Joshua, thanks for your efforts and time spent on the subject!
I read your interview with Christianity Today. In this article, you said “If we keep straight what the science is actually saying, the story of Genesis could be true as literally as you could imagine it, with Adam being created by dust and God breathing into his nostrils and Eve being created from his rib. But evolution is happening outside the Garden, and there are people out there who God created in a different way and who end up intermingling with Adam and Eve’s descendants. It’s not actually in conflict with evolutionary science”.
I agree with this, in that I think Genesis 1 is discussing the story of God originally creating humanity, and chapter 2 of Genesis is explaining when God later made Adam and Eve.
What do you think of the study, “Does mitochondria define a species?”.
The evidence from their study indicates that most current life forms emerged from small groups about 150-300,000 years ago. Other archaeological evidence shows modern civilization and modern agricultural plants and animals, and humanity engaging in these modern agricultural processes, roughly emerged about 6000 years ago. This coincides with the biblical timeline of Adam and Eve being created and their genetics being injected into the mainstream of other Homo genetic lines over a period of perhaps several hundred years. What I’m suggesting is that, based on the evidence, God wrote the DNA code and created this sixth era about 150 to 300,000 years ago, and ejected humanity with new humans with an enhanced ability to build and farm about 6000 years ago.
I’m aware of the scientific stigma surrounding this, in deviating from evolution thought that biological creatures evolved over many millions of years. The two authors of the above study I’m sure felt the pressure of this stigma, but the factual evidence of their study, I think, actually doesn’t support evolution.
I’m very interested to see what you think of their findings. If you have the time to respond, I would greatly appreciate your input on this.
However, DNA barcoding is often enough to detect what species one is sampling. Barcodes are usually unique, though as seen here many species have multiple slight variations and many other species share barcodes. Contrary to the authors’ assertions, some of those shared barcodes clearly result from recent speciation, not introgression. None of this is relevant to creation.
My main criticism of that paper is that it doesn’t consider neutral coalescence as a potential explanation. Given neutral evolution, and even with a constant population size, there is a level of standing variation that is maintained indefinitely, as alleles are fixed and lost at a constant rate over time.
But nothing in that paper so much as hints at special creation, much less anything special happening 6000 years ago.
Ah good ol’ Stoeckle and Thaler 2018. The problem I have with using mitochondrial sequences to define species is that mitochondria make up a TEENSY fraction of the total DNA in eukaryotes, and the nuclear DNA is going to resolve different relationships in terms of gene flow, recombination, and divergence times. Using the mitochondrial regions is completely arbitrary, and arguably less representative of the relationships among different lineages than then nuclear genome because of it’s unique inheritance pattern.
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