I think most atheist biologists base their beliefs and career largely on the idea that Adam and Eve are fundamentally incompatible with evolution in exactly the same sense that most atheist oceanographers base their beliefs and career largely on the idea that Jörmungandr is fundamentally incompatible with oceanography and zoology. The degree to which oceanographers’ thought system will be demolished if you come up with a way to reconcile The Prose Edda with scientific data cannot be understated.
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Many scientists would also say that the bodily Ressurection of Jesus is absurd too. @glipsnort, for what reasons do you affirm the Ressurection?
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My position, which you all may have inferred from my previous post and other writings, is that GAE is a major piece of evidence for the veracity of the Biblical account of Adam and Eve, and for Christianity as a whole. In other words, I’m not settling for mere “compatibility”; GAE is actually strong positive evidence, and everyone needs to adjust their beliefs accordingly. If your system for evaluating evidence doesn’t allow for this adjustment, then your system is broken.
This is a big enough topic that I’ll probably write a post about it on my own blog sometime soon, and I don’t expect to cover all of it here in this thread. But many of you seem to implicitly agree that if anyone had based their beliefs on the fundamental incompatibility between evolution and Adam and Eve, then GAE should rightly cause a huge adjustment in their thinking.
Now, the general reply here has been to say “but there’s virtually nobody like that!” This is… unconvincing. I mean, y’all can pretend that the whole creation-evolution controversy haven’t been a major part of our general culture for many generations, or that atheist biologists somehow have a schizophrenic dissociation between that culture and their works/beliefs. If you actually want to claim that, we’ll just have to fail to agree on reality.
@John_Harshman 's example here is illustrative:
This is exactly the kind of person who needs to learn that their “usual conception” is severely limited, learn about GAE, and then go sit down and have a good think about what they believe about Adam and Eve, and Christianity as a whole. And given that GAE is not yet widely known, I’d say that a majority of biologists are in this position. Maybe they can start with the article that we wrote, up at the top of this thread.
Look, this should not be controversial at all. Before GAE, would you not have said that evolution was a strong argument against Adam and Eve, and therefore against Christianity as a whole? I certainly would have. Is it not only right to retract that, now that GAE has shown that there is no incompatibility?
A few other points:
This is the kind of statement which you should reflect on before making. I mean, imagine actually waking up tomorrow in that alternative universe: there is (or can be), a world-sized, Ragnarok-bringing sepent encircling the earth, and oceanographers SOMEHOW MISSED IT, OR CAN’T DETECT IT? HOW? And this is somehow NOT suppose to start a revolution in oceanography? They’re all suppose to just go into their jobs tomorrow and teach and use the same system that they used before this world-altering discovery?
I don’t want to pick on this point too much, as it’s merely an assertion, but it’s useful for my point about GAE actually being positively evidence, instead of just being “compatible” with evolution. You see, GAE far exceeds a regular fairy tale in its explanatory power. A fairly tale doesn’t explain why a recent common ancestor of humanity could have lived only a few thousand years ago - a fact that was quite surprising when it was discovered, except to many Christians. A fairly tail doesn’t explain why possible objections to this scenarios, like the possible isolation of humans in the Americas or in the Andaman islands, were easily answered in a few years - an outcome which was by no means guaranteed. A fairly tail doesn’t explain how this common ancestor remained recent even when projected back to the population of 0AD, and still fit within the Biblical timeline. A fairly tail doesn’t explain the prevalence of various flood myths across the globe - an outcome which is arbitrary in a fairy tail, but expected in the GAE model.
All this is why GAE is actually strong, positive evidence for Adam and Eve, beyond mere “compatibility”. I actually have a uniquely clear view into this, because I took this journey independently, and was able to evaluate the evidence as they came in. When I first proposed my version of GAE back in 2014, I was quite hesitant. Issues like the ones that I brought up above were not yet settled, and I was fully willing to abandon the hypothesis if it turned out to be unworkable, by failing any of the above issues.
Now, we could be living in that alternate world - where those issues still remained, or were resolved against the GAE. In that case, it may be more fitting to say that Adam and Eve are like a fairly tail. But instead, we live in THIS world, where everything AFFIRMED GAE. That is exactly how evidence feels when you process it. It is the collapsing of other possibilities - which had some significant weight behind it - and leaving the hypothesis that best explains all the facts. That’s where we are with GAE right now, and that’s why it has strong positive evidence behind it, beyond just “compatibility with evolution”.
Please explain why GAE is “strong evidence for Adam and Eve”.
Being merely compatible with known science and history doesn’t mean that it is evidence for it. There are an infinite number of possible beliefs compatible with known reality.
For example, I could hypothesise us all being brain in vats hooked up to a simulation that could be compatible too, but I wouldn’t say I thus had strong evidence for braininvat simply because it is compatible with reality.
Richard Friedman has genetic evidence for his hypothesis that Levites were the group who left Egypt and travelled to Israel. And thus this particular set of people did not share a common ancestor; they actually did not have an eponymous common ancestor, the so called biblical Levi, unlike the Cohanim, who do have evidence of sharing a common ancestor - the Cohanim Modal Haplotype is good evidence for this.
Levite Y chromosomes are diverse, Cohen chromosomes are homogeneous.50
Another member of the group, Dr. David Goldstein, wrote:
Those studies also gave us an inkling that the Y chromosomes of the Ashkenazi Levites are different from those of the Cohanim, the Israelites, and even the Sephardi Levites. What they did not do was reveal a clear Levite-specific genetic signature comparable to the Cohen Modal Haplotype.51 Simple and straight: Levites are not all related genetically—not to cohanim, not to Israelites, not even to each other. They do have roots in the ancient Near East,52 but they do not come from a common tribe, let alone a common individual. The group’s conclusion:
Levite Y chromosomes have heterogeneous origins. Contemporary Levites, therefore, are not direct patrilineal descendants of a paternally related tribal group.53 Dr. Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, concluded likewise:
Y-chromosomal analysis of Levites has demonstrated multiple origins that depend on the Diaspora community from which they came—they are not all the descendants of tribal founder Levi.54
This conclusion was perplexing. Cohanim showed common ancestors, just as we would expect from the Bible. They could all be descended from that small priestly group that was singled out from among the other Levites. But the Levites overall did not show common ancestors. They were not related. No way.
Skorecki had written to me, “There has been a significant amount of work and several publications pertaining to the Y-chromosome lineages of contemporary Levites, and the many hand-waving explanations that have been proposed regarding these perplexing findings (in contrast to the lineages of Kohanim and Israelites).”
Someone who was not born a priest might get to be a priest, a cohen, maybe by just faith or by that well-placed bribe. But there was no case, no way that one who was not born a Levite could become a Levite. That identification was passed down from those original Levites, from father to son. After that original generation of Levite immigrants from Egypt, it was easier to become a king or a prophet or, for that matter, a shepherd than it was to become a Levite.57 If this is right, then what should we expect genetically? Cohanim, starting from a small group, perhaps a family or clan, should be related genetically. Levites, starting from a large, diverse group of immigrants from Egypt, should be diverse genetically. Cohanim are related by DNA. Levites are not related by DNA; they are related by common history.58 And that is just what the genetic research showed.
Now, let us compare. Where is GAE’s positive evidence for it? (Which I doubt will ever happen, particularly given current academic biblical scholarship on Adam, Eve, and how the Fall was a story to explain the removal of the snake/seraph/Nehushtan, which was Egyptian symbology as Hezekiah originally was allied with Egypt, removed by the Assyrians during Hezekiah’s reign, which was subsequently replaced by Cherubim).
An example from archaeology demonstrating King Hezekiah’s original alliance with Egypt is Hezekiah’s seal/bulla, which has a two winged sun surrounded by two Ankhs:
It is like creationism and evolution.
Creationists keep trying to refute evolution, as if refuting evolution would somehow prove creationism true.
No, for creationism to be demonstrably true, there needs to be positive evidence for creationism itself.
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No, the general reply has been that there’s nobody like that, period. But I see you’re backing off your original claim, which bears repeating:
I will repeat: nobody’s beliefs or career were largely based on that idea. It’s at the most a trivial point that no scientist spends much time worrying about, much less basing a career on it. You can’t point to anyone who did that, and there’s a reason.
Yes and no. Christianity as a whole doesn’t depend on Adam and Eve, and a great many Christians think so.
There’s a huge difference between “is” and “can be”, which you seem not to notice. Showing that the Midgard Serpent can’t be refuted is quite different from showing that it exists. The former is at best extremely weak evidence. Can’t figure out why you think it’s such a big deal. There’s as much evidence for Fred and Wilma as there is for Adam and Eve. So why aren’t you convinced that Bedrock is a real place?
Further, your analogy is bizarre. A world-spanning snake, especially one that exists today, should be detectable. But two people who lived thousands of years ago should not. The Flintstones make a much better analogy. Shouldn’t we adjust our beliefs about them?
I do enjoy “fairly tail”. But if you think that’s evidence, you are severely skewed. Nor was it surprising to population geneticists. Genghis Khan is, if I recall, ancestral to everyone in Asia, and the diffusion of genealogical ancestry is no shock. (There’s still Tasmania to reckon with, though.)
When you bring the Flood into it, you get even more bizarre, as you seem to be defending a worldwide flood, which can be ruled out just as much as a Midgard Serpent can. Nor is it relevant to GAE, which posits no such thing.
You have a serious misunderstanding of science. The data may be compatible with GAE, but they’re also equally compatible with the absence of GAE. In order to be evidence, you need something that’s more likely to be observed if GAE is true than it GAE isn’t true. (Notice, incidentally, that this isn’t even based on observation; it’s a simulation, and one that didn’t even start with GAE.)
I’m sorry, but you have failed to make that point. Again, this is equally strong evidence for Fred and Wilma, Adam and Steve, Ask and Embla, or any other ancient couple you care to posit. You have no justification for picking your favorites out of the crowd.
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You say bizzare things at times. In what way is GAE positive evidence? And positive evidence for what? In addition, GAE is not completely compatible with evolution.
GAE is a made up story. Get over it man.
I boldened those words to note your self-contradiction. Something that “could” have happened cannot be “a fact”, its a hypothetical event.
I hope you are not under the illusion GAE is a fact? Its just a reasonable story that manages to squeeze AE into the ancestral history of modern humans.
And so? How does this change GAE’s fairy tale status?
This still doesn’t upset GAE’s fairy tale status.
In what way are the various fairy tales about global floods linked to the GAE fairy tale?
I seriously think your understanding of GAE is twisted. GAE in itself in not evidence for anything. It is a scenario that tries to link a de novo created AE to modern humans by asserting the descendants of AE must have interbred with POGs. That way AE can serve as an ancestor to all modern humans.
Several parts of GAE like de novo creation and the genetic mixing of the AE descendants with POGs are not positively supported in any way, making GAE wholly irrelevant to evolutionary biology. Its mostly compatible with evolution, but that’s as far it goes.
You have grossly misunderstood the evidential base for GAE. Nothing today affirms GAE. In fact, GAE was written in a way that makes it untestable, at least at its core.
First you said GAE is positive evidence (for what?), but now you say it has strong positive evidence behind it. That’s thorough confusion.
There is no evidence for a literal de novo creation of AE neither is there evidence for the mixing of their descendants with POGs. That makes GAE a fairy tale, get over it.
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Is your idea of Christianity an all-or-none collection of affirmations that all must affirm to have membership in the tribe, or should I say, to be true Scotsmen?
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Let’s see…you claim that there are lots of people like that. Moreover, you claim to know their internal mental states.
We say there aren’t people like that.
The obvious resolution would be for you to name at least one such person and provide evidence suggesting that his/her:
Do you know of even one? I sure don’t!
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Right. They say that even though the Resurrection is consistent with the historical evidence. Similarly, most atheist biologists will continue to reject Adam and Eve even if they’re consistent with the genetic evidence.
For reasons that are complicated, tentative, and irrelevant to the claims being made in this thread.
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I read Genesis at around age 12 or 13. I was very much a Christian at that time.
Up until then, I had encountered stories that were accounts of events that actually happened. And I had encountered stories that might have been accounts of events that happened, except that they were generally taken as fiction. And I had encountered stories that could not possibly be about events that had happened. These were generally seen as fables or fairy tales.
When I read the story of Adam and Eve, it seemed trivially obvious that it was of the fable kind. I have never seen anything that would persuade me otherwise. While I have not read GAE, I doubt that it has any evidence that would persuade me otherwise.
And my point: my current view of Adam and Eve dates back to a time when I was Christian and when I had no knowledge of evolutionary biology. So no, it was not atheism or science that caused me to adopt that view.
And no, I do not see any “fundamental incompatibility between evolution and Adam and Eve”. There is nothing in evolution which makes it incompatible with people writing fables.
That some people believe fables are literally true – yes, that’s weird. But then there have always been weird people.
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There seems to be many shades of nuance here?
I would agree that there is strong scientific evidence for the possibility of AE (as the GAE defines it).
Drop “possibility” and I’m not so sure the claim would be accurate. Drop “scientific” and I’m not sure it works.
None of those shades of nuance are what @naclhv seems to be talking about.
Where’s the room for nuance in that?
Aren’t you in fact sure that the claim wouldn’t be accurate?
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I would suggest you try talking to actual biologists about what they think, rather than basing your views on what you’ve made up about biologists. That suggestion seems pointless, though, since you are talking to actual biologists here, and you’re ignoring what they’re telling you. But just in case you do want to know, the creation-evolution controversy is a modest-sized part of American culture, has very little role in the cultures of most of the world, and is just about completely absent from the thinking of most biologists.
That was a statement you should have reflected on before making.
Suppose we wake up tomorrow and find the world’s physicists making an announcement: dark matter has its own set of Standard Model interactions and can form complex structures just like regular matter, except the two sets of matter only interact through gravity. In fact, there’s a shadow world occupying roughly the same space as Earth, but we don’t know anything about beyond its existence. That world could have a world-girdling serpent in it, and we would have no idea – that possibility is fully consistent with the evidence. According to your claim, this discovery would both revolutionize oceanography and be strong evidence for the truth of Norse mythology. In reality, it would make no difference to oceanography and would provide no evidence for the reality of Norse mythology, any more than it would provide evidence for the reality of Bugs Bunny or Daenerys Targaryen.
I read the Nature paper on the most recent human genealogical ancestor when it came out in 2004. I found it mildly interesting. It hardly revolutionized genetics – it’s a conclusion about an odd corner of the field with little practical importance. I realized at the time that this meant that there could be a recent literal Adam and Eve, as long as you allowed them to be part of a larger population – a possibility of potential interest to those who take Genesis to be a historical account of something (and who care). (Such a reading of Genesis is inconceivable for me, but whatever – lots of people are tone deaf.) If it makes them happy, great – it’s got zilch to do with my life or work.
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This is ambiguous. Do you mean there is strong scientific evidence for the possibility of a de novo created AE or for the possibility that whatever descendants AE had had interbred with POGs? Because, obviously, there is zero scientific evidence for the possibility of the former (GAE version or others), but plenty for the latter.
David is not speaking of possibilities here. His comments suggest he thinks there is real positive evidence in the scientific sense for GAE.
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I think what we need here is a clear definition of “evidence”. As I have stated before, in the Bayesian sense, E is evidence for H if P(H|E) > P(H). We furthermore have a rule - Bayes’ law - which allows us to compute the relevant quantities.
Note that this affords us the nuance that you all seem to desire but can’t find in your own systems. Evidence is probabilistic. It is not confirmation. It is not proof. You can have strong or weak evidence for or against a likely or a ridiculous hypothesis, and you take all that into consideration to come to your conclusion. In fact, I gave an example of this earlier, when I said that before GAE, I considered evolution to be a strong piece of evidence against Adam and Eve, and against Christianity as a whole. But even back then, I was a Christian and did not have any real doubts about the fundamentals of the faith.
I think that a lot of the current confusion is precisely due to this lack of nuance. After all, without this nuance, every claim of “evidence” has to be conflated with “truth”, and since you can’t allow that, every field - indeed, every person - develops their own siloed and tribalistic notion of what counts as “real evidence”, which is why the most frequent counter-claim to evidence is simply saying “that’s not evidence”. If you’re stuck in this state, your system for evaluating evidence is fundamentally broken. We can avoid this mess, and restore nuance, by adopting the Bayesian definition of evidence.
Now, here is my central claim:
Bayes’ rule tells us exactly how to evaluate such a statement: E is evidence for H if H explains, or expects, E better than its rivals. In our case, H is the existence of a Biblical Adam and Eve. The rival position(~H) is their non-existence: that they are mere fairly tales. And E - our evidence - is the body of work that make up GAE.
Now, which hypothesis better expects E? As I said before, if you’re a poor pious grandma who’s ignorant of science and just wants to believe in the Bible, E is not at all surprising. It’s completely expected. “Of course humans have a common ancestor in the last several thousands years”, she would say.
But what if you thought that Adam and Eve were just a fairly tale, and are fully trained in evolutionary biology? How would you have reacted? Well, we don’t have to wonder: we have a useful iconic figure in Richard Dawkins, who wrote in his book “The Ancestor’s Tale” that “I don’t know about you, but I find these calculated dates astonishingly recent” when he learned of the recency of the common ancestor.
The ratio of the “surprise” in these two reactions is the Bayes’ factor. It is the measure of the strength of evidence. While we can try to quantify this further, I believe the adjectives here are sufficient. It’s “completely expected” vs. “astonishing”. Thus, the recency of the common ancestor forms an “astonishing” amount of evidence for the Biblical Adam and Eve. Similar kinds of calculation apply for all the other factors I brought up in my previous post.
Again, remember the nuance here: this doesn’t mean that you have to affirm that the Biblical Adam and Eve existed. You may have thought that the hypothesis was far too unlikely to begin with, so that it can’t be confirmed even with an “astonishing” amount of evidence. You may have other reasons for disbelieving it. You may think that Dawkins is a fool, and that you, being so much smarter and more “scientific”, had already known all along and was not surprised. Fair enough.
But what you cannot do is simply ignore this evidence. The idea that hypotheses are tested by their consequences is fundamental to the scientific method. This is exactly what’s encoded in Bayes rule, and its straightforward calculation above. You need to update your beliefs accordingly. Again, if you can’t do this, then your system for evaluating evidence is fundamentally broken.
Now, to some other topics brought up in the replies:
On the flood, I suppose I did throw too much out all at once. Let me provide a bit more context. I don’t believe in a worldwide flood, but the presence of flood myths worldwide, and in many distorted states, can be best explained by GAE. You can read more about this on my post on my blog (search for “this explains a curious feature of the flood narrative”
You seem to have missed out on a key point, that hypotheses are judged by their expected consequences. The magnitude of this error is hard to overstate.
See, Adam and Eve are said to be ancestors to us all, and are implied to have lived fairly recently. That’s why the recency of the common ancestor is important, and serves as evidence for their existence.
Fred and Wilma are NOT said to have been ancestor to us all. That is why the recency of the common ancestor is NOT evidence for their existence. Instead, they’re said to have lived in a society that domesticated dinosaurs, and drove around in foot-powered cars. So if we find evidence that such a prehistoric society existed, or was at least plausible, THAT would be evidence for their existence.
I don’t know who Ask and Embla are, so I’ll leave them as an exercise for you to complete. What is said about them? And based on that, what findings would be evidence for their existence?
This is actually exactly what I’ve been doing - and every time they try to contradict me, they only end up providing more examples that meets my description. For example, you say right afterwards that:
I mean, yeah, that sounds there is a “modest-sized” part of the population. Or, here’s another example:
So yeah, even if as people try to deny the existence of such biologist, they end up affirming it right afterwards.
Look, I never said that ALL biologists think this way, or even a majority. Here’s my original quote:
No qualifiers for its size, except the one implied by the fact that it was brought up at all. And I was thinking more of things like kids being inspired to go into evolutionary biology in the first place, rather than what biologists write on their grant proposals. I suppose I could just drop “career” from that original quote, if that would make people happy. That changes nothing about my main thesis: that people need to face up to the evidence.
Remember, hypotheses are judged according to their consequences. This is important.
The discovery of a parallel universe of dark matter, with complex structures, would revolutionize physics. Actually, the magnitude of such a discovery may be enough to revolutionize everything else as well, but primarily physics.
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.
The GAE is a smaller discovery - certainly not as large as a world-sized serpent, or a parallel universe - but it should still impact the related fields. People in those fields need to update their beliefs accordingly.
In each case, the thing that gets revolutionized/updated is the hypotheses that made germane statements about the discovery - that had expected consequences which are impacted by the discovery.
That gives some context and helps explain why your reaction to GAE is as you describe. For me, I never saw evolution as evidence against A&E (because I took that to be a fable), and I never saw evolution as evidence against Christianity, because Christianity, as I understood it, does not actually depend on A&E.
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I don’t think so at all. But some of what you say below is true. Just not much. The part about evidence being probabilistic, strong or weak, is the reasonable part.
This is starting to bug me. It’s “fairy tales”. Yet you seem unusually consistent.
Neither. The body of work is a simulation of the diffusion of ancestry through time. It’s as expected given H as it is given ~H. It came as a surprise to nobody versed in the theory on which the simulation was based. What’s new is its application to the GAE hypothesis. Yes, the existence of GAE is more likely given the result than if it had somehow turned out that common ancestry took 100,000 years to spread through the world. But that isn’t powerful evidence. If anything, it’s very weak evidence.
Note that this isn’t “the common ancestor”; it’s one of many common ancestors.
Nonsense. It can best be explained by the prevalence of floods worldwide. I suppose you think that the pyramids of Central America are best explained by Egyptian sailors. Still, that’s closer to sanity than believing in a worldwide flood. So that’s something.
How are the expected consequences of the Fred & Wilma, Adam & Steve, and Ask & Embla hypotheses different from those of the Adam & Eve hypothesis?
Of course they are, if they existed. It can hardly be avoided.
Google is not within your abilities? And yet you know about the Midgard Serpent. Odd. They’re the Norse equivalents of A&E. By golly, they’re another A&E, aren’t they? So is GAE powerful evidence for Ask & Embla? Is it powerful evidence for all the creation stories of all cultures?
This is you hallucinating. Nobody has affirmed anything of the sort you imagine.
Yes, as it’s the most obviously false part. Nobody, ever, has based a career in evolutionary biology on rejection of Adam and Eve. Nobody, ever, as been motivated in any research by a desire to disprove Adam and Eve. Many people, many times, have been annoyed by creationists, but that’s quite a different thing, and it doesn’t fit any of your allegations.
How should it impact related fields? And what are those related fields? What expected consequences in any field are impacted by GAE? (Hint: there are none.)
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Question: Is a green frog evidence that all crows are black?
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What do I wish to be true?
I would expect that in a hundred years’ time, scientists will look back and say, “One hundred years ago, our knowledge of genomes was quite limited and primitive. And we got quite a few things wrong.”
Even without any theory of common descent, no one should be surprised that the genomes of humans and chimps have a lot in common – after all, they do share certain physical characteristics and have lot in common with respect to physiology.
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That passage (reiterated below) says the “lights” are responsible for
(a) dividing “the night from the day“ – which is what the sun does - a literal fact;
(b) “signs” – prophetic signs: “’what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?’ … ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven’” (Matt 24:3, 29);
(c) “seasons, and for days and years” – refers to the liturgical calendar of Israel, which is regulated by the cycles of the sun and the moon.
Then it says the sun provides light during the day and the moon provides light during the night – literal facts, as far as I can tell.
“14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16 Then God made two great [d]lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also.” (Genesis 1)