In a review of Joshua Swamidass’s new book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve, we learn:
Given the surprisingly recent date at which shared genealogical ancestors arise in populations, it was well worth exploring how this might fit with the age-old belief in Adam and Eve. Joshua Swamidass does this in a highly detailed and truly inter-disciplinary manner. He shows respect for all sides, sincerely wanting to find a way forward that can defuse an area of conflict. It is to be hoped that this book will motivate the more sophisticated modelling of the human population history. It may also make believers ask questions about their hierarchy of beliefs about Adam and Eve. Is the most important thing about them the time in which they existed, or something that made them objectively unique? Are they genetic ghosts, or ghostly ancestors? The book has less to say to the atheist or agnostic reader, except perhaps to convince them that Christian views of Adam and Eve could be irrelevant to objective reality, and to persuade them that there are reputable scientists who take both science and religion seriously. No doubt Joshua Swamidass will be on this year’s shortlist for the Templeton Prize.
Richard Buggs, “Adam and Eve our ghostly ancestors?” at Nature Research: Ecology and Evolution Blog
The really remarkable thing is that after all this time and all that rhetoric, Adam and Eve remain a defensible idea.
See also: The Behe vs. Swamidass debate (quality vid).
I think it’s a testament to human ingenuity:
Bob O’Hara quotes,
So now, all of the sudden, Bob O’Hara is concerned about whether a hypothesis is falsifiable or not?
Pray tell Bob O’Hara, why do you feign concern that Swamidass has produced, via population genetics, an unfalsifiable hypothesis about Adam and Eve, whilst steadfastly ignoring all these other falsifying evidences that prove Darwinian evolution to be false?
Verse:
To say that the purported evidence for human evolution is misleading is an understatement.
There are two main lines of evidence that Darwinists try to use to substantiate their claim that humans were created by unguided material processes rather than being created ‘in the image of God’ by God. The fossil evidence and the genetic evidence.
As to the first line of evidence. the fossil record. Although it is fairly uncontroversial these days. ever since Gould pointed it out a few decades ago, to point out the fact the overall fossil record is severely discordant to what Darwin originally predicted, For instance,
Although it is fairly uncontroversial to note that the overall fossil record is severely discordant to what Darwin originally predicted, the one place in the fossil record where you will get severe pushback from Darwinists is with the purported evidence for human evolution in the fossil record. Yet their are reasons to take their pushback with severe skepticism. As Phillip Johnson once explained,
Indeed, despite all the bluff and bluster from Darwinists, the purported evidence for human evolution in the fossil record is not nearly as ‘slam dunk’ as Darwinists pretend that it is.
Despite the fevered imaginations of Darwinists, unrestrained imaginations that see a missing link in the shadow of every new fossil discovery,
Despite the fevered imaginations of Darwinists, unrestrained imaginations that see a missing link in the shadow of every new fossil discovery, the missing link between humans and apes is still missing.
Here are a few examples of how misleading Darwinists can be with the evidence:
Bottom line, despite all the bluff and bluster from Darwinists, the purported evidence from the fossil record that shows man evolving from apes is far less compelling than Darwinists pretend that it is:
As mentioned previously, the other line of evidence that Darwinists try to use to substantiate their claim that humans were created by unguided material processes rather than being created ‘in the image of God’ by God, is the genetic evidence.
For decades, the supposedly knock down piece of evidence that Darwinists touted as undeniable proof that man evolved from apes was the genetic evidence that supposedly showed that we were 98.5% genetically similar to chimpanzees.
Although the claim that we are 98.5% genetically similar to chimpanzees has always been questionable, In fact, according to a Darwinist, the 98.5% Chimp-Human DNA similarity comparisons, because of the fraudulent way in which it was derived, “needs to be treated like nuclear waste: bury it safely and forget about it for a million years”,,,
Although the claim that we are 98.5% genetically similar to chimpanzees has always been questionable, the claim that we are 98.5% genetic similar to chimpanzees has fallen on especially hard times recently, with the most probable percentage for genetic similarity is turning out to be around 80% to 85%
On top of that, and completely contrary to Darwinian thinking, kangaroos and dolphins are far more genetically similar to humans than was originally presupposed by Darwinists:
This “almost wholly identical” genetic similarity with humans, in widely divergent species from humans, presents an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. As James Le Fanu explained, “Contrary to all expectations, many DNA sequences involved in embryo development are remarkably similar across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimeter-long worm to ourselves.7 There is, in short, nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly should have six legs, a pair of wings, and a dot-sized brain and we should have two arms, two legs, and a mind capable of comprehending that overarching history of our universe.”
And as Ruth Williams noted, “A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,,
As should be needless to say, “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?” is not a minor question for evolutionary biologists to be asking themselves.
As Ruth Williams alluded to, the place where you will find the greatest differences between humans, chimps, kangaroos, dolphins, etc.. etc.. is not in the DNA sequences but is in the species-specific ‘alternative splicing patterns’ between the different species.
In fact, in terms of alternative splicing in humans, “Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,, and,,, As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes,, collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification.”
To say that the preceding finding of a ‘million distinct polypeptides’ in humans is a problem for the ‘selfish gene,’ i.e. gene-centric, view of Darwinists is to make a severe understatement. It is a straight-up empirical falsification of their gene-centric view of evolution.
Moreover, as if that was not bad enough, the biological form that any given organism may take is not even reducible to mutations to DNA in the first place (as was, and is, presupposed in the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian thought):
In fact, recent advances in quantum biology have now shown that Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, are not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand molecular biology in the first place:
In fact advances in quantum information theory have now shown that entropy is a “property of an observer who describes a system.”, thus basically verifying the primary prediction of Intelligent Design that a Intelligent Designer is necessary in order to explain life.
There is much more that could be said in regards to how our advances in our understanding of genetics, quantum biology, and quantum information theory, has falsified Darwinian presuppositions, but for now, suffice it to say that the supposedly ‘knock down’ proof from genetics that Darwinists have used for decades to try to claim that we unquestionably evolved from apes by unguided material processes is not nearly as compelling as they have falsely led many people to believe.
I’m personally a fan of the geneological Hans and Leia hypothesis. After defeating the Sith’s evil empire, their progeny emigrated to our solar system and populated Earth with their kind. What my theory has going for it is it is just as consistent with the scientific data as geneological Adam and Eve, plus it already has great appeal in pop culture.
Falsifiable Hypothesis
Someone asked for one?
Let us Creationists give you one.
Its called “The Creationist Law of Biogenesis”
Here it is:
Absent Divine Intervention life comes only from life.
To falsify it, all you need to do is make a living entity from inanimate chemicals,
as top Scientists (including Nobel Prize Winners!!!) have been trying to do for 100 years.
Their results?
Nada nothing zilch.
‘….. suffice it to say that the supposedly ‘knock down’ proof from genetics that Darwinists have used for decades to try to claim that we unquestionably evolved from apes by unguided material processes is not nearly as compelling as they have falsely led many people to believe.’
Wouldn’t you say that the notion that we had descended from apes was not, ‘not nearly as compelling as they have falsely led many people to believe’, but, rather, so massively contradicted by the evidence, as to be risible beyond belief ?’
Whether in jest or seriously I do not know, but anyways EricMH states that he is,,
So to solidify the Christian’s belief that humans are ‘made in the image of God’ by God, (and to refute the “Hans and Leia hypothesis”), ! will , once again, appeal to the scientific evidence.
First to solidify the fact humans are ‘made in the image of God’.
In 2014 a group of leading experts in this area of language research, authored a paper in which they stated that they have “essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,”
Noam Chomsky drove this point further home in 2017 when he stated, “The capacity for language is species specific, something shared by humans and unique to them. It is the most striking feature of this curious organism, and a foundation for its remarkable achievement,,,”
Best Selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession by leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject. Wolfe provided a précis of his argument in his book,
In other words, although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, and sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and, more specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, shelter, in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also for our pleasure.
And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so.
Specifically, the ‘top-down’ infusion of mathematical and/or logical information into material substrates lies at the very basis of many, if not all, of man’s most stunning, almost miraculous, technological advances in recent decades.
What is more interesting still, besides the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information and have come to dominate the world through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’ than finding both the universe, and life itself, are both ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates.
As to the fact that it was definitely God who created us (in His image), I appeal to quantum biology.
Specifically, I appeal to the fact that quantum correlations are now found to be ubiquitous within molecular biology. For instance, DNA itself does not belong to the world of classical mechanics but instead belongs to the world of quantum mechanics. In the following video, at the 22:20 minute mark, Dr Rieper shows why the high temperatures of biological systems do not prevent DNA from having quantum entanglement and then at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper goes on to remark that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.
The thing about finding quantum correlations and/or quantum information to be ubiquitous within molecular biology, is that quantum correlations and/or quantum information are “non-local”. beyond space and time, effect.
. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, ““Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or quantum information of the cell. Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
It is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that was created by God, An eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Thus in conclusion, the Christian, due to recent advances in quantum biology, now has some fairly impressive empirical evidence that he can directly appeal to in order to support his belief that God created humans, and that God endowed humans with a eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our temporal, material, bodies,
That non-locality and the centrality of the observer (if that is the right expression) have struck me as absolute game-changers : the former, for its identification of a thorough-going supernatural, not to say, ‘divine’ dimension as you point out, within our space-time, indeed, at the most fundamental level. And the latter, for its predication of theism.
Yes I’m in jest. Pointing out the fun you can have once ‘unfalsifiable’ = ‘scientific’, i.e. Swamidass’ claim that his genealogical Adam and Eve concept makes Genesis scientific.