Is the story of Adam and Eve unscientific myth or literal history? (Scene 4 of 4)

Genesis Apologetics

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It's hard to find anyone who has not heard the often -repeated claim that humans and chimpanzees are genetically 98 -99 % identical.

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This has been promoted to the world as proof that humans share a common evolutionary ancestor with chimps.

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However, recent studies now challenge this claim. Evolutionary geneticists have acknowledged that the actual genetic differences are far greater than we've been told.

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For example, primate evolutionist Todd Prius states, It is now clear that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are far more extensive than previously thought.

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Their genomes are not 98 % or 99 % identical. Earlier studies published in the evolutionary scientific literature reported an overall

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DNA similarity of 98 to 99%. However, large portions of the chimp genome did not align with the human genome, and so were excluded from the reported estimates.

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For instance, the algorithm parameters used in the major milestone publication in Nature reported by the

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Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium omitted over 100 million

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DNA letters. When accounting for these large non -alignable regions and other omitted sequence data, the actual chimp -human

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DNA similarity is significantly lower than the 98 to 99 % identity claims.

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When they originally started to ask that question, they didn't have full genomic data. And so they're actually based their estimates of similarity based upon just little snippets of the genome.

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And they were choosing protein coding sequences, which are the most similar, which are, which, you know, that explain why we have similar biochemistry.

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So, initially we're saying, oh, 98, 99 % of the genomes must be similar between chimp and human.

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The textbooks still say that. But basically geneticists know that's not correct.

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What is the actual genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees? This is a question that comes up over and over again in this creation -evolution debate.

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And if it is true we're 98 to 99 % genetically identical to the closest evolutionary relatives, evolutionists say, it feels like they're just kissing cousins.

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Well, let's dig down to what the scientific data actually say. If you look at the 2005 chimpanzee genome paper in Nature, you look at subsequent papers, the

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Bonobo paper, the Gorilla paper, the Orangutan paper, all of them give a basically a consistent answer that most of our

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DNA can be aligned to chimpanzee and vice versa. And in that region that does align, it's about 1 to 2 % different in terms of single letter differences.

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But if you say, wait a minute, are there sections of human DNA that fail to align to chimpanzee?

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Are there sections of chimpanzee that fail to align to human? The answer is yes. And it's far more

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DNA than is that 1 or 2 % different. So if you incorporate all of these numbers together, the stuff that aligns, it is almost identical.

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The stuff that can't be aligned at all, you get a number about 85%. What's even more important is what that percentage translates to in terms of absolute differences.

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So an 85 % identity, 15 % difference in terms of raw

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DNA letters represents 300 to 400 million single DNA letter differences. That's a massive number.

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The evolutionary theory claims that humans evolved from a hypothetical chimp -like ancestor roughly 6 million years ago.

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This is said to have occurred through a long series of beneficial mutations. In light of the actual genomic differences between humans and chimps, this is simply not genetically feasible.

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A more accurate chimp -human DNA similarity estimate of 85 % represents 300 to 400 million

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DNA letter differences, an extreme level of genetic discontinuity. This means in order to evolve a chimp -like ancestor into modern humans, hundreds of millions of beneficial mutations need to arise in an ancestral population.

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The difficulty with accomplishing this has to do with the extremely long waiting time required for establishing even the smallest sets of mutually dependent mutations.

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Even granting a best -case scenario for evolution by generously assuming human and chimp DNA is 99 % identical, the remaining 1 % would still be a difference of 30 million

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DNA letters, an impossible genetic barrier for evolution to traverse in 6 million years.

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Let's assume that it's still only 1%. That's not correct. No one believes that now. But even if to get 1 % of the genome different requires 30 million mutations, that's a lot of new information.

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And when we talked about the waiting time, we were saying, well, 8 mutations, waiting for 8 specific mutations takes more time than the time since the

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Big Bang. So no, it's not conceivable. You cannot change the program of an ape into the programming for a human in any amount of time.

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People ask, well, what's the problem? You're saying there's 100 new mutations per person per generation in a big population that's billions of mutations every generation.

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What's the problem with getting the information that codes for something? The difference is that genetic damage is nonspecific.

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So deleterious mutations can happen anywhere in the genome. There's no specificity. So creating damage is easy.

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But in the case of a manuscript or a genetic program or a computer program, it's easy to break them by changing letters.

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It's really hard to improve them. And you have to wait a really long time for the specific letter to mutate into the specific alternative letter at a specific site to actually create any type of benefit.

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So waiting time for beneficials is different from waiting time for neutrals. You don't have to wait long for a neutral or for a deleterious.

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You have to wait a really, really long time if you're waiting for a specific and beneficial one. Waiting for the right mutations to arise and become established in a pre -human population greatly exceeds evolutionary time scales.

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Leading evolutionary geneticists acknowledge it is a serious problem for the theory, devastating for the ape -to -man scenario.

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Population geneticist Michael Lynch confesses in the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, A central problem in the evolutionary theory concerns the mechanisms by which adaptations requiring multiple mutations emerge in natural populations.

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Lynch's calculations suggest the length of time required for just two specific mutations to become established in a pre -human population is over 200 million years, well beyond the six -million -year time span during which an ape -like creature is said to have evolved into man.

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Other studies reporting in scientific literature show similar results. Evolutionary geneticists

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Durrett and Schmidt of Cornell University report in the Annals of Applied Probability that the average waiting time to form a slightly longer

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DNA sequence of eight specific mutations is on the order of 650 million years.

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But this estimate is incomplete. When accounting for random loss due to a well -established principle known as genetic drift, the actual waiting time should be a hundredfold longer, roughly 65 billion years.

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This is four times longer than the reputed age of the universe, assuming a Big Bang singularity 13 .7

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billion years ago. At best, all evolution can hope to accomplish in the prescribed six -million -year time span is the formation of a tiny

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DNA sequence, no more than a few genetic letters in length, totally incapable of producing a single new gene.

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Modern genetics has demonstrated that it is impossible for humans to have evolved from a chimp -like ancestor via random mutations.

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It is an unbridgeable genetic gap for evolution to traverse, even given billions of years.

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If humans did not evolve from ape -like creatures, then where did we come from? The Genesis account of creation states that God made

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Adam and Eve, not as mythical beings, but as the literal historical ancestors of all living people.

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They were the first two human beings created, with all humans descending from this first couple.

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From a purely genetic standpoint, is it scientifically feasible that all humans descended from a single mother and a single father?

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Many insist this is absurd, and yet the genetic evidence for a literal Adam and Eve is inside each one of us.

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It's found in our DNA. In 1987, a milestone paper was published in the journal

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Nature by leading evolutionary geneticists who announced the results of a mitochondrial

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DNA analysis. Geneticists from the University of California found that all humans are descended from one woman thought to have lived in Africa 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago.

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Their results sent shockwaves throughout the scientific community and called for a major rewrite of the evolutionary view of human origins to accommodate the new data.

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The revision gave rise to the now widely accepted out -of -Africa theory. Proponents of the theory couldn't help but notice its uncanny resemblance to the biblical

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Eve. In acknowledgement of this, they gave the genetic mother of us all the name

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Mitochondrial Eve. According to the evolutionary perspective, Mitochondrial Eve was an unnamed woman who evolved out of Africa from a homo erectus population of apemen.

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Not long after the first mitochondrial DNA studies revealed a single mother of us all, evolutionary geneticists found similar results when analyzing sequences on the male

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Y -chromosome. In 1997, a team of researchers from Stanford University reported to the

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American Society of Human Genetics that all men inherited their Y -chromosome from a single male ancestor.

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The sequencing of thousands of Y -chromosomes from diverse people groups living around the world has revealed an overall lack of Y -chromosome diversity.

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All men share the same Y -chromosome, plus a small number of mutations consistent with a single male ancestor of the human race.

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Once again, evolutionary geneticists couldn't help but give the father of us all a biblical name

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Y -chromosome Adam. Just as they did with Mitochondrial Eve, evolutionists interpret

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Y -chromosome Adam to be an evolved apeman from Africa that lived sometime around 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago.

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The evolutionary community acknowledges that there is a literal Y -chromosome

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Adam and there is a literal Mitochondrial Eve. They say, it's clear that all of the

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Y -chromosomes on this planet trace back to a single individual who didn't live so long ago.

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The Y -chromosome is only passed on through the male, right, father to son, while the mitochondrial chromosome is only transmitted through the female.

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And that chromosome, also, all the geneticists agree, all people on the planet get their mitochondria from a woman who lived not so long ago, and it's uncontested.

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And it turns out, initially, the evolutionists said, yeah, but it looks from our estimates of how long ago those individuals lived, that they didn't live in the same time span.

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Now, actually, that they've reworked their numbers, they're always reassessing their time scales, their

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Adam and Eve, the Mitochondrial Eve and the Y -chromosome Adam, they are in the same time span.

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There are two fundamental differences between the Adam and Eve of the Bible and the evolutionary interpretation of Mitochondrial Eve and Y -chromosome

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Adam. The first difference has to do with time, and the second has to do with population size.

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The Genesis account indicates Adam and Eve lived recently, just thousands of years ago, and that they were the only two people alive at the time of their creation.

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The evolutionary model claims they lived around 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago and belonged to a hominin population of 10 ,000 individuals.

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But as you will see, it's not the genetic data that conflicts with the biblical account of Adam and Eve.

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The conflict comes from inferences about time and population size. Evolutionary geneticists estimate that genetic

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Adam and Eve lived around 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago, using a method known as the molecular clock.

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The technique relies on the assumption that mutations accumulate in certain regions of the genome at a constant rate over deep time.

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Evolutionary scientists have to further assume that humans evolved from a chimp -like ancestor roughly 6 million years ago in order to calibrate the molecular clock.

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Both claims are problematic and have been called into question by the genetics community. Distinguished evolutionary geneticist

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David Reich of Harvard confesses in the publication The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us.

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It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite embarrassingly bad and uncertain.

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Scientists are now using a more straightforward approach to determine mutation rates that do not require ape -to -man evolutionary assumptions.

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It involves directly measuring mutation rates in the present, comparing parents and offspring known as the pedigree method.

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When comparing DNA sequences between parents and children, the measured mutation rates are typically 10 to 20 times higher than those inferred based on assumptions of ape -to -man evolution.

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When the molecular clock is calibrated using the empirically measured mutation rates, both mitochondrial

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Eve and Y -chromosome Adam lived just thousands of years ago. In discussing the age of mitochondrial

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Eve, evolutionary scientists in Trends in Genetics acknowledge this discrepancy.

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mtDNA datasets often exhibit anomalous patterns. One of these anomalies is the discrepancy between mtDNA mutation rates observed in evolutionary timescales, for example, in dating the divergence between two species and those measured within family pedigrees.

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If the high mutation rates seen in some human pedigrees were used to calculate the age of our most recent female common ancestor, she would have lived just 6 ,000 years ago, a date more consistent with biblical

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Eve than mitochondrial Eve. There's a long -standing debate and argument in genetics, and that deals with the difference between what's called the phylogenetic mutation rate and the genealogical mutation rate.

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If you look at a family, you can count the differences between the people and you say, oh, they've had some mutations, and you can actually calculate a mutation rate over time in today's time, in known time.

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Right now, we know what the mutation rate is, but the evolutionary community doesn't like to use that rate because it's too fast.

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They use what's called the phylogenetic mutation rate. That is, they look at the difference between humans and chimpanzees, not the real rate, but the differences, and they say, oh, we've been separated for so many millions of years.

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When I was an undergraduate, that difference was 3 million years. Now it's 6 million years, 6 .5

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million years. Some people argue for 13 million years because mathematically, they're having a hard time dealing with this.

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Take the differences between humans and chimpanzees in some gene, like mitochondria, white chromosome, or something like that, divide it by the time that separates us, 6 million years, you get a very slow mutation rate.

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But if you look at the people alive today, count the number of differences between them, and divide by the time since their ancestor, maybe their great -great -grandfather, or something like that, you're going to get a mutation rate much faster.

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When we use that rate, Adam and Eve fall into the biblical time frame. So when we use today's science, measurable science, laboratory stuff we know is true,

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Adam and Eve are biblical. While the actual genetic data reveals a single mitochondrial

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Eve ancestor and a single Y chromosome ancestor, evolutionists have insisted they must have lived in a larger population.

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For this reason, they caution the general public not to mistake the evolutionary Adam and Eve with Adam and Eve of the

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Bible. Yet they acknowledge there can be no direct evidence for the larger population's size of 10 ,000 because all other mitochondrial and Y chromosome lineages supposedly died off, removing all traces of their existence, leaving, as paleo -expert

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Chris Stringer has said, just one lucky mother and one lucky father. In an attempt to explain what would otherwise be another remarkable biblical coincidence, proponents of the ape -to -man model invoke what is known as coalescent theory.

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This theory assumes that over many generations, it is inevitable that eventually only a single mitochondrial and Y chromosome lineage will remain.

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Coalescence theory is based upon the assumption of random mating. So you need a single population and all the people have equal likelihood of intermarriage.

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That's never been the case. From an evolutionary point of view, humans and pre -humans have always been in tribes that are separated.

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So there's not random mating. In fact, if you look at the charts that show coalescence, all you have to do is say, okay, that's one sub -population, but there's dozens or hundreds of other sub -populations and those would be producing a different coalescence to a different Adam or a different Eve.

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Basically, the coalescence argument fails. So their rebuttal position is not scientifically valid and it's relatively reckless.

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Evolutionary scientists reasoned that if humanity started with just two people, it could not explain the total amount of human diversity we see today.

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For this reason, a population of 10 ,000 became a central tenet of the current model.

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It's typically assumed that Adam and Eve would have had no genetic variance, no genetic diversity.

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However, there's no reason to assume they were created as nearly identical clones. If Adam and Eve were created with built -in diversity for traits such as skin color, all of the different looking people groups could easily arise in a biblical time frame.

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There would be no reason to wait millions of years for the slow accumulation of mutations if the diversity was encoded in their genomes right from the beginning.

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If Adam and Eve were heterozygous, as we would reasonably expect, extensive genetic diversity would quickly arise simply through sexual reproduction, which reshuffles pre -existing variation to produce different combinations of traits.

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This idea that God creates an initial pair with differences between them and within them, we'll call that term, the technical term is heterozygosity.

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So this is an idea that has massive consequences in modern genetics and virtually all of our genetic discussions.

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It also provides a convenient explanation, a very plausible explanation for how you get all the ethno -linguistic differences that we see today.

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Humans are considered one species and we can produce variety in a single generation.

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So if a dark -skinned Sudanese person marries a light -skinned Finnish individual, their children will be an intermediate skin tone and have features from both parents.

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And if you had an Australian Aborigine who marries a Han Chinese, and they had children, and so then the offspring of these two mixed marriages had children, they could produce a whole diversity of individuals.

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Why is that? Because people today still have heterozygosity. They have less heterozygosity than what

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I'm saying Adam and Eve had. In other words, Adam and Eve could have produced in their many children every version of human that we see today.

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Once you have an original pair, original population, an original set of eight if we're talking about the

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Flood, that has heterozygosity, you can explain people groups just like that. A striking example of built -in genetic variation can be seen in the example of twins born from mid -brown parents.

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Mother Kylie Hodgson and father Remy Horder gave birth to twins Remy and Kian, who appeared racially different.

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The two -tone fraternal twins shared the same womb and were born a minute apart. What most people would typically see as racial differences arose in a single generation due to gene segregation.

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Just like people living today, one can reasonably expect Adam and Eve to have had a large pool of genetic variation built in to their genomes.

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Prior to modern genetics, evolutionary scientists claimed that there were fundamentally different races of humans that evolved in diverse parts of the world over a long period of time.

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This model was known as the multi -regional hypothesis. This perception changed with the advent of DNA sequencing, which revealed that all human beings are remarkably similar genetically.

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It is now well established among the scientific community that all people, regardless of their skin color or ethnicity, are 99 .9

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% genetically identical. The so -called racial features that we tend to focus on are essentially only skin deep, reflecting trivial differences in our genetic material.

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Physical traits like eye shape and melanin production amount to a minuscule 0 .012

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% difference in our DNA. This means that regardless of our cultural differences, genetically, we are all part of one big human family.

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If you have designed organisms, created organisms, they would be designed and created so they have internal diversity.

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You don't have to wait for mutations. So the waiting time goes away. If you want adaptation without deep waiting time, then just design the organism with variants in it.

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Even a single organism has heterozygosity, and so there's lots of genetic diversity even in a single organism.

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Two individuals have four chromosome sets, and they have the ability to basically accommodate every possible variant.

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So two people is enough to allow for a vast amount of genetic diversity that could be used by natural selection, that could be used for adaptation to new environments, and you don't need deep time to do that.

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The findings from modern genetics have compelled evolutionary scientists to develop a revised story of human origins that shares many striking similarities with the biblical account of the

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Tower of Babel dispersion. The new model is called the

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Out -of -Africa Theory and has been popular for many years. This theory proposes there was a near -extinction event causing a population bottleneck that reduced humanity to a single breeding population of just a few thousand survivors.

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In the Out -of -Africa Theory, which is now on the rocks, but in the Out -of -Africa

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Theory they postulated there was a human population of about 10 ,000 people for an indeterminate amount of time.

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They never really say how long it is, but let's say 10 ,000, 100 ,000 years. If we compare a modern species that has about that many individuals, you can look at the

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African cheetah. There's about 10 ,000 of them in the wild, give or take a few thousand, and they're having massive problems.

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Birth defects are increasing, reproductive incompatibility in couples is increasing, litter size is decreasing.

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All the population biologists are essentially assuming cheetahs are going to go extinct. How did

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Homo sapiens evolve? We supposedly went from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, you know,

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Homo erectus is smashing rocks together and Homo sapiens that can fly to the moon, during a population bottleneck that should have driven us to extinction.

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This theoretical near -extinction event has been used to explain why all humans are nearly identical genetically.

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The Out of Africa theory claims all living humans originated from this small population who lived in the general vicinity of northeast

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Africa. Alternative studies suggest this small founding population was a little further north, in the general vicinity of the

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Middle East. The survivors of this theoretical near -extinction event suddenly grew very rapidly, splitting into numerous smaller tribes which dispersed outward and gradually filled

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Europe, Africa, Asia and eventually the Americas. Each initial tribe gave rise to its own language and culture, and continued to split and disperse to form the people groups and languages we see today.

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Each migrating tribe would have carried with it a different sampling of the original population's gene pool, rapidly producing the distinctive features that some use to define race.

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In this model, mutations would occur, but are not necessary to explain these distinctive features, which means deep time would not be required either.

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You know, just using standard population genetics principles, we can explain the origin of races easily in hundreds or thousands of years.

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All we need is the population to fragment into smaller populations. Isolation by distance is going to cause changes over time independently in each population, either through natural selection or just random drift.

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So we have a model for that at the Tower of Babel. A few hundred years after the flood,

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God separated the nations according to Y -chromosome, it's the male lineages that define each population, and they spread out on the earth.

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And they would have remained separate from one another because of language differences for a time. That's all we need.

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Once you do that, you're going to have regional differences amongst the people. So all of a sudden we have people start looking more

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Asian, people start looking more Norwegian, people start looking more

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Australian Aboriginal, people start looking more African. All we need is isolation in a short amount of time.

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Evolutionary geneticists reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have named this specific model the

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Instantaneous Divergence Model. This model is virtually indistinguishable from the biblical model of the human dispersion associated with the

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Tower of Babel as recorded in Genesis chapter 11. Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.

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So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.

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Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth.

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And from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth. One of the funny things about the out of Africa theory is that it actually mirrors the biblical account.

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We have a population of people that originated in Africa sometimes in a distant past.

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Well, biblically we started with two people. Our population grew to thousands of people, we don't know how many.

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And then our population crashed, biblically, at the flood. Well in the out of Africa theory we had a lot of people and it crashed, through a bottleneck.

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And then the population began to grow, in both models, and then the population fragmented and spread across the world, in both models.

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The Bible was written first, and we're stuck with it. There's a limited range of possibilities, biblically, about human history.

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Back in the day though, evolutionary theory, they could say whatever they wanted, and the most common view back in the day was the multi -regional hypothesis, that human beings just evolved in synchrony across the planet and exchanged genes as we evolved and evolved and evolved.

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They did not expect a bottleneck, they did not expect going through the Middle East, they did not expect a Y -chromosome atom in the mitochondria to leave, but those are things that have to be true if the

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Bible is true, and those are things that the modern geneticists have discovered. So what we're seeing over time is that the evolutionary model is getting more biblical, which is really interesting.