Biblical Genetics – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

• Carter, R., DNA from the last woolly mammoths: surprising results support the Flood account, creation.com.
• Dehasque M et al., Temporal dynamics of woolly mammoth genome extension prior to extinction, Cell 187(14):3531–3540.e13, 2024.
• Carter R, Biblical bottlenecks are not bad, biblicalgenetics.com, 27 May 2020.
• Carter R, Evolutionary bottlenecks are disastrous, biblicalgenetics.com, 2 Jun 2020.
• Carter R, Did we evolve from 10,000 people in Africa? biblicalgenetics.com, 19 Jul 2022.
• Carter R, Evolutionists predict super bottleneck (it would have killed us), biblicalgenetics.com, 9 Nov 2023.
• Carter R and Powell M, The genetic effects of the population bottleneck associated with the Genesis Flood, Journal of Creation 30(2):102–111, 2018.
• Carter R, Effective population sizes and loss of diversity during the Flood bottleneck, Journal of Creation 32(2):124–127, 2018.
• Carter R, Mutations and why you shouldn’t marry your cousin, creation.com, 12 Aug 2017.
• Carter R, How carbon dating works, creation.com, 12 Apr 2022.

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:

• Carter, R., Natural selection in the real world is mostly ineffective, creation.com.
• Daphnia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnia
• Lynch et al., The genome-wide signature of short-term temporal selection, PNAS 121(28):e2307107121, 2024; pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38959040
• Darwin’s Bluff: the Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished by Robert Shedinger, see also amazon.com/Darwins-Bluff-Robert-Shedinger/dp/1637120370

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:

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

Y Chromosomes Traveling South: The Cohen Modal Haplotype and the Origins of the Lemba—the “Black Jews of Southern Africa”

Intro Music by Xihcsr
Intro Graphics by MattWalkerVideo

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:

1. Francis JW, Ingle M, Wood TC. 2018. Bacteriophages as beneficial regulators of the mammalian microbiome, Proc Int Conf Creationism 8:152–157.
2. More viruses than bacteria in the gut: www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/human-virome
3. Barber MR et al. 2010. Association of RIG-I with innate immunity of ducks to influenza, PNAS 107(13):5913–5918.
4. Terborg P. 2013. The ‘VIGE-first hypothesis–how easy it is to swap cause and effect, J Creation 27(3):105–112
5. Carter RW, Sanford JC. 2012. A new look at an old virus: mutation accumulation in the human H1N1 influenza virus since 1918, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 9:42
6. Brewer W, Smith FD, Sanford JC. 2013 Information loss: potential for accelerating natural genetic attenuation of RNA viruses. In: Marks II RJ, Behe MJ, Dembski WA, Gordon B, Sanford JC (Eds.), Biological Information—New Perspectives, World Scientific, Singapore, pp. 369–384.

Intro Music by Xihcsr
Intro Graphics by MattWalkerVideo

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
Intro Graphics by MattWalkerVideo

Thumbnail: Alexander Krivitskiy via Unsplash.com

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
Intro Graphics by MattWalkerVideo

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!)

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/

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:’

• Carter 2023 What proportion of the human genome is actually functional? And how much variation is tolerable?
• Chen et al. 2023 A genomic mutational constraint map using variation in 76,156 human genomes
• Moran 2023 What’s in your genomes? 90% of your genome is junk