Please. We are dealing with the same species. Besides, no POGs means incest, although that seems to get a pass with sola A&E literalists.
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I said it’s not evidence. What does that have to do with making sense or not making sense?
And how does Genesis 1 make sense if both it and Genesis 2 are read literally?
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There is no genetic evidence which precludes the story of Romulus and Rufus. That the god Mars sired the twins thus enjoys strong positive evidence, and, well, you know the rest.
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We are dealing with a spiritual being made in the image of God, verses a soulless “beast of the field” not made in the image of God. Put the two together and you get bestiality.
As far I know, God did not impose a law against incest until Moses.
Just as for bestiality. Exodus 22.
We disagree.
Why do you insist that POG were beasts of the field? Did they eat grass or something?
Note that I personally do not subscribe to GAE, so I am not defending it. I find the idea intriguing but not convincing. To me, the story of A&E is on some level a metaphor. And with that, I am firmly out of this weird discussion.
Ahem. Romulus and Remus. /bow
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Again, let’s do some cleanup first:
@RonSewell , @Michael_Okoko :
You’re jumping into the middle of a discussion without doing the prerequisite reading. In particular, I’m using the word “evidence” in a mathematically precise way, which you are not engaging with. Please read my previous posts. The following posts from my blog will also be helpful:
- What is “evidence”? What counts as evidence for a certain position?
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 1)
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 2)
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 3)
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 4)
In addition, you will need to be adept at probability theory, and have read the GAE book - two things that you have admitted that you are not, @Michael_Okoko. Without this background people will fall into a ridiculously ad-hoc, tribalistic notion of what “evidence” really is, which is why the most common reply in the thread above is “that’s not evidence”!
@Mercer :
So, you’ve chosen the “Dawkins is an idiot” option - specifically of the “culture warrior” variety. That’s fine. I’ve already specified how this affects the evidence:
For you personally, then, P(E|~H) is still large and you don’t think that GAE is evidence of a Biblical Adam and Eve. As I said before, different things are different amounts of evidence for different people. But for everyone who DOESN’T think that Dawkins is an idiot, which is a large chunk of people, P(E|~H) << 1 and GAE is an “astonishing” amount of evidence.
But I think we can do even better. I understand that you don’t like Dawkins and won’t accept his reaction as evidence that P(E|~H) << 1. Okay, fine. Then how about the Wikipedia article on the MRCA?
“…Joseph T. Chang, Douglas Rohde and Steve Olson calculated that the MRCA lived remarkably recently…”
Or the 2004 Nature paper that forms the most immediate basis for GAE?
“These analyses suggest that the genealogies of all living humans overlap in remarkable ways in the recent past. In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models”
Or Chang’s 1999 paper?
“…the idea that all of present-day humanity may have a common ancestor who lived as little as 100 000 years ago, a time that seems to many to be surprisingly recent” - note that this is about the Mitochondrial Eve, and even 100 000 years is considered surprising!
“…if the logarithmic time to CAs seems patently implausible, then…” - here he’s talking about an estimate of ~500 years.
So, would you accept the words of Wikipedia, or the authors of the very papers that form the “body of work that makes up GAE”? The recency of the common ancestor is “astonishing”, “remarkable”, “surprising”, almost “patently implausible”. Do you still want to deny that P(E|~H) << 1?
The rest of my argument, you should already know. P(E|~H) << 1, while P(E|H) ~ 1. The Bayes factor - which is what “strength of evidence” IS - must therefore be >> 1. Adam and Eve is MUCH better than the “fairy tail” hypothesis in explaining the recency of the common ancestor. This amounts to astonishing, remarkable, surprising amount of evidence for the Biblical Adam and Eve.
According to Genesis 1:14-15, the sun did not shine its light on the earth until the fourth day of creation, because it had not been “made” (Hebrew: “asah”). Whether “made” here means the sun had not been created or that it was created but wasn’t illuminating the earth, it still clashes with the science because the sun was already hurtling radiation at the earth millions of the years before the earth as we know it had formed.
A literal or hyperliteral reading gets you into plenty trouble here.
Its an extremely important addition here, because those Bible verses suggests that stars were not existing prior to the fourth day of creation. Not surprisingly, this is another massive contradiction because our solar system (made up by our sun, eight/nine planets and others) was born from the materials released by the death of older stars. That’s why we are said to be made from stardust. We can estimate the ages of stars and not surprisingly, the sun is an infant compared to a lot of other stars in our vast, expanding universe. This also means that light from other stars asides the sun reached the earth long before it evolved to its present state.
Even animals have souls, so there is no reason to believe POGs which were animals would not have had souls like AE who were also animals.
I don’t see how, considering AE were identical to POGs.
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Obviously our conversation is going nowhere. Goodbye.
What you were saying was “The discovery that a world-sized serpent can be in the oceans, and that oceanographers cannot detect it, would revolutionize oceanography. Again, the magnitude of such a discovery may revolutionize other fields, but definitely oceanography.” That claim was bonkers then and it’s bonkers now.
You are using ‘evidence’ in a hopelessly muddled way. When scientists talk about evidence, they are talking about whether some data support a specified model. To evaluate evidence, you have to calculate how likely the data are under that model. That’s what the Rohde et al. Nature paper did – they calculated how likely different dates for the most recent common genealogical ancestor were, given a typical model of human reproduction and migration. That result is (if done correctly) a necessary first step if you want to do a Bayesian comparison of the models H = ‘humans descend from a recently created Adam and Eve’ and ~H = ‘humans don’t descend from a recently created Adam and Eve’. You are using people’s surprise at the Rohde results as an estimator for how unlikely the result is given ~H. It’s not. It’s an estimator for how little thought those people had given to this particular implication of ~H. Your core problem is that you’re confusing the implications of a model with the frequently incoherent, poorly thought-out mental maps people are working with. The former is a good place to apply Bayesian formalism, while the latter is a murky, subjective mess with no clear probability space.
Have you ever actually used Bayesian inference in a formal context, e.g. in a scientific publication?
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That’s not true. I’ve pointed out that Dawkins is not representative. YOU, on the other hand, have claimed:
…with absolutely zero evidence.
You seem to have a predilection for using the straw man fallacy.
They show that the science underlying the GAE is not surprising to those who understand population genetics and refute your claim about “thought systems” (which looks to me like an attempt to avoid rationality) being “absolutely demolished.”
Your use of Bayesian terms and of symbolic expressions does not hide the fact that you are just playing word games.
This is an excellent description of your apologetics.
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@Mercer :
So, to clearly catalogue the stances of different people or organizations on the recency of the common ancestor, we have:
Richard Dawkins, in “Ancestor’s Tale”:
“I don’t know about you, but I find these calculated dates astonishingly recent.”
Wikipedia article on the MRCA:
“…Joseph T. Chang, Douglas Rohde and Steve Olson calculated that the MRCA lived remarkably recently …”
The 2004 Nature paper by those authors:
“These analyses suggest that the genealogies of all living humans overlap in remarkable ways in the recent past . In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models”
Chang’s 1999 paper:
“…the idea that all of present-day humanity may have a common ancestor who lived as little as 100 000 years ago , a time that seems to many to be surprisingly recent ” - note that this is about the Mitochondrial Eve, and even 100 000 years is considered surprising!
“…if the logarithmic time to CAs seems patently implausible , then…” - here he’s talking about an estimate of ~500 years.
And then, there’s this:
Okay, so you say that Dawkins is not representative. What about Wikipedia? Are they not representative? How about Chang, Rohde and Olson? Are they also not representative? What about Nature? Are you going to claim that they’re not representative?
I strongly urge you to consider that it may be your position that’s not representative.
@glipsnort :
Look, I don’t know if you remember this, but a very long time ago, near the beginning of this thread, we were agreed on a lot of things. You agreed with me that over-reliance on things like logical fallacies tend to create a “only tool is a hammer” problem. I agreed with you that nobody can evaluate all the evidence. You said that we often rely on imperfect means, like heuristics, stereotypes, categorical dismissal, or network of ideas about how humans come up with explanations, etc. And I said I agreed - that estimations or approximations are often necessary and good.
Now, would I LIKE to have a fully mathematical model for P(E|~H), the probability of the recency of the common ancestor? Of course. I agree with you that such a model would be ideal, and that it’s the best way of doing things.
But, if things like heuristics or approximations are to have ANY place in our thinking (and we are agreed that they are), then surely the reaction of the scientists who have literally written the paper that we’re talking about would be the best kind of heuristic, the best kind of approximation. To instead insist on a whole process involving an exact model seems to be going back to an “only tool is a hammer”, or a “you have to evaluate everything” kind of attitude.
The human mind is pretty good at making estimations and solving problems. Especially if it’s a problem that they’ve been thinking about for a while, in an area that they’re an expert in. All of that applies to the quotes I cited above. If you want to say that expert, scientific opinion has any value at all beyond just stamp collecting, it would apply here.
This is further reinforced by the fact that their opinion is strong and unanimous, and addressing our exact problem - operating with our ~H, and reacting to our E. There’s little doubt that P(E|~H) << 1. The rest is just a straightforward application of Bayes’ rule.
I’d say it was surprising to everyone a priori, including population geneticists, but it has become an obvious and settled finding in the field, so therefore not surprising any more.
It doesn’t matter how often you repeat it. People’s subject degree of surprise at a finding are not a valid way of determining the probability of the finding under that model.
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You gotta be kidding, man. What if I edited it to remove the “remarkably”?
I do.
Do you really not know how Wikipedia works?
Have their thought systems been absolutely demolished?
I’m a Christian who views A&E as mythical and GAE has had absolutely no effect on my position, much less anything you might move the goalposts to describe as a “thought system.”
Publication of a manuscript in Nature does not entail any endorsement by the journal. Do you not know this?
It’s much better when it follows the rules of science at arriving at nonintuitive conclusions, which you aren’t doing.
If the thinking involves formulating hypotheses and empirically testing them, not merely thinking, yes. You aren’t doing that.
Surprising as in, “Gee, that would not have been my first intuition,” not as, “This absolutely demolished my thought system.”
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Does that demonstrate that humans and chimps share a common ancestor?
Speaking of “what we expect”, I would imagine that the respective intellects of rats and mice are very close, so if the genetic similarities between humans and chimps are ten times greater than the genetic similarities between rats and mice, I would expect that the respective intellects of humans and chimps would be even closer. But they aren’t – in fact, the opposite is true – humans are infinitely more intelligent than chimps.
Well, of course they have to reject a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-11 … it’s incompatible with their evolutionary beliefs.
If you ask me, the pre-Adam Genesis narrative is clearly not literal, but after Adam arrives, the narrative quickly becomes a literal description of history.
Naturally. But here is one thing they need to consider: The account of the Flood contains plentiful and very precise chronological details –
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters were on the earth …
10 And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month , the seventeenth day of the month , on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights …
17 Now the flood was on the earth forty days …
24 And the waters prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days …
At the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters decreased. 4 Then the ark rested in the seventh month , the seventeenth day of the month , on the mountains of Ararat. 5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month . In the tenth month , on the first day of the month , the tops of the mountains were seen …
6 So it came to pass, at the end of forty days , that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made …
10 And he waited yet another seven days , and again he sent the dove out from the ark …
12 So he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove, which did not return again to him anymore …
13 And it came to pass in the six hundred and first year , in the first month , the first day of the month , that the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and indeed the surface of the ground was dry. 14 And in the second month , on the twenty-seventh day of the month , the earth was dried.” (Genesis 7:6-8:14).
Are such details typical of a myth? I don’t think so. Rather, I think the writer included those details for one reason – he wanted to leave the reader in no doubt that the account is one of literal history, and not a myth.
If you see any symbolism, allegory or metaphor in Genesis 1:14-18, please point it out and explain it, because all I see is a factual description of certain effects light from the sun and the moon have on the earth and how we measure time. Since it appears to be factual, that means other parts of the Genesis creation account could be factual as well – such as Adam being created directly from inanimate matter (Gen 2:7).
It is a mathematical and precise prediction of common descent confirmed by the data. It is the sort of evidence that has Behe convinced we share common ancestors with the great apes.
The similarity is not ten times greater.
Your expectations are wrong, and that’s the point! The point is that functional difference is not well correlated with genome level differences. But they are mathematically explained by common descent.
(PS. Humans are not infinitely more intelligent than chimps, because we are not infinitely intelligent.)
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