Genetics, Genealogies, and Racism

Of course it is pronouncement that I can’t prove or disprove. Atheism is an opinion that you can’t prove or disprove. So is theism.

The argument here is whether you can get the main characters (Adam, Eve and the talking snake) of the Genesis story into the genealogy of actual human history. The whole purely mathematical discussion of whether a mated pair of some species of the genus homo can lead to every human being that ever lived is not what you are after. You need to get the Genesis story characters into human history. Mathematical modeling with genealogy is not enough.

With science. Because God by definition is outside of nature and not subject to its laws, but the formulator of them. Therefore efforts to get Him to do lab tricks for you based on the idea He must behave in a repeatable manner IOW His own natural laws is nonsense. Fortunately there are other methods of determining truth outside of the scientific method.

And mathematically, you can. Does that in itself mean that it happened? No. Does that mean that this event can be detected scientifically? Joshua would say “no” and I would say “perhaps, but not necessarily”. The point here is that there is nothing unreasonable, by the math, in believing they are in everyone’s family tree somewhere, if they existed. Getting them into human history requires more, but showing that it is possible and reasonable to believe they were does not. And I say that as someone who does not see the theological necessity of GA.

BTW there is a lot more evidence outside the mathematical model that they were there, but you can’t “prove” it by science. You can only point to anomalies in human history which are consistent with that hypothesis.

As for the “talking snake”, you should look at the Hebrew. There is a whole lot more going on there than that.

I don’t have to give reasons they are incorrect. The person making the claim has to give the reasons to support their claim or else is just pronouncements. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What is wrong with you Patrick? The people who did the Nature study DID give reasons to support their claim. You are coming along and saying they are incorrect and giving no reason for it. It is just not what you want to believe, so it must be false.

The word for this is delusion Patrick. You are behaving as one who is in delusion and has forsaken the use of reason. A famous atheist, Thomas Paine said ““To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead,

So I must ask you Patrick, do you accept the authority of reason?

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Oh my, a single paper in Nature did give reasons. How can I be so skeptical. Um, I need a lot more than just a single paper. Unless you say the paper was “inspired” Then I will put more credence in it. :rofl:

You are calling me delusional. When one person has delusional thoughts we call it a mental illness. When a group of people have collective delusional thoughts we call it religion.

Certainly not YOUR authority of reason.

Reason is not personal, only our choice of how and if to accept its authority. “Your” reason is not reason at all, but another way to put your will in the drivers seat over and above discordant feedback from reality.

So I will ask you the question again. Do you accept the authority of reason?

My comment about the talking snake is much more than a snide remark. The talking snake in Genesis proves to me that the Ancient Near Easterner writers were being good story tellers. They were not interested in science, nor history, but instead to tell a story about their God. And it was a good story to tell children of that day. But as we know a mythological story isn’t the same as real history, real science. Reading Genesis as a story gets me into the minds of the people then. That is the value of Genesis. We can use Genesis to date the people, culture, technology of the time period that the writers lived. But sorry, the people then and people today don’t really believe that snakes talked. It is purely literary.

@Patrick
So I will ask you the question a third time. Do you accept the authority of reason?

I don’t accept the authority of anything. Senses can be deceived. The mind can be tricked in all sorts of ways. As I have gotten older, things I thought were absolutely true weren’t. I really don’t know anything is true. I am a 6.999 on the Dawkins Scale of atheism but as an engineer I round that to 7. But who knows I could be wrong. (But don’t bet on it.)

@Patrick,

I changed the time frame so that you would have an opportunity to realize that one way or another, the genealogical expansion is inevitable. And so even if 2000 years might be a tight squeeze for a purely random process, 5000 years would not be.

And still you deny it.

You don’t belong here at all.

I think I’m going to get quickly bored with Patrick. However, to balance my distaste of atheist polemics & provocations, let me extend an olive branch to George, not to the UUism he is still representing. He really does have a way of summarising @swamidass’s thoughts for him sometimes & I appreciate this clarification he makes above.

After that statement, the unavoidability of ‘some’ study of genealogy is required. @swamidass’s flip from monogenesis to monopyhlogeny might seem to do ‘unavoidable’ things as well (e.g. going beyond phylogenetics). The genealogical effects, however, are not exponential for every phyla, nor for every family nor every person. So the ‘science’ behind the ‘selection’ is still lacking.

What kind of ‘science’ is genealogy? I don’t think calling it ‘racist’ makes any sense. But it involves ‘races’ in so far as ‘race’ is part of genealogical studies. Some scholars, not a few, reject the scientificity of ‘race’ as a concept. Certainly labelling people ‘racist’ is bad form; labelling a field of study as ‘racist’ is wrong-headed.

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Sure, if this a not a place where different ideologies can be discussed honestly and openly, I don’t belong here.
But if this is really a place of peaceful science discussion then perhaps there is “room at the inn” for me.

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@auntyevology

There are published papers on the probabilities involved in this scenario. Maybe we need a specific thread for them? With some papers archived for easy access for newcomers…

Granted, “Genealogical Science” is not exactly a text book topic… and I’m happy to use another label for what is the governing elements to multiple mated pairs becoming Universal Ancestral pairs for everyone alive in the world today.

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It is a subfield of population genetics. There is an immense amount of work done to understand how pedigrees interact with genetics. Pedigrees are essentially a synonym for genealogy.

For biparental species, almost every one who leaves grandkids becomes a universal ancestor eventually.

Race as biological category is disproven with monophylogeny, and genetic evidence that we find interbreeding everywhere.

In genetics we do a lot of work untangling the effect of local ancestry. In medicine we do use race as a very imperfect proxy for disease markers and response. Talking about differences in a value neutral way is not racist.

However making claims about differences in genetic intellectual capabilities at level of race is both emperically false and becomes racist very quickly. Notice, at no point have we done this.

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@gbrooks9 she just offered you an olive branch! Take it with grace. You are growing on @auntyevology :slight_smile:.

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Sorry @gbrooks9 I think I misread that sentence. You had it right.

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@swamidass

God’s Providence and God’s mysterious plan makes it difficult to imagine that anything happens in Creation without as God intended. But let’s say we deliberately leave out the realm of human choices.

Why would God not be interested in every detail? Does he allow the rains to come? Or are the rains coming just as he desires?

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10 posts were split to a new topic: Freewill, Determinism and Bringing the Rain