Readers may remember anti-ID duo Nathan Lents and Joshua Swamidass and here they back again, this time with a book:
The scriptural challenge is that Adam and Eve are purported to be the ancestors of everyone “to all the ends of the earth,” by the year 1 BCE. But we know with as much certainty as scientifically possible that our species does not descend from a single couple and instead has its origin in Africa around 300,000 years ago. We have evolved through a long line of ancestry that connects with all other living things going back nearly 4 billion years.
So there’s that.
And yet, in his upcoming book, “The Genealogical Adam & Eve,” Swamidass makes an audacious claim: A de novo-created Adam and Eve could very well be universal human ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the last 6,000-10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to reconcile the Garden of Eden story with science, but rarely does someone with Swamidass’ credentials do what most scientists would deem unthinkable: Take the story seriously. However, some atheist scientists are taking Swamidass seriously.
Nathan H. Lents, “Upcoming book leaves scientific possibility for existence of ‘Adam and Eve’” at USA Today
Actually, it would make way more sense to take Adam and Eve seriously than to take the multiverse seriously, as many atheists do. Everyone is familiar with the type of human behavior Adam and Eve are said to have engaged in. No one knows what a universe that literally makes no sense would be like.
Note: The book is due December 10, 2019.
See also: Nathan Lents: Nathan Lents is still wrong about sinuses but is still writing about them (A neurosurgeon tries to help him understand the anatomy.)
and
Biologist Wayne Rossiter on Joshua Swamidass’ claim that entropy = information
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“Doesn’t descend from a single couple but evolved in Africa” doesn’t work.
If evolution happened, it must have happened to a LOT of primates in MANY places at the same time and in the same way. This is perfectly impossible by random processes. It’s like a jackpot with quintillion-to-one odds being won by a million people at the same time. Probability REQUIRES a single individual to be the first of the type, at each stage of evolution. In turn each of these single new-types must survive and reproduce vastly better than their “lower” competitors, which is also wildly impossible because the new type will be genetically mismatched with the old versions, and unpopular with the old versions.
SImultaneous creation of a fairly large and genetically similar population is the only rational possibility. This rules out one Adam and one Eve. But a later tribe of descendants, who kept an oral tradition and wrote it down as scripture, would look back at one couple as THEIR origin. That’s how inheritance works.
As to this comment from the USA today article:
Hmmm, at least that is what atheistic professors try to tell you at secular universities with their false revisionist history of the ‘warfare thesis’.
And yet, much contrary to the false ‘warfare thesis’ that is constantly promulgated by atheistic professors at secular universities, far from science being antagonistic to Christianity, modern science in fact finds its origins in Christianity,
And indeed science, if naturalism and/or materialism were actually true, would wind up in catastrophic epistemological failure: (As I have pointed out several times now), assuming Naturalism instead of Theism as the worldview on which all of science is based leads to the catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself.
As well, very much contrary to the false ‘warfare thesis’ of atheists, which holds that the advance of modern science has undermined Christianity, the fact of the matter is that the advance of modern science has confirmed basic tenets of Christianity and has, by the same token, undermined basic tenets of Atheist Naturalism and/or materialism:
The materialistic and Theistic philosophy make, and have made, several contradictory predictions about what type of science evidence we will find.
These contradictory predictions, and the evidence found by modern science, can be tested against one another to see if either materialism or Theism is true.
Here are a few comparisons:
As you can see when we remove the artificial imposition of the materialistic philosophy (methodological naturalism), from the scientific method, and look carefully at the predictions of both the materialistic philosophy and the Theistic philosophy, side by side, we find the scientific method is very good at pointing us in the direction of Theism as the true explanation. – In fact modern science is even very good at pointing us to Christianity as the solution to the much sought after ‘theory of everything’
Verse:
As I’ve mentioned SEVERAL times before, if you accept that homo sapiens were Designed, then any LOGICAL conclusion would agree that the first production batch must have included 1 female and 1 male. This would, among other things, allow the folks in charge of Production to product test fertilization through intercourse and successful gestation and birth using the new human female body parts.
There would remain the question of how the brand new humans get fed and socialized and encouraged to mate. So I’m guessing the Production guys MUST have acted as parents and teachers for the Newbies. And this would of course have had to include spending more than 10 YEARS showing “Eve” how to be a Mom and convince Adam NOT to simply KILL Junior and eat him for lunch.
The only practical alternative is to assume that The Designer produced perhaps 10 pairs (you want a “pack” of around 20 individuals to operate self-sufficiently) of adults and let ’em have at it. But of course the guys wouldn’t know how to find food and tell dirty jokes around the campfire. And the girls wouldn’t have ANY idea how you actually RAISED a baby human.
As I’ve mentioned before, watch the authoritative documentary “The Blue Lagoon”.
The scientific evidence for a historical Adam and Eve is far stronger than Joshua Swamidass’s somewhat reluctant admittance:
Here is a recap of what brought Swamidass into the discussion and eventually led to his conclusion for a (possible) historical Adam and Eve
As has been said, your model in science is only as good as your assumptions. And here are some of the questionable, even false, assumptions that went into Venema’s original model that Drs. Schaffner and Swamidass analyzed,
Although each of those claims are problematic for Darwinists, I will focus on the second claim in particular, i.e. “There exists a high degree of genetic similarity between humans and apes.” That claim, at least how Darwinists intend it, is false. While there is a ‘high degree of genetic similarity’, the genetic similarity is nowhere close to the 98.5% figure that pop-science media constantly claims that it is. Both Drs, Richard Buggs and Jeffrey Tomkins have found, from the best data currently available, a genetic similarity figure of about 85%:
To further drive this point home, Dolphins, Kangaroos, frogs, etc.. etc… although being very different morphologically from humans, are found to have very similar DNA sequences.
In fact, this widespread genetic similarity between very dissimilar looking creatures has thrown a monkey wrench into the entire Darwinian line of thinking. As is pointed out in the following article, “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.”
As was touched upon in the preceding article, even if DNA were as similar between humans and apes, as Darwinists have falsely portrayed it to be in popular media, the basic ‘form’ that any organism may take simply is not reducible to DNA as was originally presupposed in the central dogma of evolution.
Dr. Jonathan Wells, starting around the 15:00 minute mark, shows that the central dogma of Darwinian evolution, which simply stated is “DNA makes RNA makes protein makes us”, is incorrect at every step.
In fact, this failure of the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution to account for the basic body plan, and/or form, of any particular organism occurs at a much lower level than DNA itself, (even much lower than any other biological molecule that Darwinists may wish to invoke).
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
And indeed, 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 biological life in the first place:
Where differences are greatest between chimps and humans, (and between all other creatures), are not in genetic sequence comparisons but are instead found in genomic architectures and in alternative splicing patterns.
In regards to alternative splicing patterns, as the following paper states, “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?”,,, the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,”
In fact ., due to alternative slicing, “Alternatively spliced isoforms,,, 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 (Pan et al., 2008), collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms,,”
Moreover, to make this even more devatating to Darwinists, alternative splicing patterns are part of the developmental Gene Regulatoy Network (dGRN). And yet dGRNs, as Stephen Meyer pointed out in his book “Darwin’s Doubt” are simply devastating to Darwinian presuppositions:
Of further note, dGRN’s are not deterministic, as would be presupposed within the Darwinian framework, but are instead found to be ‘context dependent’:
Thus in conclusion, Darwinists simply have made many false assumptions in their faulty model, (a faulty model which, none-the-less, they still admitted pointed to a historical Adam and Eve). Erroneous assumptions in their model that simply do not line up with current empirical observations.
I think that Stephen Meyer, in the following interview, gives a much more accurate assessment of the current state of empirical evidence than what Darwinists have erroneously presupposed in their faulty model:
Verse: