Dr. Joshua Swamidass and TMR4A: Some Major Modeling Problems for Young Earth Creationism

Will you engage in a dialogue about your counters with Swamidass here? I know you love to just stick to your channel, but come on, if he’s easy to take down then why not summarize your points and discuss them? Think of how many videos you could make about the discussion once it’s over :smirk:

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61 posts were split to a new topic: Valerie: Questions about TMR4A

I think a major failure of GAE regarding bottlenecks is the hypocritical approach it takes toward the global Noahic Flood. Under the pretense of staying biblically true to a 6000 year old progenitor couple, it then ignores the clear biblical indicators of a global Flood just 1600 years after Creation. Biblical indicators of a global Flood include

-The mountains were covered. How is that produced by a local flood?
-Why the command to build a huge boat to rescue animals if only a local flood? The replenishment of animal populations after a local loss of life would have been no problem
-Why take birds on the Ark if only a local flood? Birds can take flight to escape a local flood
-Large numbers of animals on the fringes of a local flood could have escaped with their lives. Again, why the big boat?

Why would the GAE hypocritically accept the traditional biblical view of A&E just 6000 years ago, while completely ignoring the traditional biblical view of a global Noahic Flood? Presumably because 1600 years would not be enough time for a thorough genealogical mixing of A&E and worldwide populations outside the Garden.

Have you actually read GAE? I don’t think so.

Also covered many times, so I will be brief—and only for the benefit of new readers while I’m waiting for my mid-week Zoom Bible study to begin. (You’ve already been schooled on these topics multiple times so covering this ground again is frustrating.)

(1) The underlying Hebrew word covers everything from small hills to what English-speakers would call mountains. Indeed, there is no compelling reason from the Hebrew text to think the elevations were particularly high.

(2) Hills and mountains covered by flood waters are quite ubiquitous throughout the world. For example, in Glen Morton’s final book he discussed in great detail the mountains flooded by what today we know as the Mediterranean Sea. Even river captains can tell you about their experiences navigating around flooded elevations of various magnitudes. Flooded basins of inundated mountains and hills are not at all rare.

(1) Why the command to march around Jericho for days (and then seven times on the final day) if God was going to simply knock down the walls of the city? If you have even the most basic knowledge of the Bible, you should know that pragmatics (and minimizing the labor of those involved) is not a priority with God.

(2) The Bible describes Noah’s Ark as a type of Christ meant to illustrate how he is the ark of our salvation. This is all basic Biblical theology. We’ve described this to you on multiple occasions so I’m getting the impression that you reject this doctrine. Is that the case? Why?

Same with a global flood or with the incineration of the entire earth. God, if he so willed, could simply recreate a new planet and biosphere of organisms in an instant. So your pragmatism “logic” is moot.

See above.

Sure. And a serpent was created on demand when Moses and Aaron appeared before Pharaoh, God could just as easily have told Noah to throw some leaves into the air after the flood and they could have been transformed into flocks of birds. That would save stocking birds on the ark at all. (You see, if you are going to play a pragmatics game, so can I.)

And God could simply have given all the sinners outside of Noah’s family a fatal cerebral hemorrhages. That would bypass any need for an ark or any sort flood, whether local or global.

Why take ANY animals on an ark when God could have performed a more pragmatic miracle? For that matter, why kill any animals at all when they were not the sinners being judged?

@r_speir, your “logic” keeps taking us in circles with the replaying of PRATTs (points raised a thousand times) which do not at all strengthen your case.

Of course, the biggest problem with your global flood obsession is that the Bible itself simply describes the flood as a deluge on the ERETZ, the land. There is no concept of a “planet earth” or “entire globe”. You are trying to force anachronisms into the Biblical text based upon your favorite man-made traditions.

I prefer to read and observe what the Word of God actually states. That’s why I reject your favorite traditions.

Jesus had a lot to say about those who were hung up on traditions—especially when they obsessed on imposing their favorite traditions upon others. You will find those people mentioned often in the four Gospels.

Of course, another huge problem with your global flood claims are that they totally defy what God has so clearly revealed to us in his creation. There is zero geologic evidence for such a recent global flood. None. Indeed, that is why the Christian pioneers of modern geology searched in vain for that evidence of Noah’s and eventually realized that the global flood tradition was contrary to the historical record God provided in the earth’s crust.

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13 posts were split to a new topic: Christianity and the Two Books

Just added in the images from @GutsickGibbon’s video to the OP. Enjoy.

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Seems like this one is not quite right. :slight_smile:

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Definitely after seeing this again, I’d say Sanford, Jeanson, Carter, etc view is for sure #4 with uniquely created gametes for Adam and Eve with unique alleles or #2 and I couldn’t explain yet how they defend that position. :slightly_smiling_face:

And that’s exactly what I said too! So what exactly was the strawman?

The problem isn’t the strawman. The problem is your mischaracterization of their position and I have a good memory :grinning:

@swamidass 28:16 “The fourth way to handle it which no one has gone to yet, and they’ve just maybe kind of hinted and alluded at it, is that there is something seriously strange and funky going on with the early human population’s DNA. It’s something we don’t observe in any other populations right now Much, much, much higher rates of recombination… mechanisms at play 6000 years ago that we don’t really even see anymore among current population and potentially even miracles… No one has gone to that position… If they’re saying there is a natural mechanism to do that, then we should see evidence of some of the things they’re proposing…no leading creationists I know about has actually taken hold of that and say that’s the way things work; they’ve gestured at it maybe…they’re actually more in the 2nd model we discussed”

30:15 graphic shows: “magic” hyper-diverse alleles (never seen before in nature) @gutsickgibbon “you essentially need a biology in the progenitor couple that has never been seen in nature before.”

https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=icc_proceedings#:
From the paper:

Our analyses highlight several genetic mechanisms that can help reconcile a literal Adam and Eve with the human allele frequency distributions seen today.

At first glance, I wonder if your TMR4A ignores what is presented on page 4 [page 201] which they give in support of position #2

Later…

In this paper we will use logic and numerical simulation to show that the claim that “there is no possible way…” is overreaching. There are multiple genetic mechanisms that can reconcile the biblical Adam and Eve with the observed human allele distribution data.

Is there no empirical support if they are doing simulation? It’s already been agreed it could be a valid model. So now doesn’t this hypothesis need to be proven wrong?

We examined the logical outcome that would arise if God individually designed each of the gametes (more accurately the gametogonia) within Eden, with each gamete (or gametogonium) potentially having its own unique genotype. We tested to see if this could possibly generate the allele frequencies observed today. The logic of this analysis is described in the Results section. We first explain that two designed people could have millions of individually designed gametogonia, and that these diverse gametogonia could represent a gene pool essentially equivalent to the gene pool of a large human population. We then illustrate this using numerical simulations.

If we start with the premise of a miraculously created Adam and Eve, the idea of “designed diversity” is a logical deduction.

Although the issues are complex, it is now very clear that the theistic evolutionist’s claim that “there is no way…” (that a literal Adam and Eve could ever give rise to our current allele distribution) was seriously over-reaching. In light of the current study, that claim appears to be incorrect. Given what is at stake–the authority of Scripture and the faith of millions of people–this militant attack on the historical Adam and Eve that is coming from within the church appears to be reckless and destructive. We exhort our Christian brethren who have been so vigorously arguing against a literal Adam and Eve to very carefully consider the possibility that they may be mistaken, and to prayerfully consider the possibility that they are undermining the faith of millions of souls.

In this paper we have used logic and numerical simulation to show that there are several Designed Diversity mechanisms that can reconcile a literal Adam and Eve with the allele frequency distribution now seen in the human population. These genetic mechanisms include: [#2] 1) designed diversity within Adam and Eve’s four sets of chromosomes followed by accelerated genetic drift associated with multiple population constrictions; 2) as above, combined with more powerful demographic forces such as selective sweeps, lineage extinctions, and differential subpopulation expansions; and [#4] 3) designed diversity within Adam and Eve’s originally created gametogonia. Together, these various genetic mechanisms seem to falsify the claim that there is “no way” that two people could give rise to the human allele distribution that we see today. The designed gametes model appears to be especially robust, and in our opinion is even elegant. It seems to be the best explanation for how Adam and Eve might have simultaneously given rise to our current human allele patterns and our current linkage patterns.

What am I missing? You did not present all of the mechanisms they presented and you haven’t falsified the designed gametes model that I can tell.

The evidence. Try expressing concepts in your own words instead of cutting/pasting.

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This would be like me asking you to falsify Russell’s Teapot.

You have to present a precedent for the existence of such designed alleles that would in fact represent never-before-seen biology, or it isn’t a viable empirical model. It becomes no different than positing the Global Flood, but handwaving the physics issues by asserting miracles.

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That’s not hard. The fact that Y-chromosome and mtDNA don’t fit an evolutionary time frame and fit a YEC time frame means than by necessity we must have been created that way or a similar way in order to get the diversity we see.

Take a look at your graphics again. Look at each of the four options and how you colored them, both Adam and Eve and then the diversity bar on the bottom. The truth is in the coloring.

@thoughtful this is not a fact, it is rather a false claim. If you must, you can call it a contested claim, but it is certainly not an established fact.

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OK. Prove it false. As shown in the PDF I linked, Carter, Sanford, Tompkins, and Jeanson all claim it as fact.

That’s not how science works…and no, that is not what they’ve done.

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Val, I’ve been looking here for a while and I know I have seen you corrected on this before, by multiple different parties?

Jeanson uses bad sampling and has incredible error bars.
Carter falls prey to the same issues by citing many of the same folks Jeanson uses.
Tomkins is so poor with genetics even I can show where he is incorrect both on his human/chimp similarity and chromosome 2 fusion work.

And as Dr. Swamidass has shown you, the evolutionary timescale is entirely copasetic with all aspects of genetics.

So you seem to be a bit up a creek here.

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Nope. No one has ever mentioned these things once to me. I’m not sure why since it is their area of expertise and not yours. Someone shared a video with me once on something criticizing creation science genetics. I forgot to watch that. That’s it.

Remember I’m focusing on mtDNA and y-chromosome. I don’t care about the human/chimp similarity. The “same folks” are mainstream scientists from what I understand. Please show the papers they should be considering instead. There are literally only 4 y-chromosome mutation rate studies. And I have no idea what “bad sampling” means.

Did all those papers which have been linked demonstrating Y-chromosome and mtDNA data in keeping with evolutionary timelines - just disappear? vamoosh? :hole: :open_mouth:

If the evidence does not support Carter, Jeanson, and Sanford’s conclusions, - and I think that in fact the evidence is solidly in favor of the mainstream - , then their conclusions cannot be used to buttress other inferences.

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It is tiresome to see you repeat this falsehood when it’s been explained to you multiple times how and why that statement is wrong. We recently had an extended exchange where I tried to get you to understand that there is and must be a time-dependent rate of mutation.
You mysteriously stopped responding in that thread (shouldn’t you be finishing Sanford’s book and then some other stuff before you argue about this?).

Now you’re suddenly back here arguing as if demonstrable history did not in fact occur. Of course, that seems to be the entire basis for your creationism in the first place.

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