Comments on BioLogos Podcast on Adam and EVe

You disagree with this?

“In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.”

Are there statements in that I agree with in his blogs? Of course there are. So picking a random statement out of there does not mean I disagree with it. In this case, however, you should know that he overstated the evidence to support that conclusion, and in fact it depends on his definition of “human,” which is not a scientific term, and he chose to construct a strawman.

Rather than rehashing that point, start with the mistake that Venema just acknowledged in his article last week on McKnight’s blog. As for the rest of it, I’m not gonna rehash it again.

These errors is all well known right now among scientists at BioLogos (and also Venema), most BioLogos scientists privately acknowledge error.

Naw thats you, bud. Did he make some errors? Certainly. But it is you who have misinterpreted his argument over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. His conclusion: we evolved as a population. Correct! His conclusion: Homo sapiens were never down to two individuals. Correct! Now he went too far on some other claims but those two arguments have always been his main arguments and you have totally misinterpreted those arguments.

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That’s how I see it.

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That’s how everybody and their grandma saw it except for Josh and the DI

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Please tell me how I misrepresented him? I hope that isn’t true. If it is, I’d like to correct it.

Actually, they went down to 0.

And Homo sapiens does not equal “human,” so that is a distraction any way.

Dennis stated numerous times that was what he meant by human. You go up to any person on the street and ask what a human is, you know they will respond by saying us. That book was written for that audience.

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Yes I agree. No where did I say anything that disputes or misrepresents this.

That actually is not true. That is not the common understanding at the moment.

Even if it were true, it is misleading to insist on that definition. Moreover, he does not present any evidence that demonstrates Homo sapiens do not dip down to a single couple. Instead he presents evidence that our ancestors as a whole don’t dip down to a single couple. These are very different things!

Of course you must know this already:

Yes because your random person on the street is up to date on the latest happenings in anthro. Give me a break…

Show me evidence. Most YECs think that Homo genus = “human”. Most ID have been hearing Homo genus = “human” from Gauger. Most scientists think Homo genus = “human”. RTB holds human = Homo sapiens, but they are an outlier.

Regardless, his audience wasn’t just random people, it was also scholars in theology too. Many of them were wondering about AE 500,000 years ago, and Venema presented his work as if their model was ruled out. See the appendix of my book (read: Hilber). In fact, he argued the evidence against a single couple went back 18 million years!

And even if we grant that definition of “human = Homo sapiens” (actually, especially if we do), his argument falls apart. As I quoted above.

Please do let me know where I misrepresented him. I would want to correct that immediately.

Up from 0.

Also, not starting at 2. If you’re going to use population dynamics research to claim that whatever change happened in a (new) member of the pre-human population to give rise to the first human, whatever that change was would have happened in one individual and spread to their descendants. It wouldn’t have started in 2 individuals*, and when there were 2 they would be parent and child, not mates.

At some point later the subset of the population that met whatever criteria you pick might have dropped to just two, and those two might have coincidentally been mates, but they wouldn’t have been the first two.

*Unless by some literally billions-to-one chance the exact same mutation occurred twice in two genomes. You could say that your god ensured this, but then the population dynamics becomes completely irrelevant.

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