Common Descent: Humans and Chimps / Mice and Rats

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@anon46279830

Your argument works against YEC, not against OEC. Am I missing something?

Yup. I’ll explain.

@anon46279830

I fail to see why a “design principle” is needed to explain that. The difference that stat is measuring is overwhelmingly not functional evolution, but “noise” evolution. The rat/mice genome picked up a lot of differences over time just due to random chance which had negligible fitness impact, not functional differences.

The reason is that this is all data that common descent explains. To plausibly reject common descent, you have to provide a better answer. By better, here, I mean mathematically fits the data better with fewer parameters and similar rigor. Science does not discard theories that work, even if they are working on “noise” evolution. Common descent explains the “noise” in our genomes, so that is why we we affirm it.

@anon46279830

I am having trouble seeing what it is creationists would have to explain since it is also what would be expected from that model. The changes you are measuring are almost all noise, not evolution of new function. I am not even sure most of that happens at the protein-making gene level. A lot of it is regulatory, using the same parts in different ways.

The reason it is important is because common descent explains what most of our differences are made up of, “noise.” The greater the ratio of noise to functional mutations, also, the easier it is to find functional mutations. It is like we are allowed more “misses” before having to hit one of the many “target” mutations.

Pull on this thread, and you’ll see how all the quantitative arguments against human evolution just fall apart. They do not withstand scrutiny as soon as we realize that evolutionary theory (common descent) explains that vast majority of differences between humans and chimps.

@anon46279830

Even if God looked at a chimp ancestor six million years ago and said “I am going to use that genome as a template but modify it into a homo erectus” and then 5.8 million years later said “I am going to modify that genome and make Man” then we would still expect our genome to have far less differences in them than the genome of rats and mice who have been going their own way for 12 million years.

What you are describe here is, exactly, a type of God-guided evolution or creation-by-modification that looks exactly like evolution. This is common descent. Think through the implications of what you are saying carefully. If what you are saying is how God did things:

1. Disproving evolution was not one of his design goals, because this method of creation is legitimately mistaken as common descent.
2. Only a tiny number of mutations (just as predicted by evolution) are required to turn a chimp into a human. This is a major concession that ends up undermining every anti-evolution argument we’ve seen.
3. I’ve already pointed creation-by-modification out as a viable option many times. See for example:

There are some creationists that argue God periodically create new species by special creation in a particular way: by copying their genomes, tinkering a bit, and instantiating a new species. This possibility is raised by Reasons to Believe (RTB).

Depending on the exact manner in which God does this type of special creation, it is possible that this could explain the data. God would have to be creating us from lower species, using transformations of our genomes that are readily understandable by known biochemical mechanisms (like point mutations, chromosome fusions, neutral drift, and transposons). Is this possible? Absolutely. Perhaps it is even true. But why would God do this? Why would He choose a creative mechanism that is so easily understood through the lens of common ancestry? Why was evidence against evolution not part of His design goals? Maybe the theologians can help us here.
Evidence and Evolution

I think this is a viable position, but because of the entailments above, it calls into serious question all the opposition to evolution. If God did not care to disprove evolution in our genomes, why should we?