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TitreDateDurée
The two types of natural selection, and why each fails24 nov. 202500:19:54

Natural selection comes in two forms, positive and negative. Positive selection is supposed to improve species, but Dr Rob gives a clear example where bad mutations are amplified. Negative selection is supposed to keep species from degrading, but Dr Rob uses the same example to show how it occurs too late. Based on an article from Creation.com.

Notes and links:

What is Genetic Drift?23 oct. 202500:19:42

Scientist throw around words and phrases that are sometimes hard to understand. This is not one of them. Genetic drift is an easy concept. Dr Rob brings up the example drift among of human mitochondria, perhaps the most extreme form anyone has ever seen. And, since natural selection is generally weak, genetic drift overwhelms selection at critical junctures during development. This has profound implications for the creation-evolution debate, but first, the explanation…

Source paper under discussion: Árnadóttir et al. 2024, The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees, Cell 187(15):3904-3910.

Fig 1: Mutant mitochondrial frequencies in child (y) vs mother (x), from the supporting data of the paper above.

Fig 2: Histogram of frequency changes from mother to child, same source as above.

Fig 3: Histogram data for each frequency bin in the mother (legend) vs child (x). Same source as above.

When did Eve live?30 sept. 202500:42:40

One woman is the ancestress of all living people. They call her Eve. Is she the Eve of the Bible? How long ago did she live? Join Dr Carter as he explains how scientists struggle to assign a date to Eve. It may come as a surprise, but the ‘date’ is based on questionable assumptions and debatable philosophy. All we can know is that the mutation rate is quite high and the mutation removal rate is quite low. Thus, science tells us that Eve lived not many thousands of years ago.

Note and links:

The Dark Proteome04 févr. 202500:22:20

Even though it was completed a quarter century ago, geneticists still struggle to estimate the number of genes in the human genome. They went from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to “22 thousand”, then more recently to “about 19,500”. The number, however, has just exploded. Tens of thousands of new genes with important functions were discovered hiding in the ‘junk DNA’. Dr Rob explains what these new findings mean to the creation-evolution debate.

Links and notes:

Dedicated anti-creationist makes huge blunder28 janv. 202501:29:12

In a recent presentation on human-chimp similarities to LOGOS Research Associates, I made the (correct) claim that most new mutations are lost. An opponent attempted to make hay of this, claiming it disproves the ‘creationist’ calculations of the time to Y Chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. What he failed to understand, however, is that the Y and mt chromosomes are haploid and behave very differently to the rest of the genome. In fact, mutations occur in them in a ratchet-like manner and no degree of natural selection can change that. Do you want a lesson in population genetics? Tune in!

Notes and links:

Your favorite cheese might be facing extinction21 janv. 202500:04:57

In a recent Creation magazine article, I talked about an interesting new case study done on one of the world’s most favorite cheeses, Brie, and its relatives Camembert and Roquefort. A long time ago, cheesemakers unknowingly selected non-sexually reproducing fungal lines for these cheeses. Now, many decades later, mutations have built up in this lines to the point where they are starting to have trouble reproducing. Rescue efforts are underway, but in the meantime this gives us an object lesson about the impossibility of evolution, specifically the survival of the first organisms, which would not have been able to go through sexual recombination.

Links:
The Creation magazine paper: creation.com/cheese-verge-of-extinction
Signup for Creation magazine here: creation.com/en-us/creation-magazine
The original research: Harmi, M., French cheese under threat, news.cnrs.fr, 16 Jan 2024.
Additional info on Muller’s ratchet: dl0.creation.com/articles/p145/c14588/j29_2_70-77.pdf
About Dr. Robert Carter: creation.com/dr-robert-carter-cv

Mendel’s Law of Exponential Trait Combination26 nov. 202400:14:21

Gregor Mendel was the father of modern genetics. He wrote his most important papers on the topic just a few years after Darwin published the Origin of Species. What people don’t realize is that Mendel’s papers did not only describe how traits are passed down. He also explained how his ideas of genetics lead directly to an explanation of the origin of species. Was Mendel directly and purposefully contradicting Darwin?

Links and notes:

Seabird shennanigans12 nov. 202400:09:30

Dr Carter spent some time recently in New Zealand. While there, he stopped by a giant colony of gannets. These sea birds number in the millions but they create a bit of a taxonomic mystery. Are three living species of gannets and the eight living species of booby one ‘created kind’? What about the cormorants? Should they also be included? Baraminology has not revealed the limits of the created kinds, so we have much work still to do.

Notes and links:

Placing Noah’s sons on the Y chromosome tree29 oct. 202400:26:06

It is only natural for people to want to compare the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) to geography, linguistics, ancient history, and/or patterns in human DNA. The solution, however, is harder than most people think. Here, I list multiple reasons why it might actually be impossible to know where Shem, Ham, and Japheth belong even though Genesis is true.

Notes and links:

Additional references can be found in the main article.

DNA from the last woolly mammoths supports the Bible18 sept. 202400:20:19

The woolly mammoth is strongly associated with the Ice Age, but they survived until surprisingly recent times in the far north. Recently, the genomes of multiple mammoths from the last surviving population on Wrangel Island were sequenced. The scientists concluded the population was founded by 8 or fewer individuals and only 1 mitochondrial lineage was among them. They also estimated that the population grew to a few hundred before finally going extinct. This, it turns out, is a wonderful natural laboratory for biblical events. Consider that there were only 8 people on the Ark. How much genetic diversity would we expect to lose? Is that population too small to prevent so much inbreeding that humans would have gone into mutational meltdown? Etc. Etc.

Natural selection has little power in the real world10 sept. 202400:25:14

Mike Lynch and colleagues published a paper that is devastating to thousands of past studies on natural selection. By sequencing DNA from multiple natural populations over several years, they showed that the net effect of natural selection is “zero” for most genetic variants. They caution that selection pressures in the natural world fluctuate. This cause the chromosomal targets of selection to shift over time, etc., meaning that many thousands of scientific studies that found evidence for natural selection are probably wrong. This paper is a gold mine of quotes, so Dr Rob quotes it extensively.

Links:

Can creationists explain Neanderthals?20 août 202400:18:18

Neanderthals got their name from a valley that was, in turn, named after a beloved pastor and hymnwriter named Joachim Neander. Thus, since their first discovery, they have been associated with Christianity, believe it or not. Problem is, Neanderthals have been consistently used as arguments against the very foundation of Christianity: the Bible. Can we incorporate these enigmatic people into any sort of biblical history? If so, how? Dr Rob gives his solution here. Neanderthals are a post-Flood people group, descendants of Adam and Eve, and descendants of Noah. There were fully human, but also highly mutated.

Thumbnail photo by Jakub Hałun  Model of Homo neanderthalensis man in The Natural History Museum, Vienna – via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homo_Sapiens,_Cro-Magnon_1_The_Natural_History_Museum_Vienna,_20210730_1223_1272.jpg.

Biblical contradiction solved! Explaining the Jesus genealogies30 juil. 202400:30:49

There are two conflicting genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament. Anyone can see that the name lists in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 are not at all similar. Worse, 1 Chronicles 3 adds a THIRD conflicting genealogy for a pivotal person in these lists, Zerubbabel, the first governor of Judah after they were restored from the Babylonian Captivity. In this episode, Dr. Rob presents a logical answer to the problem that follows Old Testament law and basic logic and that does not have to invoke improbable circumstances. The key is realizing that Matthew is probably not a genealogy. Instead, it is a list of the rightful kings of Judah. Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, was the rightful king and a descendant of David. His kingship and his descent from David are both attested to in the New Testament.

A deep dive into the nation of Edom09 juil. 202400:15:24

In this, the 7th episode in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob takes us deep into the genealogy of the nation of Edom. This was a people/tribe/kingdom that existed south of the Dead Sea and southeast of the kingdom of Judah, which dominated Edom for several centuries. There are several textual mysteries in Edom’s data, but they can be solved satisfactorily if we think through the issues carefully.

An Introduction to Esau02 juil. 202400:17:01

Video Link:

https://youtu.be/OTj_P8P1v6Q

 

In this, the 6th episode on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains where the nation of Edom came from, how they tie into the main biblical story, and how to handle several tricky textual problems in Genesis 36.

 

 

 

The Nations Surrounding Israel18 juin 202400:14:51

In this, the 5th episode in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains the origins of the nations that surrounded (and still surround) Israel. He explains who the Philistines, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Edomites were while adding lots of interesting little factoids that help us better understand the Bible.

Notes and links:

  • The descendants of Seir, the kings of Edom, and the chiefs of Edom

 

Working through challenging genealogical details13 juin 2024

In this fourth installment in a series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob works through three challenging details that must be overcome if one is to use those genealogies to build a chronology of biblical history: how to link Genesis 5 and 11, how old Terah was when Abram left Haran, and how old Abram was when God made the “Promise”.

What is a chronogenealogy?04 juin 2024

In this third installment in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains why the data in Genesis 5 and 11 are so important. These are not just lists of names. The added ages allows us to piece together a timeline of biblical history. Problem is, you can’t directly connect the two passages. A several-year ambiguity is created when you try. There are other interesting factoids that pop out when one studies the chronogenealogies, so you will enjoy this episode much.

Links:

Getting started with Biblical Genealogy28 mai 2024

In this second installment on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains why all those names (or at least most of them) in the Bible are so important. This should be encouraging to anyone who struggles to read the Bible for comprehension.

Ancestor vs descendant trees21 mai 2024

This is the first in a multi-part series on biblical genealogies. To understand what we are dealing with, we first need to know that there are two completely different types of name lists in the Bible. The first, an ancestor tree is easy. Ancestor trees are balanced and have a known number of people at each level. Even better, nearly all biblical ancestor trees only list fathers, so there is but one person at each level. The second, descendent trees, are the stuff of genealogical nightmares. Dr Rob makes it all easy.

Here are some helpful images.

  1. Ancestor trees:

2. A descendant tree:

3. A mixed tree:

 

What is the longest match between the human and chimpanzee genomes?17 mai 202400:28:46

Human-chimpanzee similarity is a hotly-debated topic in the evolution-creation wars. Are we 98, 95, 90, or 85% similar? One way to get at the question is to ask what is the longest stretch of DNA that is shared between the two species. This is a very difficult question to answer! But, unperturbed, Dr Rob set out to answer it. Will our fearless hero be able to pull it off? Spoiler alert: not quite, but the path of discovery is still very interesting.

  • LastZ github.com/lastz/lastz
  • LastZ chaining github.com/hillerlab/make_lastz_chains
  • Mummer4 mummer4.github.io/
  • Blast blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
  • Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium primate projects github.com/marbl/Primates
  • Python python.org/
  • Standard Bases:
    • A: Adenine
    • C: Cytosine
    • G: Guanine
    • T: Thymine (in DNA)
    • U: Uracil (in RNA)
    Ambiguous Bases (IUPAC Codes):

    These codes are used when there is ambiguity in the nucleotide present at a particular position:

    • R: A or G (puRine)
    • Y: C or T (pYrimidine)
    • S: G or C
    • W: A or T (Weak)
    • K: G or T (Keto)
    • M: A or C (aMino)
    • B: C, G, or T (not A) (B comes after A)
    • D: A, G, or T (not C) (D comes after C)
    • H: A, C, or T (not G) (H comes after G)
    • V: A, C, or G (not T) (V comes after U; U is replaced with T in DNA)
    • N: Any base (A, C, G, T) (N for any nucleotide)
  • Silver Comet Trail silvercometga.com/
Junk or genius? How functional is the human genome? Part 219 mars 202400:15:56

https://youtu.be/-jpoxCZgZKQ

Is the human genome highly functional or mostly junk? This is a question that is not only being asked in the creation-evolution debate; it is a question raging in the ivory tower as well. The ‘old guard’ is much more likely to resist any claim that large swaths of the genome are useful. The ‘young punks’ in science is more willing to accept the obvious fact that the genome is highly functional. Who is going to win? In this episode, Dr Rob puts a few more nails in the coffin of junk DNA..

Notes and links:’

DNA – highly functional or mostly junk? Part 103 mars 202400:27:40

Is the human genome highly functional or mostly junk? This is a question that is not only being asked in the creation-evolution debate; it is a question raging in the ivory tower as well. The ‘old guard’ is much more likely to resist any claim that large swaths of the genome are useful. The ‘young punks’ in science is more willing to accept the obvious fact that the genome is highly functional. Who is going to win? In this episode, Dr Carter highlights four new studies that ratchet the argument toward high function.

Notes and links:’

 

The Incredible Shrinking Human Genome13 févr. 202400:13:59

No, the size of the genome has not changed, but the number of genes we thought it contains certainly has. After lots of double checking, there are fewer known protein coding genes today (~19,000) than there were when the human genome was first published, and even that count (~23,000) was shockingly small, according to the predictions of the world’s top geneticists. The nature of the genome has consistently surprised people, but mostly because they applied Darwinian concepts to it. Instead, the genome is a wonderful testimony to the engineering prowess of God, who built something unexpected.

LInks:

James 3 vs the anticreationists16 janv. 202400:31:19

A slew of videos has recently come out arguing for and against the work of Dr Jeffrey Tomkins, who claims humans and chimps are only about 85% similar. His detractors have made some massive blunders and I attempt to document them here. This is not to gloat, however. I understand that all humans are bigoted, biased, myopic, jealous, envious, etc., including all scientists. So, we’ll apply James 3:1 (“Not many of you should presume to be teachers…for know that we will be judged more strictly)  and Philippians 2:3… (Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit…) to the situation as we outline multiple lapses of logic and analysis that have been done in an attempt to discredit Tomkins’ work. To be fair, though, the main person in my crosshairs has admitted to making these mistakes. I am only documenting things for posterity.

Notes and links:

  • James 3:1–2
  • patternsofevidence.com/patterns-plus
  • The 3rd Commandment
  • Dr Jeffrey Tomkins
  • Blast
  • Gutsick Gibbon, A Professional Creationist Agrees with Me: Tomkins Wrong, 30 Dec 2023.
  • Roohif, Jeffrey Tomkins is allergic to controls, 29 Dec 2023. Note: I made several mistakes when describing Roohif’s results. First, he was looking at older trace read datasets, not the contig database I (and Gutsick Gibbon, and Tomikins in his 2018 paper) have been working with, so his conclusions about vector, etc., contamination do not apply here. Second, I stated that he only tested a few of the problematic areas, but he actually performed several thorough tests. Third, I also conflated his analysis on non-aligning subsequences in Blast matches with his analysis of the sequences for which Blast failed to find any alignment at all. After being challenged on a few of these points, and upon re-watching the video, paying attention this time (!) I stand corrected. Yet, that was but a small portion of my presentation and I included it almost as supplementary information, trying to cover all bases. In retrospect, I could easily have left it out entirely.
  • Gutsick Gibbon’s Blast program on Github: GGBlast
  • Philippians 2:3–11
Recombine-o-mania02 janv. 202400:26:25

Chromosomal recombination is an essential part of the life cycle of all sexually reproducing organisms. Yet, the system is complex, involving hundreds to thousands of proteins and RNAs. It also involves DNA repair pathways, which are themselves incredibly complex. The newest available information on recombination tells us it is mutagenic, meaning that recombination erodes the very places where recombination happens. How did such a system arise by chance? Can we assume the recombination rate has always been the same? What happens when a new allele arises in the protein that controls recombination? What is the mutation burden caused by this important system? Finally, how does this affect the creation-evolution debate?

Links and notes:

Let’s talk about ancient DNA19 déc. 202300:23:44

My new video made quite a splash! Apparently, lots of Christians are asking questions about the DNA we can now pull from very old skeletons. How do they do it? What are the data telling us? How is it even there, if the bones are as old as claimed? Without revealing too many details about what is in the main presentation, here I am just talking about ancient DNA and its implications for the creation-evolution debate. I also throw in a few things I was not able to address in the main presentation, including the genetics of ancient Canaanites and Philistines found in and around Israel.

Notes and links:

African cichlids – ‘fast species’ are very, very biblical05 déc. 202300:25:06

African cichlids are a diverse group of fishes that have frequently been used as evidence for evolution. Yet, now that the genomes of several hundred species have been published, the true history of this group has been revealed. All parties must now acknowledge that the many species arose quickly, from a common stock. In many ways, African cichlids fit beautifully into the biblical model of ‘created kinds’.

Links:

Darwin’s Finches: the little birds that destroy evolution30 nov. 202300:28:10

Darwin’s finches have long been considered an icon of evolution. A recent analysis included 40 years of morphological measurements and genealogy tracing among four finch species on a small island in the Galapagos chain. This was coupled to 30 years of DNA sampling, including the recent sequencing of nearly 4,000 finch genomes from the same small island. The results tell us a LOT about biblical views of speciation, natural selection, and ‘change over time’.

Notes and links:

Evolutionists predict super bottleneck (it would have killed us)09 nov. 202300:13:49

A new paper claims that the pre-human population went through an extremely small and extremely long population bottleneck. Starting about one million years ago, the population was reduced to at most 1,280 “breeding individuals” and this lasted for over 100,000 years. To get there, they examined thousands of human genomes and assumed that all mutations are neutral. What would happen if we applied real-world mutation affects to the data? You know it. We would have gone extinct. The mutation burden would have driven us to extinction. Instead, what they really discovered was the we came from a very small founding population with only a little diversity. This fits perfectly within the Adam and Eve model of human ancestry.

Links and notes:

Human vs Chimp Part 3: a deep dive into how statistics are being misused09 nov. 202301:37:44

The opponents of biblical creation have made some glaring errors in their criticisms of prior work on human-chimpanzee genetic differences. Specifically, several of their claims are in conflict with both theory and experiment. I document these here in detail. They have also shown a rudimentary understanding of how scientific data needs to be ‘weighted’ and they completely misunderstand how BLAST is supposed to work. Despite the high level of vitriol I have received so far, I submit this detailed analysis of their work for your review.

Links:

Human vs Chimp part 206 oct. 202300:32:47

This is the second installment in a now multi-part series on human and chimpanzee genetic differences. I had a lot of pushback from my last episode, including negative reviews posted by Gutsick Gibbon, Creation Myths, and Dapper Dinosaur. Unperturbed, I push on. Here, I lay out some of the arguments in more detail and discuss many of the problems people are having when using one particular program, BLAST, to assess similarity between the two species. I will address the results of Gutsick Gibbon specifically in Part 3, but this was filmed before I got most of my experimental results back.

Links (many of these are for Part 3 also):

Background:

My first installment:

The three attempted rebuttal videos:

Human vs Chimp: an honest evaluation of our genetic differences15 août 202300:21:11

Several anti-creationists have made a hobby out of attacking creationists. Their best efforts, however, have generally failed. For example, see:

Unperturbed, “Gutsick Gibbon” has recently tried to discredit Dr Jeffrey Tomkins and his work on human-chimp genetic similarities:

In my analysis of her analysis, I note several flaws in her logic. Note, however, that I deliberately ignored several of her main objections. This was not because I do not have answers, mind you, but because I wanted to focus on the most salient questions. Ignored were questions about why God would have included all the chimp-like non-coding DNA when he made humans and questions about properly weighting samples.

The most recent comparison I am aware of claimed 96.6% similarity between humans and chimps:

This comes from the laboratory of Richard Buggs. This is much higher than Tomkins’ estimates, that, with one exception, are generally in the 80s. However, I know the first author on that paper, so I called him up to discuss his methods. Sure enough, he used entirely different methodology than earlier work from that same laboratory (which arrived at an estimate of ~85%). To reach the higher percentage similarity, they cut out everything humans and chimps do not share, including the centromeres, telomeres, copy number variations of many annotated genes, and hundreds of thousands of small insertions and deletions that must be included to align the two genomes. This “apples to apples” comparison is fine, as long as everybody acknowledges that the true similarity is necessarily less than 96.6%. Yet, if the percent similarity is much less than 99%, there is no way, mathematically, to explain how so many millions of difference arose in the (imagined) 6.5 million years since our last common ancestor.

Additional links:

Eschatological Genetics25 juil. 202300:14:18

Dr Rob outlines three aspects of genetics that tell us that, scientifically, the human species is doomed to eventual extinction. These include the rate of mutation accumulation in our population over time, the inability of natural selection to remove most of those mutations, and the sheer number of children that would be required to remove the mutations, given perfect selection. These all argue that there is no hope, collectively, in any evolutionary process. Thus, biblically, the only hope for us individually is through belief in Jesus.

Links:

Fisher’s failure and the dramatic end of neo-Darwinism11 juil. 202300:11:06

Dr Rob discusses a fundamental aspect of neo-Darwinism (Fisher’s Theorem of Natural Selection) and how it fails mathematically. First postulated in 1930, Fisher’s idea was promoted as something as firm and settled as the 2nd Law. Problem is, he made several incorrect assumptions that invalidate the whole thing. When you add realistic mutations to the scenario (e.g., Basener and Sanford’s ‘Fisher’s Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations’), you see that the net trajectory of evolution is downward. Why did it take 90 years to figure this out?

Links:

Geeking out about DNA damage repair27 juin 202300:27:19

Dr Rob waxes eloquent about some amazing new revelations involving DNA damage repair systems. Researchers recently turned AI onto the human genome, probing the genes and gene systems that are involved in maintaining and repairing DNA. The results shocked everyone. Many more genes that anyone thought are required, and entire new repair systems were discovered. So what came first, DNA or the amazing repair systems required to maintain DNA that are, in turn, coded into DNA? The point is that these systems are absolutely necessary for living things, yet they are also incredibly complicated. They would never be expected to arise without help, but without them the entire DNA system (not just the code, but the DNA itself) could never exist. Evolution, in this case, simply fails to explain much of anything.

Links:
Kratz et al. 2023. A multi-scale map of protein assemblies in the DNA damage response. Cell Syst 14(6):447-463.e8; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37220749/

Why you can’t trace your family tree to Adam and Eve13 juin 202300:15:04

Everybody loves genealogy, but we are severely limited in what we can know about our family histories. There are two main reasons for this. First, family records only go back so far. Even the longest family trees can’t go back thousands of years. Second, personal genetics testing can only tell you who your closest relatives are. Yes, genetics can tell you what population you came from, but that is a matter of statistics, not documentation. This is not a problem for belief in the Bible. Adam and Eve are still the (sole) ancestors of everyone who has ever lived, it’s just that you cannot prove it with what we have available to us today.

It’s an RNA world after all30 mai 202300:25:02

Notes and links:

Bacteria deceived us! Life is not simple04 avr. 202300:17:29

Science advances in fits and starts, and it sometimes takes a detour onto a dead-end road. Bacteria represent one of those roads. Studying bacteria gave us a sense that we could easily figure out biology, that there was a direct connection between genes and behavior, and that life was simple. Granted, there was no other way to get started, but the study of bacteria slowed down our understanding of higher organisms in many ways. From the ‘one gene, one enzyme’ hypothesis to the thought that living systems can be reduced to a binary decision tree, many things about bacteria misled us and prevented science from seeing that the majority of the information in the genomes of higher organisms is in the non-coding DNA.

How I made fluorescent fish (a Christian response to genetic engineering)23 mars 202300:35:36

Genetic engineering is a controversial topic. From vaccines to fetal cells to transhumanism, the debate rages. Yet, there are certain aspects to genetic engineering that are demonstrably good. How are we supposed to make heads or tails of this new technology, especially since it is impacting every aspect of our lives? I thought that a simple explanation (at least, as simple as I could make it!) of the things I did while earning my PhD could help increase our understanding. I, as a conservative Christian, made the ‘frankenfish’. I stole the genes for the bright green and red fluorescent proteins in corals, engineered them into bacteria, then into fish. There is nothing inherently difficult in what I did, but there were a LOT of steps. Perhaps, after this explanation, we can have a more civil discussion on the pros and cons.

Links and notes:

Scopes, 100 years later: the lingering effects of the famous “monkey trial”08 mars 202300:19:31

We are approaching the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey Trial”. Dr Rob was in the neighborhood, so he stopped by the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, TN to tell the part of the story most people have never heard. This was the first time evolution was put on ‘trial’ in a US courtroom and it pitted two of the greatest orators of the 20th century against each other: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. Bryan, the Christian anti-evolutionist, gave a weak performance. Darrow, the anti-theistic evolutionist, made Bryan, and thus by proxy, cultural Christianity, look foolish. Put yourself in the shoes of person living in 1925. Which side would you have chosen?

Notes and links:

 

 

Can creationists make any real predictions? Or are they just preaching to the choir?01 mars 202300:13:34

Given the biblical accounts of Creation and the Flood, can we draw any conclusions about what we would expect in genetics? That depends on status of the species in question (e.g., ‘clean’ vs ‘unclean and ‘on the Ark’ vs ‘not on the Ark’), its population history, the amount of created diversity initially engineered into that species/kind, difference in mutation rates and DNA repair systems, and things like that. In the end, no, we cannot make many direct predictions, yet much of the genetic data and observations still point straight to the Bible. The biblical model is expansive enough to take in a range of observations.

Notes and links:

Sexual Recombination, complex genetics, and challenges to the Out-of-Africa theory25 janv. 202300:27:55

Notes, links, and things to think about:

Biblical Genetics episodes mentioned:

Images:

A diagram of crossing over from Thomas Hunt Morgan, circa 1917.

Two consecutive crossings leads to gene conversion (if they are close enough)

HapMap data, Europeans, Chr 15 spanning the XXX gene. Each individual is represented by a pair of rows. Each column is a single letter in the genome, but the letters are separated by an average of ~1000 nucleotides, so this is not full sequence data.

Same as above, but for West Africans.

Two accidental three-generation families in the HapMap and 1,000 Genomes datasets. The dotted lines show where the two-parent-child trios connect.

The three-generation, 17-member CEPH panel

A recombination map of Chr1 for one child (child #5, if I remember correctly). Blue = letters that came from the paternal grandfather. Red = letters that came from the paternal grandmother. Green = a spacer region to represent the position of the centromere.

The number of recombined blocks vs the length of each block among the 11 children in the CEPH panel. Note: I totally messed up the explanation (and my hand motions) when I was describing this. I had something else in mind, but after filming, when I went looking for the image I had in my head, I realized my mistake. Either way, it is still an interesting image. It cannot be known how many of the singletons are sequencing errors of 1-SNP gene conversions, but see the Eberle reference above and how they claim to resolve many of the apparent errors.

Things I no longer believe12 janv. 202300:30:03

Dr Rob spills the beans about several things he no longer believes, including Darwinian evolution, the simplicity of bacteria, Linnean taxonomy, and the thought that the human embryo goes through the stages of evolution as it develops. This is a deep dive into the world of uncertainty and scientific thinking.

 

Notes and links:

Where are the skeletons of all the REALLY old people? Archaeology vs the Bible.08 déc. 202200:17:14

There is scant evidence for very old people in the archaeological record, but the Bible claims people once lived for centuries. Is this a major contradiction? Not really. First, regarding the physical evidence, we would not necessarily know what to look for. Second, just because a person can get old does not mean they will. Potential lifespan is not the same as realized lifespan. Third, and this is the focus of this episode, population modeling shows that short-lived people that are the maximum number of generations removed from Noah will quickly dominate. This is a recipe for rapidly collapsing lifespans. Long-lived people would have been quite rare in the early post-Flood world.

The biblical data. See my article The rapid decline in biblical lifespans:

The actuarial table I used. Data from https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper09.pdf, WHO LIFE TABLE FOR 1999: AFR D

A population pyramid at year 1000 using the default model:

The number of generations people are ‘removed’ from Noah at 100-year intervals in the default model:

Realized vs expected lifespans at 100-year intervals in the default model:

 

Genealogy vs Phylogeny: The War Continues29 nov. 202200:15:35

Mutations are known to occur at much higher rates than can be accounted for in evolutionary theory. Given measurable rates, Y Chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve would have lived only a few thousand years ago. To answer this, evolutionists generally appeal to natural selection or genetic drift. Yet, selection can only remove ‘selectable’ mutations, and most mutations are necessarily selectively neutral. Also, drift fails to do anything at all in answering the dilemma. In the end, Adam and Eve are recent and there is little anyone can say about it.

Notes and links:

How the butterfly got its stripes20 nov. 202200:12:55

The genetics of the humble butterfly tells us a lot about the creation-evolution debate, the definition of ‘species’, the definition of ‘junk DNA’, and how complex the control systems for things like wing patterns are. The ‘unit’ of creation is not the species but the baramin (e.g., the ‘created kind’), so within the creation model, species can merge, split, and morph to their hearts content.

Links and notes:

Why Egyptians are not ‘Black’14 nov. 202200:13:48

Egyptian culture is thousands of years old, yet they never maintained perfect isolation from the nations among whom they lived. They have been conquered and they themselves have conquered many times. Invading armies brought hordes of soldiers, who would have left behind children. Given that Egypt is on the African continent, and given that there Egypt was conquered at least once by the their southern neighbors (the Nubians) at least once, why doesn’t the average Egyptian have the features of, say, the average person from Sudan? To answer this requires a deep dive into history and biology. There are four factors that have the greatest effect. 1) They are a Mediterranean culture, 2) many phenotypes (e.g., skin, hair, and eye color) are controlled by multiple traits, 3) many lineages peter out over time, and 4) genetic recombination insures that most people will fail to pass on their DNA to their distance descendants even if their line is maintained.

DNA of the Ancient Pharaohs11 oct. 202200:16:36

Dr Rob describes the horrible levels of inbreeding within the ancient Egyptian royal family and how this affected them over time. This includes the problems we see in the mummies of King Tut and his father Akhenaten, plus further up the family tree in the time of Hatshepsut (who may have been the princess who drew Moses out of the Nile) and much later in time during the Ptolemies (Cleopatra only had three great-grandparents!).

Notes and links:

 

How did they build the pyramids so soon after Noah’s Flood?04 oct. 202200:13:27

Dr Rob travels to Egypt to answer some difficult questions about the biblical timeline, population growth, the people of Egypt, and how, on earth, there were enough people to build the pyramids just a few centuries after Babel.

Notes and links:

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