Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Biblical Genetics
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| DNA from the last woolly mammoths supports the Bible | 18 Sep 2024 | 00:20:19 | |
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.
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| Natural selection has little power in the real world | 10 Sep 2024 | 00:25:14 | |
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:
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| Ancestor vs descendant trees | 21 May 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.
2. A descendant tree: 3. A mixed tree:
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| Fun Anecdotes in Genetics | 17 Mar 2020 | 00:11:50 | |
Location: Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater, Morrison, Colorado Thomas Jefferson has children by his slave Sally Hemmings, historical uncertainty, Genghis Khan leaves an enduring genetic legacy, African Y chromosomes in old England, Levi and the Cohanim, the Jewish Lemba of southern Africa. Links: Thomas Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs to a rare European lineage The genetic legacy of the Mongols Africans in Yorkshire? The deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny within an English genealogy Extended Y chromosome haplotypes resolve multiple and unique lineages of the Jewish priesthood Intro Music by Xihcsr | |||
| Most Viruses are Good | 14 Mar 2020 | 00:13:21 | |
Show Notes: For additional details, see my article Coronaviruses in creation on Creation.com and the video titled Coronavirus I did with Gary Bates. Here’s an audio-only version of that same video. Specific references are as follows:
Intro Music by Xihcsr | |||
| The Mystery of Personal Ancestry | 10 Mar 2020 | 00:12:07 | |
The things we can now learn about ourselves, and our recent history, through ancestry testing are simply amazing. Revisiting the SNP chip used by Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com, 4-grandparent test, amazing geographic specificity, no you do not have thousands of relatives on those ancestry sites, population-level ancestry reduces to statistics, horrors of slavery, the amazing story of Hans Jonathan and the African DNA of Iceland, recreating genetic history of people across the world. Intro Music by Xihcsr Thumbnail: Alexander Krivitskiy via Unsplash.com | |||
| The Mystery of DNA Sequencing | 10 Mar 2020 | 00:14:55 | |
Dr C explains how to sequence DNA, how to build a genome, and how Ancestry and 23andMe work their magic. Bacterial polymerases do all the work for us, PCR and DNA sequencing, the genome, shotgun sequencing, example: shotgunning the Bible, size of the genome vs a book like the Bible, disaster of the first chimpanzee genome, millions of genomes equals an amazing ability to test ideas of history, Ancestry.com and the SNP chip, ancestry informative markers. Location: Tiers of Zion, Golden, Colorado Intro Music by Xihcsr | |||
| The Mystery of Human Ancestry | 10 Mar 2020 | 00:09:27 | |
Old ideas about where babies come from, blending ancestry, Mendel and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, “Darwinism”, maybe proteins confer ancestry, DNA did not look like anything important, discovery that DNA is the source of ancestry in 1952 via the Hershey-Chase experiment, Watson and Crick figure out the double helix structure of DNA which led to our modern genetics and genetic engineering, Shakespeare’s claim about Edward IV, death of King Carlos II and the end of the Spanish Hapsburg, DNA and history. My gear: DJI OSMO Pocket, but you will need a memory card because you do not want to stream the video to your cell phone. Trust me. So maybe try a bundle. I also have a selfie stick that transforms into a short tripod that can hold my phone AND the camera. You don’t want to stick the camera in your phone’s power jack and let it wiggle around. (BTW, these are Amazon affiliate links. If you chose to get one after shopping around, please come back here are click through these links!) | |||
| What is the longest match between the human and chimpanzee genomes? | 17 May 2024 | 00:28:46 | |
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.
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| Junk or genius? How functional is the human genome? Part 2 | 19 Mar 2024 | 00:15:56 | |
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 1 | 03 Mar 2024 | 00:27:40 | |
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:’
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| The Incredible Shrinking Human Genome | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:13:59 | |
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 anticreationists | 16 Jan 2024 | 00:31:19 | |
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:
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| Recombine-o-mania | 02 Jan 2024 | 00:26:25 | |
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:
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| Let’s talk about ancient DNA | 19 Dec 2023 | 00:23:44 | |
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:
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| African cichlids – ‘fast species’ are very, very biblical | 05 Dec 2023 | 00:25:06 | |
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:
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| Darwin’s Finches: the little birds that destroy evolution | 30 Nov 2023 | 00:28:10 | |
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:
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| Can creationists explain Neanderthals? | 20 Aug 2024 | 00:18:18 | |
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. | |||
| Evolutionists predict super bottleneck (it would have killed us) | 09 Nov 2023 | 00:13:49 | |
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:
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| Human vs Chimp Part 3: a deep dive into how statistics are being misused | 09 Nov 2023 | 01:37:44 | |
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:
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| Human vs Chimp part 2 | 06 Oct 2023 | 00:32:47 | |
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:
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| Human vs Chimp: an honest evaluation of our genetic differences | 15 Aug 2023 | 00:21:11 | |
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:
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| Eschatological Genetics | 25 Jul 2023 | 00:14:18 | |
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-Darwinism | 11 Jul 2023 | 00:11:06 | |
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:
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| Geeking out about DNA damage repair | 27 Jun 2023 | 00:27:19 | |
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: | |||
| Why you can’t trace your family tree to Adam and Eve | 13 Jun 2023 | 00:15:04 | |
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 all | 30 May 2023 | 00:25:02 | |
Notes and links:
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| Bacteria deceived us! Life is not simple | 04 Apr 2023 | 00:17:29 | |
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. | |||
| Biblical contradiction solved! Explaining the Jesus genealogies | 30 Jul 2024 | 00:30:49 | |
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. | |||
| How I made fluorescent fish (a Christian response to genetic engineering) | 23 Mar 2023 | 00:35:36 | |
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:
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| Scopes, 100 years later: the lingering effects of the famous “monkey trial” | 08 Mar 2023 | 00:19:31 | |
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:
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| Can creationists make any real predictions? Or are they just preaching to the choir? | 01 Mar 2023 | 00:13:34 | |
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:
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| Sexual Recombination, complex genetics, and challenges to the Out-of-Africa theory | 25 Jan 2023 | 00:27:55 | |
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 believe | 12 Jan 2023 | 00:30:03 | |
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:
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| Where are the skeletons of all the REALLY old people? Archaeology vs the Bible. | 08 Dec 2022 | 00:17:14 | |
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:
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| Genealogy vs Phylogeny: The War Continues | 29 Nov 2022 | 00:15:35 | |
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:
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| How the butterfly got its stripes | 20 Nov 2022 | 00:12:55 | |
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:
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| Why Egyptians are not ‘Black’ | 14 Nov 2022 | 00:13:48 | |
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 Pharaohs | 11 Oct 2022 | 00:16:36 | |
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:
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| A deep dive into the nation of Edom | 09 Jul 2024 | 00:15:24 | |
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. | |||
| How did they build the pyramids so soon after Noah’s Flood? | 04 Oct 2022 | 00:13:27 | |
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: | |||
| Fighting among the creationists? | 14 Sep 2022 | 00:13:49 | |
Dr Rob talks about how divisions and disagreements are not only necessary but also productive for scientific progress. Thus, when you see two scientists disagreeing, this does not mean they hate each other or that they are necessarily refuting each other. He talks about the debates within creationism, including the location of the post-Flood boundary, the role of natural selection in the created order of things, the usefulness of molecular clocks, the dating of the Exodus, and the location and timing of the Tower of Babel event. Notes and links: | |||
| There is no Y Chromosome Clock | 08 Sep 2022 | 00:15:04 | |
The ‘molecular clock hypothesis’ is critical for evolutionary theory. If it fails, many evolutionary speculations will fall as well. Yet, there is abundant evidence that mutations in the Y chromosome have happened at different rates among different people groups. If this is true, nobody an know how long ago ‘Y Chromosome Adam’ lived. Notes:
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| Evolution’s Wobbly Foundation | 25 Aug 2022 | 00:12:38 | |
During the process of protein translation, the cell matches three letters in DNA for each amino acid. But there are 4 x 4 x 4 = 64 possible 3-letter combination and only 20 amino acids. This means that most amino acids have more than one code and that many mutations do not change the amino acids in the resulting protein. For decades, mutations at these sites were seen as ‘silent’, but this can no longer be accepted. Instead, it is now clearly understood that most mutations in these sites, even if the amino acid sequence in the protein is unchanged, are measurably bad for the organism. There are various reasons for this, as Dr Rob explains, but this creates a giant headache for evolutionary theory. Removing this class of ‘irrelevant’ mutations means that evolution has even more mathematical difficulties. On the other hand, the new information tells us that life was designed with an amazing degree of exactitude and precision. All quotations and references can be found in my article Carter R, Mutations are more harmful than we thought: silencing the ‘wobble’ in the codon table, creation.com/silent-mutations-harmful, 25 August 2022.
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| Adam and Eve did not live 200,000 years ago | 16 Aug 2022 | 00:12:32 | |
Dr Rob explains an issue in the creation vs. evolution debate: how fast mutations accumulate. The rate we can measure in families (the ‘genealogical’ rate) is much faster than the rate at which it is claimed mutations accumulate in the population (the ‘phylogenetic’ rate). There are good reasons why the genealogical rate is closer to the real value we should use to date Adam and Eve, including the fact that most mutations are selectively neutral and, therefore, accumulate at the rate at which the occur. Yes, natural selection can remove some mutations. Thus, the long-term mutation rate is a little slower than the genealogical mutation rate, but the difference is a few percent, not two orders of magnitude. There are several charts shown in this presentation that are part of an ongoing project that Dr Rob is working on. When the paper is published, a link will be added here. In the meantime, here are the charts: Figure 1: Using Mendel’s Accountant, the accumulation of neutral (blue), deleterious (red), and beneficial (green) alleles can be tracked over time. These are the results from a model population of 500 individuals with a neutral mutation frequency of 0.5 over 10,000 generations.
Figure 3: Using my own population modeling software, I was able to estimate the average lifespan of any new, neutral mutation. I ran each population size model 1,000 times and took an average (orange dots). Since most new alleles are lost to genetic drift very quickly, the size of the population is almost irrelevant. In the video, I say “4” generations, but I said that before I had finished all the models runs. I think “5” is a better estimate. It takes, on average, 5 generations for any new mutation to be lost (btw, this also applies to beneficial mutations, as Sanford has shown in his work with Mendel). Further reading: Carter, R., A successful decade for Mendel’s Accountant, Journal of Creation 33(2):51–56, 2019. | |||
| Creation Research Society Summer Meeting 2022 | 11 Aug 2022 | 00:09:47 | |
Dr Rob is at Liberty University for the annual summer conference of the Creation Research Society. He shares the highlights and an encouraging message for the future of creation research. Notes and links:
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| Did we evolve from 10,000 people in Africa? | 19 Jul 2022 | 00:09:01 | |
The oft-heard claim is that Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus within a small African population with an effective size of about 10,000 individuals. What, exactly is an “effective” population size and how is that different from a “census” population size? Strangely, nobody seems to be able to identify that “population” from which we supposedly arose. Earlier discussion on Africa on BiblicalGenetics.com: Some background reading:
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| Seven reasons to believe that Adam was real | 05 Jul 2022 | 00:20:30 | |
This presentation was produced for a conference at the Scandinavian School of Theology in Uppsala, Sweden. I was speaking as a representative of Creation Ministries International, but since this recording is similar to my talk The Historical Adam: theological conundrums and scientific implications,* which is free on the CMI store, by the way, CMI decided to not publish my new talk. Yet, I hated to let all that work go to waste, so I am putting it out on my Biblical Genetics platform. *If that link does not work in your country, go to Creation.com, click on “Store” in the header bar. Hover over Media tab that appears below the header and click on “Streaming Video”. Links and notes:
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| Old fathers are genetic poison | 28 Jun 2022 | 00:09:59 | |
The idea that old men contribute more mutations to their children than young men is not controversial. The application of this thought to people who lived ‘biblical’ lifespans, however, is. Here, I discuss some new information on the subject and talk a little about the Creation Research Society and what it does to promote creationist research.
Links:
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| Apples are the perfect fruit…for discussing how things were designed to change | 09 Nov 2021 | 00:11:43 | |
The apple gives us several excellent illustrations for understanding biblical genetics. The genetics of the apple tree is super complicated, yet always fascinating. From one domestication event several thousand years ago we now have over 10,000 apple varieties, and this does not include the many wild species of apple-like trees. How does this fit within biblical genetics? Tune in to find out! Filming location: Raven Rock State Park, Lillington, North Carolina Notes and links:
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