rivals for “Patriarchal Pair” of all existing humanity - - most importantly, within the 5000 year time frame!
As to the question of Moral Agency, I categorize Adam & Eve as the “First Couple” to be taught Moral Agency (and failing at it). This is not the same as saying all the other humans are incapable of Moral Agency. There is always the First of anything. Once Adam & Eve have the first opportunity, all the other humans of their lineage (which, over “x” number of generations, and within 5000 years, eventually includes 100% of all humanity) are taught the dilemma of Moral Agency as well.
My specific objection, then, is that there is no point in endorsing this schema (< a morally neutral word not to be confused with the American sense of the word “scheme”) - - until we start hearing from YEC leaders or YEC groups that this idea is Biblically acceptable. I am willing to be patient for this to happen. But until we have some public acknowledgement of this, this whole approach is moribund.
Jon may find it an easy pill to swallow, along with the Swami - - but I’m not going to plan my hand-stands until I know that there are YEC’s who agree that a pre-Adamite population of humans is not only feasible but Biblically allowable.
Biblical issues that favor this whole approach would include:
a) who did Cain build his city for?
b) who did Cain marry?
c) how did the “Cain-to-Kenite Pedigree” survive if only Noah’s lineage survived?
Biblical issues that YEC’s will use to refute this approach include:
the account of the Flood says Noah and his family were the only survivors.
Genesis doesn’t specifically acknowledge that there are other people on Earth other than Adam, Eve and his children.
“There are many ways of defining moral agency, and the choice of a
definition is a crucial factor in whether moral agency proves to be
limited to humans. Philosophers like Pluhar set the standard for
moral agency at a relatively high level: the capability to understand
and act on moral principles. In order to meet this standard, it seems
necessary for a being to possess linguistic capacities beyond those
presently ascribed to any other species (with the possible exception of
some language-trained animals). However, a lower standard for
moral agency can also be selected: the capacity for virtuous behavior. If this lower standard is accepted, there can be little doubt that many
other animals are moral agents to some degree.” – Emphasis added
Edit: Forgot to mention that Genesis specifically mentions knowledge …
I don’t think you are going to get very far with this if you have to constantly explain all these options about defining moral agency.
If you look at my post (just above, #26), I am able to arrive at your conclusion without wasting a moment on such matters.
Why would you or anyone think making sub-humans “moral” would be relevant to YECs? Can’t you produce all the necessary rhetorical magic you need with just regular ol’ Homo sapiens?
This is not correct. What you are describing is genetic ancestry, not genealogical ancestry.
Genetics is “either or” but genealogy is “both and”.
There is no pedigree lottery to become universal genealogical ancestors. It is exactly the opposite. There is a pedigree lottery the other way around, the “winner” will not become universal genealogical ancestors. No special magic is required except but sufficient (but unobservable) migration. Under that untestable or observable condition, it is virtually certain that that everyone alive at, say 8,000 years ago, is either genealogical ancestors of everyone or no one.
I accept your definition and clarification of the term “Pedigree”. I shouldn’t have used that term. It has a specific meaning.
However, it doesn’t change my position a wit, which is to say that it is conceivable that Adam and Eve’s descendants could have migrated in such a way (presumably with God’s unknown assistance), to have “captured” all the other (and more populous) lineages alive 4000 years ago.
Otherwise, I’m not sure why you have thrown in the 8,000 year figure!
If YEC’s are convinced the Genesis genealogies are essentially correct, then you aren’t doing anyone any favors by trying to push the Adam & Eve “nexus” back to 8,000 years. It’s just something more that YECs will resist.
For other readers who are not quite comfortable with the ability of one kin group to “take over” other kin-groups, I am hoping this example will help:
From Quora (if you have - - or want - - access to Quora):
“It is the nature of surnames to go extinct. Historical data and mathematical models show that the number of surnames inevitably decreases over time. In fact, [FN] the total number of surnames would keep reducing until there is only one surname. Probably not MacLeod.”
[^ Author’s clever movie reference to “There can be only one”!]
While this is an unlikely scenario, it is certain that surnames do go extinct, and that their numbers will drop sharply over the next few centuries.
How do we know? Maths.
In Great Britain during the Victorian era, high-born aristocrats started to become concerned that ‘good families’ like theirs were becoming extinct. After all, ‘everyone’ knew a childless gentleman who was the last of a family that had been recorded since the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Meanwhile, thousands of new Joneses, Taylors, Murphys and Cohens arrived in London every year. Naturally, pro-eugenics scientists were just as drawn to this question as were the classists and racists who didn’t have a degree in classism and racism. Francis Galton wrote that:
The tendency is universally true, and, in explanation of it, the conclusion has been hastily drawn that a rise in physical comfort and intellectual capacity is necessarily accompanied by diminution in “fertility”… If that conclusion be true, our population is chiefly maintained through the “proletariat,” and thus a large element of degradation is inseparably connected with those other elements which tend to ameliorate the race.
Galton doubted that aristocratic names died out faster, but gave up on doing the maths himself. His friend, mathematician Henry William Watson, took it up, and discovered the Galton-Watson process, determining that a high rate of surname extinction inevitably occurs as the ‘Game of Names’ plays out over time.
Rules of the game. 1.British surnames, like most Earth surnames, are patrilineal. They only pass on when offspring are male. 2.Offspring are randomly either male or female. 3.Too many females over time results in an extinct name.
In any given generation, some surnames will randomly produce more females; lowering their chance of survival over time. A few generations with an excess of males tend to make a surname much more likely to survive in the long term, while just a few generations with an excess of females will trend the surname toward eventual collapse…
The same thing happens if surnames are inherited only through the female line, or in some other even process. It also happens if the process is not even. It just takes longer. If no new surnames are invented and the population does not grow, the trend is toward 1.
This is borne out by historical evidence. The real world isn’t a Galton-Watson model. Surnames get adopted, misspelled, inherited through daughters, hyphenated, and decimated by local mass death events. However, the general process looks much like the above. The trend is toward surname extinction, and we can see that by looking at actual cultures.
Surnames have been adopted at different times in different cultures. Chinese surnames are very old and there are very few of them, only about 3,000, and nearly a quarter of the population is either a 王 (Wang), a 李 (Li), or a 張 (Zhang). Some villages only have one surname remaining. This compares to over 100,000 surnames in the much smaller Netherlands, where surnames were adopted far more recently —closer to 10 generations than 50.
Again, in the real world this isn’t just because of a natural process. In China, many people adopted popular Han surnames as their ethnic group assimilated. In many countries, surnames are multiplying (immigration, hyphenated, combined, and newly-invented surnames).
[Footnote: The author also mentions several other conditions that could trigger new last names: " … if humans were to stabilize the global population, never colonize other planets, avoid species extinction, encourage long-distance migration, and make it globally illegal to invent new surnames…" I’m not sure stabilizing the global population would have much affect either way.]
Final comment from @gbrooks9:
The fact that “genealogical connection” to Adam and Eve can come through either the male or female lineage, Adam & Eve’s conquest of the human population could happen at twice the rate, or probably the geometric Square of the normal rate of conquest by just the male lineage, or the female lineage, alone.
Not sure I follow what you’re saying here. What do you mean when you say that the creation of Adam the individual was not a physical but a spiritual event? Are you saying that Adam the individual was already a fully-grown man in the ANE when God spiritually “created” him?
@Jay313, I think what @Jon_Garvey is saying is that the difference between Adam and his fellow hominids (if one accepts that there were fellow hominids) was in his soul… not in his genetics or his phenotype.
Not really. Unless I misunderstand, both Jon and Joshua are proposing a literal/real individual named Adam placed into a literal Eden about 6-8,000 years ago. (Thus, in the context of existing humans and human culture, not Neanderthals or Denisovans or some other hominin.) I am asking whether he is postulating an Adam specially created by God, body and soul, and placed in that garden, or whether he is postulating an already-existent man named Adam who was “englightened” or “ensouled” by God. Is that more clear?
On several threads in this Forum I have espoused the postulate highlighted above: [I have doubts about a literal Garden of Eden, but I am impressed with the evidence for a **Great Leap Forward** that resulted in humankind.] All the Homo sapiens living at ~50K yrs. ago had brains with enough neurons that, if formed optimally into operationally functional circuits, would out-perform today’s IBM Watson computer. Darwinian evolution had produced, through EXapltation, brains that could be ‘programmed’ into Minds. But, you should ask: is any such ‘programming’ biologically possible? Not by any mechanism we know currently. But God has a lot of surprises “up His sleeve”. I have expressed this previously as: "DNA methylation in mammalian genomes regulates gene expression, but it seems to have an added function in the brain where it is important in the maturation of neurons in the process of development. In the frontal cortex, methylation profiles are altered as synapses develop and are matured all the way from the fetal to the adult stage of life. In others words, this may be the mechanism by which the brain ‘hardware’ is being newly connected, i.e. ‘programmed’ by information acquired not from DNA but directly from the environment (in utero to old age) and by language from other humans so endowed. This epigenetic evolution is clearly Lamarkian in nature, rather than Darwinian. And it is purposeful, not the result of chance."
Many participants in this Forum are far more knowledgable than I am in this area of science. E.g. @DennisVenema. I would greatly appreciate their comments and criticisms.
Al Leo
What I have in mind is that there is a “saltation” inherent in the Genesis concept of man, in that he comes into close relationship with God and some kind of headship of the race, which is not to be equated with his biological/evolutionary origins or his cultural development, as observable by science.
Now, those things are also necessary (eg Adam could not have been a monkey), but not sufficient nor, in themselves, indicative of what is described as Adam’s special status.
Whether this also constitutes the “image” of God depends on whether Genesis 1 speaks of the creation of Adam or not - I’m currently inclined to think it does, in order for Genesis to be consistent in its understanding of “man” (adam).
I described the creation of Adam as not “necessarily” physical not to deny that creative action lies behind man’s biological origin, but rather to leave somewhat open the question of the special creation of Adam - for my Catholic friends, you understand! Personally, I consider his spiritual birth into relationship with God sufficient to warrant the “creation” word.
Additional note because Leo mentioned Dennis Venema: it’s at least theoretcially possible, if Adam is “amongst existing fellows”, for him to be created physically de novo with a genome comparable with theirs, thus defusing the genetic objections to a recent Adam (as in Joshua’s 100 year old tree). However, it’s a bit gratuitous, and so I see no reason to support it, except (as i said) that it’s an article of faith for some Catholics and it’s not logically impossible.
Jon, I am not quite sure what you mean, comparable. I am postulating that Adam’s genome was exactly the same as previous Homo sapiens. His becoming Human was EPI-genetic, and, incidentally, issued in the Noosphere which evolves purposefully (Lamarkian) not via chance.
Al Leo
Once again @gbrooks9, this is all wrong. Your analogies of surnames is wrong. This matches the genetics, but not the genealogies. Your intuition is wrong.
I think you should pause for a moment on this one.
The central premise you have proposed is that descendants of Adam and Eve (presumably with considerable help from God Almighty) could have insinuated themselves into every human kinship group on Earth, and be part of their genealogies at one point or another.
This does not require that people are only descended from Adam or Eve. It only requires that Adam and Eve appears somewhere in their ancestral “cone”, “pyramid” or any other geometric allegory you prefer.
But I will agree with you that my example is not a perfect match to the scenario at hand. And there are some differences in the dynamics.
But I decided if people could understand how the use of “non-hyphenated sir names” can ultimately lead to the monopolistic survival of just a single sir name - -
in a single town,
or in an entire country,
or even for the whole planet - -
it would be more understandable how a mating pair 4,000 years ago could - - conceivably - - become ancestral to all of humanity, while at the same time preserving the kind of genetic diversity the larger/older non-Adamic population would have had to have in order to explain the diversity we find in the human genome today.
Perhaps it would be helpful to look at this genealogical issue from a slightly different perspective. At the bottom of the posting is a link to a 2009 article:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans
by Douglas L. T. Rohde1, Steve Olson2 & Joseph T. Chang3
1] Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
2] 7609 Sebago Road, Bethesda, Maryland 20817, USA
3] Department of Statistics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
It includes this rather stunning introductory paragraph:
“If a common ancestor of all living humans is defined as an
individual who is a genealogical ancestor of all present-day
people, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly
mating population would have lived in the very recent
past” [Footnotes 1,2 & 3]
“However, the random mating model ignores essential
aspects of population substructure, such as the tendency of
individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and
the relative isolation of geographically separated groups. Here
we show that recent common ancestors also emerge from two
models incorporating substantial population substructure.”
“One model, designed for simplicity and theoretical insight, yields
explicit mathematical results through a probabilistic analysis. A
more elaborate second model, designed to capture historical
population dynamics in a more realistic way, is analysed
computationally through Monte Carlo simulations.”
These analyses suggest that the genealogies of all living
humans overlap in remarkable ways in the recent past. In
particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just
a few thousand years ago in these models. Moreover,
among all individuals living more than just a few thousand
years earlier than the MRCA, each present day human has
exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So… observations & conclusions?
A) The journal article is touching on the often ignored genealogical reality that starting with any pair of ancestors, and following their descendants down towards the current date, you will inevitably find multiple incidents of a man or woman marrying his or her distant cousin! In keeping with the wise dictum that “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”, marrying one’s first cousin is not universally banned. There are more than 20 American states, including my home state of Massachusetts, where marriages to first cousins are completely legal. In Afghanistan, nearly a third of marriages are to first or second cousins; in that country this practice simultaneously supports intense tribalism as well as a deterrence to being kidnapped by your in-laws and held for ransom. Marriage is very serious business in Afghanistan.
B] If one were to visualize each generation of ancestors as a giant wheel [see wheels images below, provided by @gbrooks9], with you in the center, and each generation of parents as halving the arc of the circle immediately succeeding the parents (see image below), whenever cousins marry, the wheel immediately (and eternally) loses a wedge of unique ancestors that extends back all the way to Africa !
C] Because of the generational compression created by the inevitable pairing of cousins, the purely mathematical calculation of how many descendants Charlemagne or Attila the Hun could have is impossible to achieve (which under some assumptions would amount to more people than have ever lived on the Earth!).
D] It also means that, with just a few assumptions, it is not as difficult as I once imagined for a mating pair, 2 or 3 thousand years ago, to be somewhere on the ancestral/genealogical tree of every single person now living!
Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult for descendants to avoid pairing with their own cousin! If they could avoid it, it would be easier to preserve unique lineages from ancient times. And thus, conversely and unavoidably, the lineages of those known to have lived within recorded history become unavoidably “smushed” together!
Instead of having 127 people in 7 generations, the example shown below only has 106 in 7 generations (with the impact of some individuals doubling). And the further back in time the wheel is extended, the bigger the numerical affect on the number of unique individuals in your genealogical chart.
This is not collapse of a pedigree - - it is the collapse of the genealogical chart!
[@Swamidass, you gotta love the irony of this, aye!?] Have a wonderful evening!
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