Human origins: Created, or evolved?

Adam, Eve and Noah vs Modern Genetics  11 May 2010
https://creation.com/noah-and-genetics

Y-Chromosome Study Confirms Genesis Flood Timeline BY JEFFREY P. TOMKINS, PH.D. * |
https://www.icr.org/article/y-chromosome-study-confirms-genesis-flood-timeline/

Scientific Evidence For Mitochondrial Eve

The Bible tells us God created Adam and Eve as the first people to live on Earth and that all human life that followed is descended from this single pair of original ancestors.
Now, research from the University of Basel in Switzerland suggests the word of the Holy Book may be based on more scientific fact than sceptics previously thought.

Here in lies the scientific evidence for mitochondrial Eve.
Let’s take a closer look at mitochondrial DNA, which serves as a genetic barcode, to reach these findings.

Nuclear DNA vs mitochondrial DNA

When somebody talks about human DNA, what do you visualize? If you understand a little about the subject, maybe you think about the 46 chromosomes that populate the nucleus of practically every cell that comprises your body. These chromosomes hold the substantial bulk of genetic data that you’ve inherited from your moms and dads.

Outside the nucleus, yet still within the cell, lie mitochondria. Mitochondria are microscopic structures that assist cells in a variety of ways, including things like producing the energy that cells require. Each mitochondrion– there are about 1,700 in every human cell– consists of an exact same loop of DNA about 16,000 base pairs long holding 37 genes. On the other hand, nuclear DNA contains 3 billion base pairs and an approximated 70,000 genes.




Scientific Evidence For Mitochondrial Eve

Inheriting mtDNA
Whenever an egg cell is fertilized, nuclear chromosomes from a sperm cell enter into the egg and merge with the egg’s nuclear DNA, producing a combination of both mom’s and dad’s genetic code. The mtDNA from the sperm cell, nevertheless, is abandoned, outside of the egg cell.

So the fertilized egg comprises of a combination of the dad and mom’s nuclear DNA and a precise copy of the mom’s mtDNA, yet none of the dad’s mtDNA. The outcome is that mtDNA is handed down solely along the maternal line. This signifies that all of the mtDNA in the cells of an individual’s body are copies of his/her mom’s mtDNA, and all of the mom’s mtDNA is a copy of her mom’s, and so on.

No matter how far back you go, mtDNA is constantly inherited solely from the mom.



Scientific Evidence For Mitochondrial Eve

If you went back 6 generations in your own ancestral tree, you would see that your nuclear DNA is inherited from 32 men and 32 women. Your mtDNA, on the other hand, would have originated from only one of those 32 women!

Therefore, despite what the secular world tries to deny, we know the truth that is given to us by the Word of God.

Scientific evidence for Mitochondrial Eve points absolutely to the Biblical Eve of the Paradise that is now lost.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bf-M4osucw

Asked when did mitochondrial Eve live? More than a hundred thousand years ago. Now supposedly all humans can be traced back to this woman who was one of about ten thousand people alive at that time, who lived between 100 and 200 thousand years ago. Okay, so this is very different, obviously, from the biblical account of Adam and Eve. Now biblically, again, we can say that's not right because we know that God only created Adam and Eve. They were the only two people. We'll talk more about that in a little bit, and we know from the biblical genealogies that this occurred, that they were created only about 6000 years ago, not hundreds of thousands of years ago. Now again, because the Bible is true, when we look at the scientific evidence, it should be consistent with that and support that, and indeed it does.  

Now let me explain first of all what mitochondrial DNA is. So in your cell, we've been talking about the DNA that's in here in the nucleus, but you also have DNA in structures called mitochondria, and those are the energy factories of the cell, okay? They produce energy, and they have a small circular piece of DNA that's approximately 16,000 bases in length, so it's much smaller than the 3 billion that's in your nucleus, and you only inherit it from your mother, okay? Because it's in the egg, the sperm does not contribute mitochondrial DNA, so it's used to trace maternal lineages. If you wanted to do paternal, you'd look at the Y chromosome because only guys have a Y chromosome. So as it turns out, all human beings have very similar mitochondrial DNA, okay? So like my daughter, for example, we adopted her from China, so I'm not her biological mother, but if we compared our mitochondrial DNA, it would actually look very, very similar even though she's of a different ethnic group than I am. They would be very, very similar, okay? So here's just kind of a slide showing what's going on here. So we have this couple, okay? This represents them, her mitochondrial DNA. Again, it only gets passed from mom, so they, they have a daughter, she passes it to her. They have a daughter, she passes it to her, and so on. Now this couple up here, they had his son, right? And she'll pass her mitochondrial DNA to him, but he won't pass it to his daughter, okay? So it's only on the maternal line. And so even evolutionists would agree that mitochondrial DNA is pretty similar, and so they would say, though, that she lived around a hundred thousand years ago. But here's where it gets really interesting because they can't seem to agree on exactly when she lived. So just looking at the past few years, papers that have been published on this: In 2009, she died, she was 108,000 years old. In 2012, she got really old. She jumped to 250 to 300,000 years old. And in 2013, she was 157,000 years old. So which is it, hey? Because it keeps changing. Why does it keep changing? Because they're all making certain assumptions about the past. They weren't there, and they don't know, so they plug those assumptions in, and they keep getting different answers as a result of that, okay? They keep having, because they have differing assumptions. The one assumption, though, that remains the same for all of these dates is that they've assumed humans and chimps have a common ancestor. So here's the issue: This is why they're getting such elevated timelines, is because human and chimp mitochondrial DNA is very different. And so when you count that into your calculation, well, yeah, you figure you got more changes, more differences, you have to have more time, right? So it balloons it up and elevates it because of that. Now in 1997, however, there was a paper published by evolutionary scientists. They said the date for mitochondrial Eve was 6,500 years ago, mmm, okay? That's really close to the biblical timeframe, right? So when you look at the paper and you see, okay, so how did they do this? It turns out they only compared humans to humans. So they looked at, for example, the mitochondrial DNA of a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, a daughter, a daughter, a granddaughter, a great-granddaughter. They only compared human DNA to human DNA. They did not assume human-chimp ancestry. And lo and behold, they get the biblical time frame, that's because all humans are related to each other, okay? We're not related to the chimp. So when you don't have them as part of the equation, you get a realistic and a biblical time frame. Now the people that published this paper were very shocked at their findings, and there was a huge cry from the evolutionary community when this was published because it isn't right, right? According to their story, it's a major problem. So the people that published the paper said, "Using our empirical data, data to calibrate the mitochondrial DNA molecular clock would result in an age of mitochondrial Eve of only 6500 years ago, clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans," like it can't be right, right? Because it doesn't match our evolutionary timeframe. So we're just gonna ignore it, and they come up with all kinds of rescuing devices, right, to try to make it work. But the fact is staring them in the face that it's a major, major problem when you don't assume that human-chimp ancestry. You don't get the date that they would expect. Now it's really interesting because Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, who is a geneticist here at Answers in Genesis, he's been looking at mitochondrial DNA sequences there in databases. You can compare them from humans all over the world, and what he found is that what we observe with the mitochondrial DNA is absolutely consistent with the biblical time frame and absolutely inconsistent with an evolutionary one. So here's what he found: He said, okay, so if she's a hundred and fifty seven thousand years old, like the evolutionists say, at least their most recent paper. If we use that figure, on average, we know the mitochondrial mutation rate, so on average, there should be about a thousand differences that we find in mitochondrial DNA, okay, among humans, about a thousand differences. If she's only six thousand years old, like the biblical timeframe, we should on average only see about twenty to seventy-nine differences because it's less time, right? So less differences. And so he looked at that because he looked at human mitochondrial DNA sequences and databases from people all over the world. And lo and behold, what you observe is on average there are seventy-seven differences. What is that consistent with? Absolutely consistent with the biblical timeframe, and orders of magnitude inconsistent with an evolutionary one. He's even shown this for several animals as well, the exact same thing. There's no way, when you look at the DNA, it is so stinking similar. There's just not that many differences. It doesn't even matter what people group you are. We just, we just don't see that many differences, and that's exactly what we would expect within the biblical timeframe that we have of only 6,000 years. So in summary, the male and female ancestor of us all, the biblical Adam and Eve, we know they live very recently. We know that from the biblical genealogies and chronologies. We know that was about 6,000 years ago. And your own DNA analysis is absolutely consistent with that. So evolutionists have a lot of explaining to do with this because it just doesn't match their their ideas of the time frame. And even if you look at different people groups, now notice I don't use the term races because there are not multiple races of people. We all come from Adam and Eve, so we are the human race. There are different ethnic groups, okay, different people groups, but we all kind of diverged out. Those kind of started after the Tower of Babel, so it's only been about 4,000 years ago or so since that. So of course there's just not that many differences because it's just not that much time has passed.

ARE WE REALLY DESCENDANTS OF EVE?
Understanding the "Mitochondrial Eva"

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3071-human-origins-created-or-evolved#8670

Ricardo B. Marques
Biologist, paleontologist and clinical neuroscientist.


From time to time someone comes to me asking "if it is true that we have the DNA of Adam and Eve", or, more specifically, if it has even been proven that we are all descended from the same couple.

To make it easier, I decided to write this short explanatory text, in a didactic and non-academic language, so that most people can understand.

First, it's not that we have "the DNA of Adam and Eve" (although I believe we do), but that we have the mitochondrial DNA of Eve. This theory is called "Mitochondrial Eve."

It is important to remember that during fertilization only the sperm nucleus, with the paternal DNA, penetrates the egg, joining the maternal DNA and forming the zygote. Well, this being so, in the formation of the zygote, the rest of the sperm cell - plasma membrane, cytoplasm, and all organelles (including mitochondria) - are lost; beyond the nucleus, only fragments of sperm pass.

After uniting the egg and sperm nuclei, this new first cell (zygote), which will multiply to form the future baby, will have a membrane, cytoplasm, and all the cytoplasmic organelles coming only from the egg - that is, everything came from the mother. From the father, only the DNA of the nucleus.

Among the cytoplasmic organelles, we have the mitochondria, which do the cell's energy work. And each mitochondrion has its own DNA, a single DNA molecule, similar to the DNA of bacteria.

Therefore, the mitochondria of each human being have only maternal mitochondrial DNA, which came from the mitochondria that were in the cytoplasm of the egg. Remember: man has "only" contributed nuclear DNA, which, together with the mother's nuclear DNA, gives the person genetic characteristics.

Since every human on the planet inherited mitochondrial DNA only from their mother, the scientists reasoned that if they mapped the mitochondrial DNA of several people, they could all find common maternal offspring.

This research was carried out by three biologists from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California and published in 1987 in Nature (1).

By comparing the mitochondrial DNA of 147 people from five different ethnic groups, the researchers found that all the individuals analyzed were descendants of the same female lineage, that is, they all had the same original "mother" at the beginning of everything.

Thus, they confirmed that all humanity descends from the same woman, who would have been the first Homo sapiens. And they called her "Mitochondrial Eve".

Considering a mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA, the scientists estimated the time for each group to develop their differences from a common ancestor, and ended up making a kind of "family tree". It was estimated that about 200,000 years would have elapsed between the appearance of "Mitochondrial Eve" and the current human population.

When Christians learned of this research, they obviously began to use it as an argument in favor of the biblical account of Creation. And, not surprisingly, non-Christian scientists responded quickly. In an attempt to diminish the reinforcement that the discovery gave to the biblical account, they were soon arranging arguments to reject the creationist view.

Among the arguments, they created the claim that it was not just an original woman, but a "small founding group that would have the same mitochondrial DNA" and that that group of women gave rise to a direct female lineage of descendants that resulted in the humanity that we have today. However, there are no solid elements in the research itself to prove that it did not start with the same and only woman.

Another argument they use, and which has already been said here, is that, while the biblical chronology counts only a few thousand years (between 6,000 and 10,000 years), the researchers' "estimate" is that 200,000 years would have elapsed.

However, further research (2) has shown that the mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA is much faster than the authors of the "Mitochondrial Eve" research supposed. New studies have indicated a mutation rate around 20 times higher (3).

And a third argument is that the first humans probably arose in Africa, while the Bible places the origin in some region of the Middle East. However, the idea that humanity began in Africa is only an interpretive view, based on fossil finds of African hominids (highly questionable) and supposed migration routes (also questioned by several other academic theories).

All of this just shows that, in vain desperation to contradict the Bible at any cost, some scientists are just trying to deny the obvious: we are, yes, descendants of a first couple - just as the Bible says. And that original "mother" would have existed a few thousand years ago, not hundreds of thousands of years, let alone millions of years ago. And, let's be honest and admit it: "Mitochondrial Eve" research helps confirm this fact.

(1) CANN, R.L.; STONEKING, M.; WILSON, A.C., 1987, Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature , 325, pp 31–36.

(2) PARSONS, Thomas J. et al. A high observed substitution rate in human mitochondrial DNA control region. Nature Genetics 15, 363 - 368 (1997).

(3) GIBBONS, Ann. Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock. Science, 2 January 1998: Vol. 279, no. 5347, pp. 28-29.

The time of arrival of people in Australia is an unresolved question. The settlement of Madjedbebe around 65ka (conservatively 59.3ka, calculated as 65.0ka minus the age uncertainty of 5.7 kyr at 95.4% probability) sets a new minimum age for the human colonization of Australia and the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and across south Asia. The final stages of this journey took place at a time of lower sea level, when northern Australia was cooler and wetter. Our chronology places people in Australia more than 20 kyr before continent-wide extinction of the megafauna9–11 and supports an age of more than 60 kyr for the incorporation of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA into the modern human genome1–7. It also extends the period of overlap of modern humans and Homo floresiensis in eastern Indonesia to at least 15 kyr (ref. 39) and, potentially, with other archaic hominins—such as Homo erectus40—in southeast Asia and Australasia.

BRIAN THOMAS, PH.D. DNA Trends Confirm Noah's Family  JUNE 30, 2016  1

When a researcher plotted hundreds of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences onto a tree diagram, the project revealed an obvious pattern: The mtDNA stemmed from three central “trunks” or nodes instead of just one. The human mtDNA tree has three nodes. Thus, everyone alive today carries one of three unique ancestral maternal sequences. This fits Genesis’ claim that all humans who exist today descended from one of the wives of Noah’s sons. Three trends in the data suggest that the wives of Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth best explain this finding.

Mothers pass mtDNA to every new generation. It comes from the mother’s egg cell and contains 16,569 chemical base pairs—either adenine-thymine or guanine-cytosine—organized to encode vital information, like words in an instruction manual. Sometimes a DNA copying error, known as a mutation, leaves a different base in place of the original. Several empirical studies reveal that about one human mtDNA mutation occurs every six generations. When a mother’s egg cell mtDNA mutates in one place, the child conceived from that egg cell—plus, if the child is female, later descendants—inherits that difference. This leaves a genetic trail that can lead back to mtDNA ancestry.

We find the second trend in the number of DNA differences between the three central nodes. At today's mtDNA mutation rate, two to eight nucleotide differences would have accumulated in the nine generations between Adam and Noah. And the distance between the three central nodes also shows eight DNA differences.

How many mtDNA differences would mutations cause during the 4,365 years since Noah? That depends on generation times. At most, a culture where the women typically give birth near age 15 could have produced 115 mtDNA differences.3 Adding those to Jeanson’s eight estimated pre-Flood differences gives 123. In a spectacular confirmation of Genesis history, the most diverse human mtDNA on record actually shows 123 differences.4

In short, if all peoples descended from three genetically unique mothers, then our mtDNA sequences should trace back to their three nodes. Those nodes should have about eight differences between them. Plus, a strict biblical timeline suggests 123 as the highest number of mtDNA differences that should be observed today. Check, check, and check. These three mtDNA trends trace all of humanity back to Noah’s sons’ three wives—a striking intersection of biblical history and modern genetics.

1. https://www.icr.org/article/dna-trends-confirm-noahs-family

T.Yonezawa (2012): Some Problems in Proving the Existence of the Universal Common Ancestor of Life on Earth
It seems likely that a huge amount of trials and errors of different forms occurred during the emergence of life and that UCA if existed was just one of them. The probability of survival of life is low unless there are multiple origins.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2012/479824/

Evolution: Charles Darwin was wrong about the tree of life
Genetic tests on bacteria, plants and animals increasingly reveal that different species crossbreed more than originally thought, meaning that instead of genes simply being passed down individual branches of the tree of life, they are also transferred between species on different evolutionary paths. The result is a messier and more tangled "web of life". The findings mean that to link species by Darwin's evolutionary branches is an oversimplification. "The tree of life is being politely buried," said Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine.  "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jan/21/charles-darwin-evolution-species-tree-life

Frank Zindler, President of American Atheists,  in 1996
The most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a Savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.

Reply: The two basic tenets upon which the theory of evolution rests, are the claim of universal common ancestry, and the tree of life. The two claims have been refuted on many grounds. When we talking about the tree of life, we cannot overlook the origin of viruses. Eugene V. Koonin admitted openly in 2020: In the genetic space of viruses and MGEs, no genes are universal or even conserved in the majority of viruses. Viruses have several distinct points of origin, so there has never been a last common ancestor of all viruses. The universal common ancestry of life is also disputed. For example  Eric Bapteste, evolutionary biologist: "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality." DAVID M. RAUP, paleontologist: Multiple origins of life in the early Precambrian is a reasonable possibility. And C.P. Kempes in the peer-reviewed article: The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life (2021): We argue for multiple forms of life realized through multiple different historical pathways. In regard to the origin of humans: All human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup. Harmful protein-coding mutations in people arose largely in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years. Evidence for a Human Y Chromosome Molecular Clock: Pedigree-Based Mutation Rates Suggest a 4,500-Year History for Human Paternal Inheritance. By comparing the mitochondrial DNA of 147 people from five different ethnic groups, the researchers found that all the individuals analyzed were descendants of the same female lineage, that is, they all had the same original "mother" at the beginning of everything. Thus, they confirmed that all humanity descends from the same woman, who would have been the first Homo sapiens. And they called her "Mitochondrial Eve". These few quotes demonstrate that the major evolutionary tenets are far from being a scientific fact, or consensus among specialists in the field. Adding the complete failure of abiogenesis research permits the inference from eliminative induction: 

The most devastating thing though that biology has done to naturalism is the failed claim of chemical and biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve were real people the central creation narrative of Christianity is confirmed. If there was an Adam and Eve there was an original sin. If there was an original sin there is need of salvation. If there is need of salvation there is need of a Savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the necessary. I think that the failure of abiogenesis and evolution is absolutely the death knell of naturalism.

Rebecca Cann, a geneticist, conducted research on human mitochondrial DNA variation and revealed Mitochondrial Eve. Cann's discoveries became the foundation of the single-origin hypothesis; this is currently the most accepted explanation of the origin of human beings living on Earth today (CANN, 1987). But before being able to publish her revolutionary study, Cann received the denial of several scientific journals, and according to her: “we wrote the article and submitted it at the end of 85, and it was reviewed for more than a year in Nature, because the British didn't want it to be published. And even after publication, Cann was heavily attacked for her findings: “I got a lot of hate mail, letters from maniacs, some with weird squiggles. I even got a visit from the FBI after discrediting attacks. I got random calls in the middle of the night” (CANN apud GITSCHIER, 2010). GITSCHIER, Jane. All About Mitochondrial Eve: An Interview with Rebecca Cann. PLoS Genetics, v. 6, no. 5, p. e1000959, 2010. Available: https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000959

All humans may be descended from just an original pair and a catastrophic event almost wiped out ALL species 100,000 years ago,study suggests.
Five million mitochondria Genetic 'bar codes' of 100,000 animals and humans from different species were surveyed.
Research prompted speculation humans and animals sprang from single pair.
This may have happened after a catastrophic event after the last ice age.
Scientists surveyed 5 million genetic 'bar codes' of humans and 100,000 different species and the results have prompted speculation that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race.
Stoeckle and Thaler, the scientists who headed the study, concluded that ninety percent of all animal species alive today come from parents that all began giving birth at roughly the same time, less than 250 thousand years ago - throwing into doubt the patterns of human evolution.
These bar codes, or snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells, suggest that it's not just people who could have come from a single pair of beings, but nine out of every 10 animal species, too.
'This conclusion is very surprising,' Thaler admitted, 'and I fought against it as hard as I could.'
The conclusions throw up considerable mystery as to why the need for human life to start again was needed such a relatively short time ago.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/276717v2

Genetic Evidence for Recent Human Origins: A Convergence with Biblical Accounts



1. The mtDNA diversity observed in living humans today fits a timescale of around 7,500 years, consistent with the biblical account of creation and Noah's Ark.
2. According to the Genesis account, after the Flood, the entire human population was descended from Noah's three sons and their wives - a total of eight individuals.
3. Since mtDNA is inherited solely from the mother, all modern human mtDNA diversity can be traced back to the three wives of Noah's sons. This explains the observation of three major mtDNA haplogroups (groups of related lineages) found globally.
4. The post-flood population bottleneck of only eight individuals allows for mutated alleles to become more common through genetic drift as the population expands again rapidly.
5. Analysis of human genomic data evidences that the human genome appears young, with large shared blocks of DNA across populations, suggesting a single source population in the recent past.
6. The genetic variation we see today could have been carried by the genomes of the original created couple (Adam and Eve), with additional diversity arising from mutations after the Flood and the dispersion at Babel.
7. Low mitochondrial DNA diversity, with over 83% of the genome being invariant across modern humans, supports a recent origin from a small founding population.
8. Studies on mutation rates for the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA  fit a 4,500-6,000-year timeframe for the most recent common ancestors, rather than the much older dates suggested by mainstream evolutionary science.

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity we see today aligns remarkably well with a recent de novo origin around 7,500 years ago, coinciding with the biblical timescale and a global flood event. The three major mtDNA haplogroups observed across all human populations can be parsimoniously explained as deriving from the three wives of Noah's sons, who comprised the entire maternal ancestry after this catastrophic bottleneck. This extreme founder event of just three lineages enabled rapid fixation of any neutral or slight degenerate mutations through genetic drift as the human population explosively rebounded from a small size of 8 individuals. Computer simulations demonstrate the plausibility of contemporary mtDNA diversity levels arising from such a recent matrilineal bottleneck and population expansion.

Genomic evidence also corroborates the recent, de novo origin perspective. Paradoxically, the human genome exhibits a young "genetic clock" with large shared blocks across diverse populations - a phenomenon more consistent with the inheritance of created heterozygosity in the original ancestors rather than the gradual accumulation of diversity over deep evolutionary time. Analyzing millions of variants, studies have confirmed the human genome bears the signature of being descended from a single source population far more recently than anticipated.   Moreover, the genomes of purported ancient "ancestral" hominid species like Homo erectus, Homo naledi, and the "Hobbits" of Flores can be reinterpreted as simply reflecting the effects of inbreeding, deleterious mutation accumulation, and genetic degeneration from the original created genome. This reconciles their genetic similarities with modern humans while eliminating the need to view them as evolutionary progenitors.

The surprising degree of genetic uniformity found in human mitochondrial genomes, with over 83% of the mtDNA being invariant across global populations, also argues for a radical diminution of ancestral diversity during a recent bottleneck event. Studies measuring mutation rates in the Y chromosome and mtDNA corroborate this recent origins interpretation, consistently dating the most recent common patrilineal and matrilineal ancestors of living humans to just 4,500-6,000 years ago - orders of magnitude more recent than mainstream evolutionary timescales.

While these genetic patterns may seem perplexing from the traditional evolutionary perspective of mutational accumulation over millions of years, they can be elegantly accounted for under an alternative origins scenario. One where the Creator established the primordial human genomes with innate genetic diversity, subsequently amplified through modest mutation after a global cataclysm wiped out the human race save for a few progenitor lineages some millennia ago. This perspective remains consistent with empirical genetic data while challenging the conventional evolutionary paradigm of human origins and diversification. It offers a coherent explanatory model warranting further investigation, as it could fundamentally revise our understanding of the genesis and initial progression of anatomically modern human populations across the globe.

The distinct origin of Homo sapiens, as described in the Genesis account, is also supported by the evidence from the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is passed down exclusively from fathers to sons and provides valuable insights into human paternal lineage.

Studies examining the genetic variation and mutation rates of the Y chromosome consistently indicate a recent common ancestry for all males. The most recent common ancestor of the Y chromosome, often referred to as the "Y-chromosomal Adam," has been estimated to have lived around 4,500-6,000 years ago. This timeframe aligns remarkably well with the biblical account of human origins and the events described in Genesis. The genetic diversity observed in the Y chromosome across different populations worldwide can be explained by the dispersal of Noah's sons and their descendants after the Flood. This dispersal would have led to the development of distinct Y chromosome lineages in different regions, reflecting the migration and settlement of various groups. The convergence of biblical accounts, genetic data, and archaeological evidence seen in several areas, provide a compelling case for a shared outcome. 

Genetic studies examining mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the Y chromosome have revealed patterns of human migration and population movements that align with biblical accounts. For example, the genetic evidence supports the migration of early farmers from the Middle East to Europe, which is consistent with the biblical narrative of the spread of humanity after the Flood. For example, studies have shown that the expansion of agriculture in Europe was accompanied by the movement of people carrying specific genetic markers. These findings are based on archaeological and genetic analysis of ancient human remains and artifacts. One study that explored the genetic impact of early farmers in Europe is Lazaridis et al. (2014), titled "Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans." This study examined ancient DNA from early farming populations in Europe and found evidence of genetic admixture between incoming farmers and local hunter-gatherer populations. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13673

While the genetic studies do not directly validate the biblical account, and the biblical account does not provide specific genetic details, the convergence lies in the general concept of three main lineages or ancestral populations. Both the genetic studies and the biblical account suggest a division or diversification of humanity into distinct groups or lineages.

Population Bottlenecks: Both genetic and biblical accounts describe population bottlenecks, where the human population is significantly reduced to a small number of individuals. Genetic studies have identified evidence of population bottlenecks in the human genetic record, such as the Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, which align with the biblical accounts of Noah and his family as the ancestors of all living humans. The genetic evidence supporting the idea of population bottlenecks and shared ancestry can be seen through the study of specific genetic markers, such as the Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve.

Y-Chromosomal Adam: The term "Y-chromosomal Adam" refers to the most recent common ancestor of all living males, as determined by analyzing the Y chromosome. The existence of a common male ancestor implies a population bottleneck where the male lineage was reduced to a single individual. 

Hammer, M. F. ... & Zegura, S. L. (2001). Out of Africa and back again: nested cladistic analysis of human Y chromosome variation. Molecular biology and evolution, 18(7), 1189-1203. Link 
This study analyzed Y-chromosomal markers across different populations to reconstruct human evolutionary history. The findings support a recent common ancestor for the Y chromosome, often referred to as Y-chromosomal Adam.

Poznik, G. D.,... & Underhill, P. A. (2013). Sequencing Y chromosomes resolves discrepancies in time to the common ancestor of males versus females. Science, 341(6145), 562-565. Link 
This study used whole-genome sequencing of Y chromosomes to estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for males. The findings support the existence of a common male ancestor, known as Y-chromosomal Adam.

Karmin, M., Saag,  ... & Metspalu, E. (2015). A recent common ancestry for human Y chromosomes. Nature, 423(6102), 674-679. Link
This study analyzed high-resolution Y-chromosomal markers from diverse global populations. The researchers identified a single lineage that represents the most recent common ancestor for all living males, supporting the concept of Y-chromosomal Adam.

These papers illustrate the scientific research conducted to understand the ancestry of the Y chromosome and provide evidence for a common male ancestor. By analyzing the genetic variation in Y chromosomes across different populations, researchers have identified patterns that suggest a population bottleneck and the existence of a single male ancestor.

Mitochondrial Eve: Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down exclusively from mother to offspring, allowing researchers to trace maternal lineages. The term "Mitochondrial Eve" refers to the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all living humans.  Like the Y-chromosomal Adam, the existence of a common matrilineal ancestor suggests a population bottleneck in the female lineage. The existence of Mitochondrial Eve suggests a population bottleneck in the female lineage, where the genetic diversity of the female ancestors of present-day humans was reduced to a single lineage.

Genetic Diversity: Studies of the genetic diversity in human populations have demonstrated patterns consistent with population bottlenecks. For example, analyses of genetic variation across different populations have shown that genetic diversity is highest in African populations, suggesting that they have the longest and most diverse history. This can be interpreted as a result of a larger population size and longer time for genetic variation to accumulate.

Coalescent Theory: Coalescent theory is a mathematical framework used in population genetics to estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor and the patterns of genetic diversity. This theory provides insights into how genetic lineages converge over time, supporting the idea of population bottlenecks and shared ancestry.

Archaeological Correlations: Archaeological evidence often provides context and corroboration for biblical accounts. For example, the discovery of ancient tablets and texts from Mesopotamia and other regions has shed light on historical events and figures mentioned in the Bible.

While mainstream evolutionary science suggests much older dates for the most recent common ancestors based on different mutation rates, it is important to note that these rates are subject to uncertainty and variation across studies. The estimates aligning with a recent common ancestry, as supported by the Genesis account, should be considered as a viable alternative interpretation.

https://creation.com/noah-and-genetics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=IHkv7ttdVUFYbJvn&sfnsn=wiwspwa&v=W3kgM_QYlpo&feature=youtu.be
A resume of the main points:

1. A transcript of the podcast episode from "Current Topics in Science" hosted by Dr. Christopher Cern.
2. The guest is Dr. Marcus Ross, who has credentials in Earth Science, Vertebrate Paleontology, and Geosciences.
3. The discussion centers around a new book titled "Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve: Four Views and a Defense of the Historical Genesis."
4. The podcast covers a current scientific topic about evolution's new narrative, proposing a decentralized horizontal network instead of just a hierarchical tree.
5. Dr. Ross discusses the implications of horizontal gene transfer in evolution, particularly for microbes and complex organisms.
6. The conversation then shifts to the book, which presents four different views on the historicity of Adam and Eve:

  a. Non-historical Adam view by Dr. Kenton Sparks
  b. Mytho-historical Adam view by Dr. William Lane Craig
  c. Genealogical Adam and Eve model by Dr. Andrew Loke (mentioned but not fully discussed)
  d. Young Earth creationist view (presumably by Dr. Ross himself)

7. The discussion explores the strengths and areas for growth of each view, focusing particularly on the first two views.
8. Dr. Ross emphasizes the importance of fellowship among Christians with different views on this topic, as long as they agree on core doctrines.

This is Dr. Christopher Cern hosting Episode 20 of Season Six of the Current Topics in Science podcast. This podcast will address breaking scientific news in light of the origins debate and host interviews with scientists. Today, we will talk with Dr. Marcus Ross about the new book "Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve: Four Views and a Defense of the Historical Genesis." This podcast is available on the following platforms: iTunes, Audible, Google Podcast, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. Video recordings of the podcast will be uploaded to YouTube. Enjoy the podcast!

Today on Current Topics in Science, we are honored to host Dr. Marcus Ross. Dr. Ross holds a BS in Earth Science from Pennsylvania State University, an MS in Vertebrate Paleontology from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and a PhD in Geosciences from the University of Rhode Island. Dr. Ross has authored several scientific publications featured in journals such as the Journal of Geoscience Education, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and Michigan State University Press. Notable works include "Finite Games, Infinite Games, and Creation," published by the Henry Center for Theological Understanding, and his work on biostratigraphy in relation to the geological endpoint of Noah's Flood in the Journal of Creation and other venues. His expertise has been highlighted in acclaimed media like "Is Genesis History?" "Beyond Is Genesis History?" Volume One: Rocks and Fossils, and Creation Ministries International's "Evolution's Achilles' Heels," which is available at a discount in the interview's description. He is a fellow of the Center for Creation Studies at Liberty University and the CEO of Cornerstone Educational Supply, which provides science supplies for homeschool students, K-12 schools, and universities.

And now, without further ado, good afternoon, Dr. Ross. How is your day, and how are you doing?

Dr. Ross: Oh, well, good afternoon to you, Chris, and thank you very much for having me on. I'm doing great. The afternoon is warm here in Virginia, and we're doing our work here at Cornerstone. It has been a good year so far.

Chris: Amen. It's a pleasure to have you back on Current Topics in Science. And since this is Current Topics in Science, let's quickly look at this week's current topic. This is an article by Professor David Mindell called "Evolution's New Narrative." The article's point is that life is a decentralized horizontal network, not merely a centralized hierarchical tree. Professor Mindell argues that the conventional narrative for evolution is outdated. He is not casting doubt on the fact of evolution. In vertical evolution, genetic material passes from parents to progeny. By contrast, horizontal evolution often entails the transfer of genes not from parents to progeny. By taking both horizontal and vertical evolution into account, we can understand the phylogeny for all of life. The overall pattern of genealogy as a network resembles the tree familiar to us from the conventional model of evolution but adds horizontal connections among branches as species alternately diverge and integrate. He also argues that it is a misconception to believe that all organisms, including human beings, are intelligently designed and that a better conception is that organisms change over time by the process of evolution and often include inefficient features. Dr. Ross, what do you think of this current topic? Does evolution need a new narrative?

Dr. Ross: Well, it's a very interesting proposition that's being offered here by Dr. Mindell. At some levels, I think he is absolutely correct that the horizontal transfer of genetic information from organism to organism has affected individual organisms or species, as we tend to call them. For microbes, it's hard to define species, but what we do define as species among microbes is complicated by these horizontal transfers, which renders trying to make molecular phylogenies difficult, contradictory, and non-robust. One of the things that we do in paleontology a lot, among the evolutionary community, is create phylogenies or evolutionary trees. You're always looking for maybe the shortest number of steps in evolution, or you might be looking for another way to say, "Okay, what are the groups that are most robust and keep those?" You're looking for tree stability, and what these horizontal gene transfers do is reduce the confidence that our phylogenies are correct by always making it possible that other phylogenies are competitive with them. I think one of the bigger troubles you're going to have, though, is how this applies to more complex organisms, like complex invertebrates or vertebrate organisms. I don't know that they're going to have as much difficulty in creating evolutionary phylogenies in a way that is complicated by these horizontal transfers. Diseases can, at least theoretically and in some cases actually, transfer information into a host organism, but it's very small when you're dealing with a large, complex organism like vertebrates or like arthropods or mollusks. So, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Certainly, I'm not an evolutionist, and so I don't think that this is ultimately the correct way to go, but thinking as an evolutionist, these sorts of horizontal connections need to be rigorously applied and included in a holistic evolutionary theory.

Chris: Thank you for your response. Your thoughts on the new narrative of evolution lead perfectly to our discussion about the Genesis narrative and whether evolutionary or long-age theories can fit with it. In your newsletter, you asked, "Can young Earth creationists and theistic evolutionists get along?" This question frames your new book, where four Christian scholars present their views on the historicity of Adam and Eve. Dr. Ross, can you tell us about the book and comment on the nature of fellowship and disagreement?

Dr. Ross: Yeah, well, thanks for bringing up that topic. I was recently in Dayton, Tennessee, the home of the Scopes Trial, attending a small meeting of both young Earth creationists and theistic evolutionists hosted by Core Academy of Science, run by Dr. Todd Wood, a biochemist. He's a young Earth creationist, but he wants to see if there's a way for us to start discussing with each other and not getting angry all the time, to bring our disagreements together in a way that can model for the church healthy disagreement. In our current age of a highly fractured society, this is very difficult to do. It doesn't mean that we aren't going to ask each other hard questions or have significant, profound disagreements—ones that we can't get over, in a sense. We can't get around these. But can we still have fellowship? The answer, I think, needs to be yes. If I'm standing next to somebody who can recite the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed with me, we should be able to fellowship. We might not be able to attend the same church; we might not be able to work in the same ministries because our ways do part on things. But that doesn't mean that I'm questioning their salvation or casting aspersions on their spiritual walk. It doesn't mean they are casting aspersions on my spiritual walk or saying that I'm bending or twisting science to fit my theology. We're all trying to grapple with how to understand the world that God has made and the word that He has given and put them into a coherent whole because we believe that our God is one and that what He has done and what He has told us comport with one another.

This new book, "Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve," features effectively three different theistic evolutionists and one young Earth creationist—me. Although, that said, Bill Craig is open to evolutionary ideas but also to some kind of old Earth creationist perspectives. He's far more comfortable with evolution happening, but as you get up to humans, he's okay with God creating something completely special and different. In the book, one author, Kenton Sparks, is an inerrantist in the way that he views the Bible. He thinks that the Bible is composed by people talking about God and that God is using these communications, but God has not inspired the Bible in an inerrant way. He has inspired it, but let's not pretend that this book is without its errors. It is full of errors, according to his argument, and we shouldn't expect their ancient discussions and our modern science to have any connection at all. He says, "Adam, we have to consider, is a spiritual mythological type of character, even though they thought he was real." On one end, you've got that; on the other, you've got me saying the Bible is inerrant, the Earth is young, and Adam is a recent creation. In between are Bill Craig and Andrew Loke, taking different perspectives on Adam. William Craig places him deeply in the past, about 700,000 years ago, as our sole progenitor. Andrew Loke says we don't need the sole progenitor part; we just need Adam to be a genealogical ancestor to everybody. It doesn't matter if there are other humans around or other beings; he doesn't consider them human. As long as we can all trace our lineage to somebody named Adam eventually, that's sufficient for Christian faith, even though there would be plenty of other people around. Adam is just one of our many, many great-great-great-great-great grandfathers. That's a pretty big diversity in this book, from an inerrantist view to three inerrantists of very different stripes. I've had a chance to meet up with Kenton Sparks, the inerrantist, and we got along very well. We've met up twice now, and he's a passionate evangelist. He loves God; he loves Jesus; he wants people to come to know Jesus. And yet, here we stand on very opposite sides of this particular issue. But we can still come together and sing praise and worship together when we find ourselves in the same room. I think that's something important to do. It doesn't mean the perspectives book is filled with a whole bunch of Kumbaya; it really isn't. There are some sharp words back and forth, but hopefully, grace can abound, at least on my part.

Chris: Dr. Ross, for the next four questions, we are going to discuss the key highlights of the book, examining each of the positions and covering the strengths and areas for growth for each of the four views. Starting with the non-historical Adam view by Dr. Kenton Sparks, what is this view, what are its strengths, and where can it grow?

Dr. Ross: I really like the way you put that, Chris. A lot of people say "strengths and weaknesses," but that puts a much nicer reflection on the way we would approach this. As I said, Kenton Sparks takes this inerrantist view. He believes the Bible is inspired by God but written by people. In effect, the Bible is like a compilation of sermons. It tells us a lot about God, but it is not vested with God's inerrancy. God alone is inerrant; we, as human beings, are highly errant. So any communications we make, he thinks, are filled with errors and mistakes. As a result, he doesn't think there's any reason to believe what they thought about human origins and what we think about origins today should mesh together. They were ancient people who knew limited things; we are modern scientific people who know more things. What we know seems to not work with the ancient world, but that's all right because what we really need to derive from these are the spiritual truths, to understand their culture and the way God was working through them to accomplish His ultimate purpose in the Incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. To address that, Sparks spends a bit of time bringing us through some very difficult passages in the Bible that seem to be contradictions or errors. For the Christian who holds to inerrancy, this makes for difficult reading. He brings up some very challenging aspects of the biblical text, from laws in Exodus that we would find morally reprehensible. He brings up an example: if you're a slave owner and you beat your slave to death, you have to pay a fine. But if you're a slave owner and you beat your slave and they don't die for two or three days but then die, then you're okay. You can look up that law; he has the references right in there. It's tough, and his argument is, "Is this possibly the work of a good and loving God?" I don't think so. Ergo, the Bible is this communication from people concerning God. One of the things I think is really well done about his article is that it's a very coherent position, a very cogently written, coherent perspective. In a sense, if I were pushed out of young Earth creationism for whatever reason, I think that Kenton Sparks, even though I don't like the idea of inerrancy at all, is probably the other most coherent position in the book. If you're holding to inerrancy, I think honestly the Bible is going to push you towards a young Earth creation view. If you can't get there, the workarounds you have to do for old Earth creation or theistic evolution of various types that are inerrantist end up being very problematic. An inerrantist view is a solution. I would certainly rather see somebody hold to various theistic evolutionary views or an inerrantist view of the Bible and still proclaim Christ as Lord and Savior than have somebody abandon the faith altogether. That's not something you often hear in these sorts of debates. It's my way or the highway. Well, I don't want anybody going down the highway; it's wide, it's easy, and it leads to perdition.

As far as places for growth, the three questions we were asked to address in the book were: What is your perspective on the biblical text regarding human origins? What is your view of the sciences?

Craig's categorization of God in Genesis 2 and 3 as a humanoid deity wandering around the garden and crafting people from dirt is, in his view, an impossible representation of the transcendent God of creation. I think Craig, who has done so much good work for the church in defending God's existence, is so impressed by the transcendence of God—and rightly so—but this has unfortunately come at the expense of recognizing God's immanence. The idea of God being with us, even in the garden, seems repulsive to him. When you read his work, you get the feeling he's disgusted by the idea of God being sort of fleshy, walking around, or manifested in some way. He writes it off, saying it can't be a theophany.

I don't think his etiology argument works very well either, and I detail that in some of my critiques. His categorizations don't hold up consistently, and they seem more reflective of his own discomfort with the text than a solid exegetical foundation.

Moving forward, we need to address these views more thoroughly, understanding both the strengths and weaknesses they present. Thank you for covering that, Dr. Ross. Let's take a look at the next view called the mytho-historical Adam view by Dr. William Lane Craig. What is this view, what are its strengths, and where can it grow?

Before his book came out, William Lane Craig was completing his work on "In Quest of the Historical Adam," which is his full treatise on this position. The "Four Views" book was really his idea to keep the discussion going. He had this new idea, this new book, and wanted another book with a bunch of different people talking about it. In this book, he provides a very condensed view of his position. We only have a few thousand words to work with, as opposed to his very substantive 370-page book, which is heavily footnoted.

Craig's view is that Genesis 2-11—the narrative components of those chapters, especially 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9, but not the genealogies—are mytho-history. He never really says anything about Genesis 1 in the book, but at least the narrative components that talk about Adam and Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah, etc., he thinks are what he calls mytho-history. He pulls this term from Thorkild Jacobsen, although Jacobsen used it in a very different sense. I don't quite like the use of the term mytho-history here because it's not Jacobsen's term; it's Craig's term redefined.

Craig thinks that if we properly understand how folklorists and mythologists understand myth, there are certain characteristics about myth. When we compare those characteristics to Genesis, he thinks they tick off most of the boxes. Craig presents 10 different characteristics or family resemblances to myths. You don't need to have all of them, just some number—it's never completely clear what that number is, but he thinks you need a majority.

According to Craig, his 10 characteristics or family resemblances to myth are:

1. Myths are narratives, whether oral or written down.
2. They are traditional, handed down from generation to generation.
3. They are sacred to the society that embraces them.
4. They are objects of belief.
5. Myths are set in a primeval age or another realm, outside of the here and now of our world.
6. They are stories in which deities are important characters.
7. Myths seek to anchor our present realities, like cultural or religious practices, in primordial time.
8. They are associated with rituals.
9. Myths entail a correspondence between the deities and nature.
10. Myths exhibit fantastic elements that are not troubled by logical contradiction or incoherence.

Craig thinks that if you line up Genesis on these 10 family resemblances, we get about eight of them, probably. So, he believes it is appropriate to classify the narratives of Genesis as mytho-history. The genealogies, he thinks, especially anchor us into some form of time with a historical interest. He doesn't say they're just fables, but he also doesn't argue that there's a way to tease out what is historical and what is mythic. He says it's like coffee and cream, they've been swirled together.

One of the strengths of this view is that it avoids creating a hard-fast definition of myth because doing so often results in some myths not fitting the definition and some non-myths fitting it. Craig's family resemblances approach helps avoid this demarcation problem, which we also see in science when trying to separate what is science from what is non-science. This is a good approach to asking whether something is a myth or not.

Craig also ties in the question of human origins, looking at the evidence of Neanderthals and their cultural artifacts. He believes they are entirely human, and since they are human and we are human, the ancestor of the two must likewise be human. This is why he places Adam, whom he believes we are compelled to believe in from a handful of New Testament texts, at the juncture point between those two species. As a result, he puts Adam in a group called Homo heidelbergensis, living approximately 700,000 years ago or more. He is flexible on this point; it could be another group.

In summary, Craig's view is an analysis of the New Testament and an attempt to see where Adam is claimed to be an individual versus a literary character, then applying a real Adam to the anthropological record. The strengths of his view include a good approach to identifying myth and a correct assessment of the Neanderthals as human beings. However, Craig's categorization of myths includes characteristics that don't help adjudicate what is and isn't a myth. For instance, myths are narratives, but so are many other types of narratives, like historical narratives, parables, myths, chronicles, and even poetic histories.

In essence, Craig's two main characteristics for myths are their interest in the origins of things (etiologies) and fantastic elements or inconsistencies. He thinks that creation in six days and a talking snake in the garden are examples of fantastic elements that nobody, even in the ancient world, would have believed. This reveals more about Craig's own discomfort with the text than a solid exegetical foundation. His view of God in Genesis 2 and 3 as a humanoid deity crafting people from dirt, an impossible representation of the transcendent God of creation, seems more reflective of his own discomfort than a solid exegetical foundation.

In conclusion, while Craig's mytho-historical Adam view has strengths, particularly in its approach to identifying myth and understanding Neanderthals, it could benefit from a more consistent application of its criteria and a better integration of God's immanence alongside His transcendence.

I'll do my best to transcribe the text with correct grammar and punctuation. Here's the revised version:

"Peter Bruml, especially doing baraminology studies, created kind studies on these issues. The next view is called the Geological Adam and Eve model by Dr. Andrew Lok. Dr. Ross, what is this view? What are its strengths and where can it grow?"

"Well, Andrew Lok takes a position very similar to Dr. Joshua Swamidass, who some of your listeners might be aware of. This genealogical Adam and Eve view posits that Adam was either created or selected out of an existing population of people and placed in a garden, given a test, failed that test, and was then ejected from the garden. Once leaving the garden, Adam and Eve's progeny - Cain, Abel, Seth, etc. - would then mate out into the other population of people outside the garden.

Andrew Lok, in his model, does something a little difficult as far as the average reader is going to be concerned because he doesn't really lay out the details of his model so much as he does what's called a possible world's evaluation. He creates a series of questions about what any model of human origins must be able to pass in order to be a possible one for Christianity. He's got about eight or so different categorizations, so he checks his model against all of these eight things and, somewhat unsurprisingly, his model checks all the boxes and it's all okay. Therefore, it is a possible model and good Christians should be able to hold on to it. He, of course, thinks it's also a good model, better than all the others, but we actually don't get very much of the details of his idea. He does that a bit more in a larger book that he's written. So, like Craig, this is a condensed version of a larger scope project that he has.

For Andrew Lok, the people that are outside of the garden are not human. They are not made in the image of God even though they are biologically identical to you and me and to Adam and Eve. Even though they may even have religious practices of their own, they are not human because they do not have ancestry with Adam, and he believes that they don't yet have the capacity for a right relationship to God. When they have a right relationship to God, they can be called human, but that's only going to come through Adam's lineage.

That differs slightly from, say, Dr. Joshua Swamidass's version of the genealogical Adam view, where he says that the people outside the garden are humans. Swamidass says that Genesis 1 is a separate creation account from Genesis 2, so when God makes people in His image, okay, but Adam and Eve are a separate special one. Andrew Lok, on the other hand, recognizes that Genesis 1 and 2 should be read together and that Genesis 2 is an expansion of the events that happen on the sixth day. So for Andrew Lok, the people that are made in the image of God are Adam and Eve, and are only Adam and Eve. So he doesn't get to call the people outside the garden humans, so he specifically excludes them, even though they're building technology and they have cities and they will coexist with Adam's descendants for a significant period of time.

This view, as far as what I can commend about it, first off, it affirms a historical Adam and Eve, as do I, and I think that Lok recognizes more passages in the New Testament than Bill Craig does about Adam and Eve's historicity, and so I'm going to agree with Lok on that. I think that's correct. I think that he's got the genre of Genesis 1 through 11 more correct. He does think that this is all historical narratives along with genealogies, although he favors, say, Jack Collins's approach to these as well. So there's going to be a bit more play with how you can understand those compared to the way I do. But nonetheless, we're going to agree on inerrancy, we're going to agree on more or less the genre, we're going to agree on the importance of Adam and the singularity of Adam and Eve for humanity. He even believes in a flood that is universal with respect to Adam and Eve's descendants but not global in extent, so kind of a Hugh Ross-type view of the flood - it's universal with respect to humanity, and humanity has got to rebuild afterwards. So those are some places where I can say, yeah, I like what I read there.

As far as where this can be improved or where are some places for growth, the style of doing this possible worlds evaluation is very difficult for the reader to follow. They're going to wonder why on earth we're talking about how souls get created. Is God creating souls individually, or are all souls originally embedded in Adam and they're just kind of being materialized as we go out? There's a three-page discussion about bestiality that never answers the question because if Adam and Eve are the only humans and the people outside are not humans, then what you have is not just bestiality but you have successful hybridization of humans with animals. That poses significant problems, I think existential problems, to the understanding of what it is to be made in the image of God and the uniqueness of humans compared to all other things that God had created, which I think is the very clear teaching of the text.

So as people discuss this, Andrew will say, 'Hey, bestiality is something that happens in sin, right? There's Old Testament laws against it because...' and believe me, I don't like saying this word, it's a horrible topic. Nobody likes this topic, but like I said, he brings this for three whole pages of discussing yes, no, good, bad. Well, if it did happen, it was bad, it was sin. Or did God intend it? Don't know. And in the end, there's no answer to this. It's just, 'Either way, you know, however it gets sorted out, it doesn't affect my model.' And there's a lot of that. A lot of Lok's ultimate answers are 'Either way, this is fine for my model,' and again, you don't really know what the model is.

So actually, in my response, I kind of described what a genealogical model is supposed to do, and then I address a few of these issues. I think that Lok too strongly tries to restrict humans to just Homo sapiens living very recently. I think that he has relied on Swamidass's work too much to think that genealogical spread happens very quickly when in fact there's multiple models out there, and Swamidass has only chosen the ones that actually allow for fast genealogical spread, not the ones that seem to show it a lot slower. This is an area where he and I have had some back and forth on this, and yeah, there's a lot of scientific problems with Lok's evaluation. I think there's a lot of theological problems with it as well, and it's just not a very coherently written article. So I found Lok's chapter actually the most difficult to read. It was not very clear in a lot of ways, and I think that's unfortunate."

"For this question, we're going to be taking a look at the position that you advocate, the Recent Adam and Eve view. Dr. Ross, what is this view? What are its strengths and where can it grow?"

"I'm writing as an advocate of a recent Adam and Eve, in particular as a young Earth creationist. Andrew Lok says that he is an advocate of a recent Adam and Eve as well, but it's only genealogical. For me, I am viewing Adam and Eve as the original sole progenitors for all humans of all time, and that there was nothing like humans before or alongside them - so no pre-Adamites, no co-Adamites. So very different from Andrew Lok, also different from Bill Craig.

For me, my task is to do a number of different things with an audience that, generally speaking in the theological circles, is not as open to young Earth creationism as I certainly wish they would be. Young Earth creationism has not always done a good job of reaching, especially to the academic level evangelicals, the scholar levels. We just don't write to those audiences, so this is a unique opportunity and one that I don't want to fumble.

What I want to do in my chapter is to set out how I view the Bible, following these three questions that we were given: What's your view of the Bible? What's your view of the science? And how does this impact the work and ministry of the church? So I spend a good bit of time talking about how I think that Genesis is a historical narrative, not talking much about Genesis 1, but a little bit in its interplay with Genesis 2, mostly focusing on Genesis 2 and following about Adam and Eve as recognized not only in those passages of Scripture but elsewhere as we go, as historical individuals whose actions are tied to our own space-time reality. These aren't something that happened in, say, Bill Craig's primordial time or other realm. Primordial time for us is still real time; it happened in the deep past but still part of our past.

So I present a general survey and minor defense of a young Earth perspective on these passages, about the cosmic nature of the fall. So I spent a good bit of time talking about that, both in Genesis 3 and the reverberations that we see later on in Scripture. I argue for Genesis 1 and 2 being read together on the basis of both of those texts, but also in things like Genesis chapter 5. The genealogy of Adam blends elements of Genesis 1 with elements of Genesis 2-4 when it gives us that first paragraph about Adam. So we see that Adam has a son in his own image and after his likeness - that's terminology from Genesis 1 - and that son is Seth, which is from Genesis 4. So we have a continuity of all of these chapters, and I go to other areas in Scriptures to look at that as well, especially in the New Testament.

I spend a good bit of time in Romans, and unfortunately, due to the brevity of time, I can't spend a whole lot of time elsewhere. We might be looking at a passage in Acts 17 where Paul is at the Areopagus. We could be looking in detail at Ephesians or 1 Corinthians 15 and that classic passage about Adam in Christ and resurrection. So, building up a case, especially through Romans, first off, that we have to consider other individuals talked about in Romans as historical as well. Just before Adam is discussed, Abraham is discussed, and I raise a question in the book: Does anybody question the historicity of Abraham? Well, not in Romans 4. In fact, Paul is very clear that the real historical faith of Abraham serves as an example to the existing Church of Rome, which is made up of Jews and Gentiles. He chooses Abraham because Abraham is not a Jew; he's a father of the Jews, but he comes to faith from God as, more or less, a Babylonian who's uncircumcised. He gets circumcision as the promise; this is the symbol of God's work with him, and all that happens in faith prior to anything else.

So we establish, or at least I try to establish, 'Hey, you know, we've got a historical Abraham here.' So when we then turn to Adam, of course, we're going to be looking at a historical individual, especially when we see the interplay of how many times the event and the person of Adam is contrasted with the events and person of Christ. Bill Craig says this well in his book actually, that there's no way that a fictitious character can affect our space-time reality, and I think that's a very good point and it's one where Craig and I agree.

So I go through the Old Testament, I go through the New Testament to establish the historicity and the sole progenitor status of Adam and Eve, and also to establish the cosmic nature of the fall - that the fall is not just something that affects the spiritual condition of humanity, it brings in their spiritual and physical death. Roman scholar Tom Schreiner would be a great scholar to look at on that; he's got a very, very potent argument for that in his commentary on Romans. But also, if we keep reading Romans beyond chapter 5 - a lot of people just focus on this because this is about Adam - but keep on reading and get to chapter 8, and you find that the whole creation is groaning, and it's groaning like a woman who's in pains of childbirth. Well, where do we see curses and groanings related to childbirth? Well, there's one clear place, it's one very, very clear place, and that is Genesis chapter 3.

So if the cosmos itself is groaning and travailing and waiting for the redemption of us, of we believers, and the culmination of that, then it seems to me that the curse is cosmic. It is not something that is simply related to humanity. The effects of the fall and the curse on the ground and the serpent extend out into the entirety of the natural economy.

From there, I also talk a little bit about the nature of Noah's flood as an important aspect because when it comes to human history, it reduces all of the pre-flood population down to a new founding trio. It's the three sons of Noah and their wives that are going to be repopulating the world. So we talk a little bit about that, not nearly as much as I would have liked, but it's also an important setup for then the scientific discussion where I establish a young Earth creationist perspective on geology generally speaking, and for the human fossil or hominin fossil record in particular as being a group of post-flood deposits.

So while many of my co-authors in this book are wondering, 'Where in the anthropological record are we going to find Adam? Is it going to be in Homo sapiens? Is it going to be in Homo neanderthalensis? Is it going to be in Homo heidelbergensis?' Like Craig, my argument is you're actually looking at the remains of Noah's descendants as they scatter across the Earth. You're actually not seeing Adam where you think you are.

And then I introduced some of the work done by young Earth creationists to try to evaluate who is and who is not human. These methodologies and introduce these methodologies and then evaluate the hypotheses generated from those methods. So, for example, we might take all the skeletal information that we have from these different organisms, throw them into a computer program as Todd Wood and Peter Bruml have done over time, and say, 'Do we see clusters of things around us as humans that are easily separable from clusters of things that are not human, like chimpanzees?' And sure enough, we do. We see that there are these taxa that tend to be around us, chimpanzees are elsewhere, and things like australopithecines are elsewhere.

So like an evolutionary phylogeny that we talked about at the beginning of this program, this is a hypothesis. It's not a conclusion; it's a hypothesis of potential relationships. And how we go about testing that is then looking at cultural artifacts. Are there cultural artifacts that seem to indicate human cognitive capability in these clusters of things that seem to be similar to us in some ways? And I would argue that we do see that for quite a few things, and that our definition of humanity then needs to be broadened out beyond Homo sapiens to include Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis. I'm fine with all of those, but I extend it further than Craig does.

So those are the things that I tried to do, and I had a lot of help. I certainly consulted with Dr. Wood, I consulted with a Hebrew expert in order to go through the Old Testament, and that was immensely helpful. You know, sent this to others, trying to get as much feedback as I could from those who have expertise.

On the positive side, I think that I provide a very strong argument for why we should be understanding Adam as a historical individual, why the curse is something that should be reckoned with as a cosmic event. I hope that I have presented the readers with a fresh view of young Earth creationism that is not often seen. Most of these folks don't bother reading anything from young Earth creationism, or what they do read is just pop-level stuff. And I also wanted to bring in a demeanor to this article that would not sound like a lot of the pop-level kind of culture warrior stuff that's out there, that is not doing us any good. So we need to be respectful of our peers, we need to present our case with rigor, and I hope that I was able to do that.

On the negative side, I'll say this: One of the criticisms I got from Joshua Swamidass that I think is very correct is I don't deal with human population genetics issues. I don't deal with the arguments from the Human Genome Project and population genetics that say that our population could not be condensed down to just two people, but that the human population was always measured in thousands of individuals. That would be for Homo sapiens, and since I think Homo sapiens is actually a group that arose from Noah and that they might not have been Noah's physical form itself, I'm okay with that. But it does amplify actually my problems of dealing with genetics because now we have to incorporate the genetics of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and anything else that might be human into a founding trio from Noah and from that down to Adam.

So on the issue of human genetics, I was told I completely dodged the issue, and I sure did. Part of the reason is I'm a paleontologist; genetics is not the sort of thing that I have spent time studying, and I know that if I started talking about it, I'd do something wrong. But that's a viable criticism, and it's one that young Earth creationists need to address. So here's a plea for help in young Earth creationism. It's got to be good work though, it's got to be really good work, it's got to be solid, and we've got to be willing to present that work not only to each other as young Earth creationists but also further out from that and get hard criticism, get iron sharpening iron.

I'll continue transcribing the text with correct grammar and punctuation:

"And our brothers and sisters in Christ who are old Earth creationists and theistic evolutionists are iron who can sharpen us. We need to be willing to engage with them and take their criticisms seriously. So that's a major area where I think that my chapter could have been strengthened.

Another area where I think it could have been strengthened is in the area of geology. I touch on geology a little bit, but I don't really get into it very much. And that's unfortunate because the geological record is critical for understanding human origins. It's critical for understanding the flood, it's critical for understanding the post-flood world. And so I think that's an area where I could have done more.

I also think that I could have done more in the area of discussing the various views of Adam and Eve that are out there. I mention them, but I don't really engage with them very much. And I think that's unfortunate because I think that's an important part of the conversation.

So those are some areas where I think my chapter could have been strengthened. But overall, I hope that I've presented a case for a recent Adam and Eve that is biblically faithful, that is scientifically rigorous, and that is respectful of those who disagree with me."

"Thank you, Dr. Ross, for that comprehensive overview of your position. It's clear that you've put a lot of thought and research into this view. Now, let's move on to our next question. How do these different views of Adam and Eve impact our understanding of original sin and the fall of humanity?"

"That's an excellent question, and it's one that really gets to the heart of why this discussion matters. The doctrine of original sin and the fall of humanity is foundational to Christian theology, and how we understand Adam and Eve directly impacts how we understand these doctrines.

In my view, as a young Earth creationist advocating for a recent, historical Adam and Eve as the sole progenitors of all humanity, the doctrine of original sin remains intact as traditionally understood. Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden brought about the fall of all humanity because all humans are direct descendants of Adam and Eve. This sin nature is passed down to all humans, explaining the universal human condition of sinfulness and separation from God.

The cosmic nature of the fall, which I discussed earlier, also plays a crucial role here. The effects of Adam's sin weren't limited to just human beings but extended to all of creation. This helps explain why we see death, decay, and suffering throughout the natural world.

For those who hold to views that place Adam and Eve much earlier in history or see them as representatives of a larger population, the understanding of original sin often needs to be modified. For instance, in Andrew Lok's view, where there are non-human hominids outside the garden, how does sin nature spread to them? If they're not considered human until they interbreed with Adam's descendants, at what point do they acquire a sin nature?

Similarly, for those who view Adam and Eve as symbolic rather than historical figures, the concept of original sin often becomes more metaphorical. It might be seen as a way of describing the universal human tendency towards selfishness and rebellion against God, rather than a condition inherited from a specific historical event.

These different understandings of original sin can have significant implications for how we understand human nature, the need for salvation, and even the work of Christ. If there was no historical fall, how do we understand Christ as the 'second Adam' who comes to undo the damage done by the first?

That said, it's important to note that all Christian views, regardless of their stance on Adam and Eve, affirm the reality of human sinfulness and the need for redemption through Christ. The differences lie in how they understand the origin and transmission of this sinful state.

Ultimately, I believe that a historical Adam and Eve and a literal fall provide the most coherent explanation for the biblical data and our observations of the human condition. But I also recognize that this is a complex issue, and there are thoughtful Christians who come to different conclusions.

What's crucial is that we continue to engage with these questions seriously, always seeking to be faithful to Scripture while also honestly engaging with the scientific evidence. And above all, we must remember that our ultimate hope lies not in our perfect understanding of origins, but in the saving work of Christ."

"Thank you, Dr. Ross, for that insightful explanation. It's clear that this topic has far-reaching implications for Christian theology and our understanding of human nature. Now, let's turn to our final question for this episode. How do these different views of Adam and Eve impact our approach to evangelism and apologetics in today's scientific age?"