Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Nature weighs in on “genetic Adam and Eve”

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Recently, we noted the claim that “Genetic Adam and Eve could have been contemporaries … ?”: Here’s Nature on the subject:

The Book of Genesis puts Adam and Eve together in the Garden of Eden, but geneticists’ version of the duo — the ancestors to whom the Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA of today’s humans can be traced — were thought to have lived tens of thousands of years apart. Now, two major studies of modern humans’ Y chromosomes suggest that ‘Y-chromosome Adam’ and ‘mitochondrial Eve’ may have lived around the same time after all1, 2.

When the overall population size does not change (as is likely to have happened for long periods of human history), men have, on average, just one son. In this case, evolutionary theory predicts that for any given man there is a high probability that his paternal line will eventually come to an end. All of his male descendants will then have inherited Y chromosomes from other men. In fact, it is highly probable that at some point in the past, all men except one possessed Y chromosomes that by now are extinct. All men living now, then, would have a Y chromosome descended from that one man — identified as Y-chromosome Adam. (The biblical reference is a bit of a misnomer because this Adam was by no means the only man alive at his time.) More.

Comments
Moreover, the genetic similarity between chimps and humans, with better resolution of data, is falling far below what neo-Darwinists had originally misled people to believe:
Comprehensive Analysis of Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes Reveals Average DNA Similarity of 70% – by Jeffrey P. Tomkins – February 20, 2013 Excerpt: For the chimp autosomes, the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76%, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense the chromosomes, the higher the DNA similarity—although there were several notable exceptions defying this trend. Only 69% of the chimpanzee X chromosome was similar to human and only 43% of the Y chromosome. Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While, chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v6/n1/human-chimp-chromosome Genes from nowhere: Orphans with a surprising story - 16 January 2013 - Helen Pilcher Excerpt: When biologists began sequencing genomes they discovered up to a third of genes in each species seemed to have no parents or family of any kind. Nevertheless, some of these "orphan genes" are high achievers (are just as essential as 'old' genes),,, Orphan genes have since been found in every genome sequenced to date, from mosquito to man, roundworm to rat, and their numbers are still growing. http://ccsb.dfci.harvard.edu/web/export/sites/default/ccsb/publications/papers/2013/All_alone_-_Helen_Pilcher_New_Scientist_Jan_2013.pdf "More than 6 percent of genes found in humans simply aren't found in any form in chimpanzees. There are over fourteen hundred novel genes expressed in humans but not in chimps." Jerry Coyne - ardent and 'angry' neo-Darwinist - professor at the University of Chicago in the department of ecology and evolution for twenty years. He specializes in evolutionary genetics (and inquisition style censorship).
Even if the genomes had been 99% similar, the neo-Darwinian mechanism would still be grossly inadequate to explain the genetic differences between chimps and humans:
Thou Shalt Not Put Evolutionary Theory to a Test - Douglas Axe - July 18, 2012 Excerpt: Any aspect of the transition that requires two or more mutations to act in combination in order to increase fitness would take way too long (>100 million years). My challenge to McBride, and everyone else who believes the evolutionary story of human origins, is not to provide the list of mutations that did the trick, but rather a list of mutations that can do it. Otherwise they're in the position of insisting that something is a scientific fact without having the faintest idea how it even could be." Doug Axe PhD. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/thou_shalt_not062351.html
Moreover, mutations to DNA are not even on the right level of the information hierarchy of the cell to address basic changes in body-plans:
‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’ - Stephen Meyer - (excerpt taken from Meyer/Sternberg vs. Shermer/Prothero debate - 2009)
Moreover, alternative splicing (which is a integral, though not a complete, part of body-plan development) is now found to be vastly different between chimps and humans
Evolution by Splicing – Comparing gene transcripts from different species reveals surprising splicing diversity. – Ruth Williams – December 20, 2012 Excerpt: A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,, A commonly discussed mechanism was variable levels of gene expression, but both Blencowe and Chris Burge,,, found that gene expression is relatively conserved among species. On the other hand, the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,” said Blencowe.,,, http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view%2FarticleNo%2F33782%2Ftitle%2FEvolution-by-Splicing%2F
As if all that wasn't bad enough for Darwinists, the ratio of beneficial mutations to slightly detrimental mutations (harmful mutations which are below the power of natural selection to cull from a population before they spread throughout the population) is grossly out of proportion for what Darwinism needs for it to even be considered remotely feasible in the first place:
A graph featuring 'Kimura's Distribution' is shown in the following video: Evolution Vs Genetic Entropy - Andy McIntosh - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4028086
Moreover, despite all the cartoons that are around in the popular press showing that man evolved from chimps, the fact of the matter is that in reality, not in cartoon drawings, the fossil record itself shows the abrupt appearance of our genus in the fossil record:
“A number of hominid crania are known from sites in eastern and southern Africa in the 400- to 200-thousand-year range, but none of them looks like a close antecedent of the anatomically distinctive Homo sapiens…Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented…there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or the intellectual sense.” Dr. Ian Tattersall: – paleoanthropologist – emeritus curator of the American Museum of Natural History – (Masters of the Planet, 2012)
i.e. no matter which way you test it Darwinism is found to be absurd as to explaining the origination of humanity!bornagain77
August 7, 2013
August
08
Aug
7
07
2013
09:07 PM
9
09
07
PM
PDT
correction: Actually when one takes a good hard look at the genetic evidence (withOUT Darwinian blinders on),,,bornagain77
August 7, 2013
August
08
Aug
7
07
2013
08:16 PM
8
08
16
PM
PDT
Actually when one take a good hard look at the genetic evidence (with Darwinian blinders on), as Dr. Carter and Dr. Sanford did, then there is very good scientific reason for us to believe the genetic evidence actually supports one man and one woman (i.e. Adam and Eve) as the originators of all humanity, and falsifies the neo-Darwinian account: notes: Here is a paper which, though technical, shows that the modern genetic evidence we now have actually supports Adam and Eve. Moreover, the evidence it presents from the latest genetic research is completely inexplicable to neo-Darwinism, i.e. neo-Darwinism, once again, completely falls apart upon rigid scrutiny; (and although I don’t agree with the extreme 6000 year Young Earth model used as a starting presumption in the paper for deriving the graphs, the model, none-the-less, can be amended quite comfortably to a longer time period. Which I, personally, think provides a much more ‘comfortable’ fit to the overall body of evidence) The Non-Mythical Adam and Eve! - Refuting errors by Francis Collins and BioLogos http://creation.com/historical-adam-biologos CMI has a excellent video of the preceding paper by Dr. Carter, that makes the technical aspects of the paper much easier to understand; The Non Mythical Adam and Eve (Dr Robert Carter) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ftwf0owpzQbornagain77
August 7, 2013
August
08
Aug
7
07
2013
08:16 PM
8
08
16
PM
PDT
Ah, Barb, you might want to read the article. The common ancestor from which all Y-chromosomes descend wasn't the first man - he was one of tens of thousands alive at the same time.wd400
August 7, 2013
August
08
Aug
7
07
2013
06:18 PM
6
06
18
PM
PDT
“Science now corroborates what most great religions have long been preaching: Human beings of all races are . . . descended from the same first man.”—Heredity in Humans (Philadelphia and New York, 1972), Amram Scheinfeld, p. 238. “The Bible story of Adam and Eve, father and mother of the whole human race, told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today: that all the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.”—The Races of Mankind (New York, 1978), Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, p. 3. Acts 17:26: “[God] made out of one man every nation of men, to dwell upon the entire surface of the earth.” Thank you, science, for catching up with what Christians have known for a long, long time.Barb
August 7, 2013
August
08
Aug
7
07
2013
05:25 PM
5
05
25
PM
PDT
OT: Casey Luskin exposes more of Nick Matzke's misrepresentations: Does Natural Selection Leave "Detectable Statistical Evidence in the Genome"? More Problems with Matzke's Critique of Darwin's Doubt - Casey Luskin August 7, 2013 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/08/does_natural_se075171.htmlbornagain77
August 7, 2013
August
08
Aug
7
07
2013
12:52 PM
12
12
52
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply