Oh if that were only true. There is a lot of disagreement about this, with respectable scientists on either side of the debate.
Context is important.
From a scientific point of view, I don’t think there is any debate about this if Adam and Eve are recent (which is what I thought we were discussing). In that case, the would be fully human minds outside the Garden.
There is a theological debate about whether human minds outside the garden are allowed. WLC says “no”, which is why he holds to an ancient Adam and Eve. RTB does somethign similar.
That’s not my idea. That is WLC’s idea with an ancient AE. With a recent GAE it is different. Which obviates all your objections.
Really, this is not so complicated.
I suppose there is a large difference, in my mind, between Jeason’s YEC science and mainstream science. If you don’t see that difference, I don’t know what to do for you :).
You guys are miles apart.
Ken Miller does not put me in the same category as AIG, and he has been a very strong supporter of my and my work.
I think one of the similarities is how you deal with criticism. I think you are pretty willing to take criticism from a more-or-less like minded critic like Craig who you can convince that either way is more or less fine because in the end you are both followers of Christ, or at least you may convince them either way is plausible or there’s nothing objectionable which I believe is more or less how you put it.
But any critic which says all this is rather unnecessary (as Miller has definitely done and I agree with) you have a little more of a visceral reaction.
And take the time Josh to pay attention to what I said. I said you and Jeanson were doing the same thing in principle but certainly not in the execution (which is amateurish on Jeanson’s part and of course on your part infinitely more scientifically credible).
I’m not sure why you can’t acknowledge this. It seems so obvious to me.
Both you and Jeanson are Bible believing Christians who say that it’s important that at least certain parts of the Bible are literal.
Both of you have the Christian faith as a central part of your lives.
Both of you build a scientific model that either seeks to support or at least shield those Biblical beliefs from being viewed as rejected by science. Your view says there’s nothing in science that would say a literal Adam and Eve is not possible and you go to great lengths to support that claim.
In principle you both are doing the same thing from my perspective.
I understand the potential for a perceived indignity of being lumped in with Jeanson but I would think you would welcome the “common ground” in this idea that you both are essentially after the same thing. I kinda thought common ground was your thing?
I think for both of you it’s important to reconcile YOUR faith with science in some way. I’m not sure how you could scoff at that.
I emphasize “YOUR” however because I think this entire endeavor is peculiar to YOUR faith and the faith of like minded Christians so as such it’s a very personal endeavor unique to your expression of Christianity but not necessarily meaningful or even useful for someone else. It would appear to me that someone like Ken Miller doesn’t need your model and I certainly don’t and I suspect that’s what he’s getting at when he says your model is unnecessary (which he did in fact say).
Also as for Neanderthals read Rebecca Wragg Sykes I don’t think the inferiority of Neanderthals is as widespread as you think it is among anthropologists and archeologists. The pendulum has been swinging the other way on that for a while.
Look Josh, you’re a perfectly fine person and I have no doubts as to either your competency or sincerity but I’m just not buying your model as something we need. I have no use for it and I really don’t think it’s much use to anyone else either except as a rationalization for what they may already believe.
I try to avoid saying this because it’s such a trivial cliche but this may be an agree to disagree situation.
I have no problems with anyone’s religion so long as they aren’t hurting anyone in the name of that religion, coercing anyone to share their beliefs, or presenting their religious beliefs as something they are not.
Someone once told me that mixing religion and science is like mixing crap and ice cream. It doesn’t improve the taste of one and just ruins the taste of the other. That pretty much works whether you are defining one thing or the other as the ice cream.
That wasn’t even close to what he said. Neither of these represent doing science; Jeanson misrepresents what he does as science, and while saying that “science doesn’t prohibit a genealogical A&E” may be true, it doesn’t represent doing science at all.
Yeah I agree, to me it’s the same thing. Just because one is better at it than the other doesn’t change that. We should get away from people entangling religion and science in my opinion. It doesn’t do a service to either.
I think Dr Swamidass is doing the exact opposite. IMO, he is showing the farthest extent science can have a say on A&E as opposed to trying to entangle both.
As I said earlier, his goal isn’t to merge science with religion. His goal is to show that one can accept a literal A&E, as well as have them and ancient humans as ancestors of all modern humans. Its theology he is doing, primarily.
To me it isn’t. Prior to the GAE, various scientific arguments were used to assault the idea of A&E. What Dr Swamidass did with the GAE is make those arguments moribund. That way he has kept evolutionary science off A&E. Just as science has nothing to say about a host of religious issues, it no longer has anything to say about A&E under the GAE scenario.
A place for the GAE was carved out a long time ago before science came on the scene, I think. However, it was given a modern and quite rigorous touch by Dr Swamidass.
And all this is entirely irrelevant to anyone with no religious conviction to believe in a Biblical Adam and Eve in the first place. That’s my point.
Plus, there are problems that arise from Josh’s model both scientifically and theologically. Who were the people outside the garden? Could they be considered fully human? Then there is the issue brought up on this thread. If Adam and Eve were young then they couldn’t be the genealogical ancestors of Native America who have been living independently in the Americas for 20-30k years. Long before any young Biblical Adam and Eve.
I really don’t know how anyone could not view what Josh is doing as anything but the mixing of religion and science. If he didn’t have these religious beliefs in the first place none of this would ever come up.
Actually, there has been gene flow (and “genealogy flow”) across the Bering Straits for many thousands of years. Ancestry diffuses faster and farther than genes.
True, but the GAE was written primarily for those who share the same or similar beliefs as the author. In addition, the GAE is important to Atheists, Christians and other groups who deploy certain scientific arguments against A&E because it makes those arguments impotent.
Do you really care about the theological problems? If no, why bring them up?
This seems to be a problem and the one I raised about Africa for a young GAE. However, there is an older GAE version which is not affected by these challenges. I don’t buy the GAE even though I am a Christian but it is a really good idea.
He is not IMO. AFAIK he has tried to draw clear boundaries between both. He even explicitly states that the GAE is not a scientific idea but a theological one. All the GAE does is show how science can keep mum about the idea of A&E.
Like I said earlier, the concepts surrounding GAE are not new. They were raised a long before Dr Swamidass began his GAE journey.
Ah yes, the “well actually…” bit I always forget about.
But if Adam and Eve were young (6,000 or so years old) they couldn’t have been the genealogical ancestors to the indigenous peoples that existed in the Americas thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands, prior to the miraculous popping of Adam and Eve into existence. Hence these awkward discussions about who are “real people” and who are not. Outside the Garden they were people just like us, or not, or maybe, or some were and some weren’t, and on and on.
Additionally most gene flow between Asia and the Americas would have been prior to the end of the Pleistocene and the Americas essentially becoming an island to the rest of the world until the arrival of Vikings and later Columbus much much later. How much gene flow was taking place between the Eurasia and the Americas between 6,000 years ago and 600 years ago? Probably not much if any.
I feel like there are a lot of hoops to jump through and special pleading being done just to accommodate this one narrow Bronze Age Near Eastern religious tradition and make it seem scientifically tractable or at least safe from falsification. We don’t do that with any of the thousands of other creation stories.
Because the entire thing only works if you buy into the theological argument that Adam and Eve were NOT the first humans. It’s like Ken Miller said in his criticism of Josh’s ideas. They aren’t theologically necessary and the young earth creationists he’s trying to convince won’t like his Biblical interpretation anyway.
My thoughts exactly and that’s a major goal of the GAE project. The inability of science to say anything about GAE stifles any conflict between it and a literal A&E.
Obviously genealogical A&E were “NOT the first (anatomically modern) humans”. They were the first “textual” humans as Dr Swamidass says, I think.
Again do you really care about the theological concerns of GAE as an atheist?
It seems you love theology a lot, but some actual theologians don’t share this view with you.
I don’t know the impact the GAE has had on the YEC community but they now know that the idea of a literal A&E can coexist peacefully with the fact of our shared ancestry with other modern apes. Science utterly rules out the YEC, young genetic A&E, and the GAE compounds its woes from a theological standpoint.
They couldn’t have been the ancestors of anyone who lived more than 6000 years ago. So?
Not much, but enough. Remember that genealogy spreads must faster than genes, and with no dilution by distance. You do understand that he’s basing this all on a simulation that has parameters for migration rates all over the world, right?
Again, not true. People in eastern Siberia and western Alaska had boats long before Columbus or the Viking voyages. Both the na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut language families arrived in America long after the original settlement. People speaking Eskimo-Aleut languages have been in continuous contact across the Bering Straits for a very long time. If there’s a real problem with his scenario (and I mean the demographic science associated with it), it’s at the other end of the world, in Tasmania.
You should look up some of @swamidass’s original references.
Well, first, I’m not an atheist. Second, Josh’s ideas come with theology so if he wants scientists of all beliefs or none at all to engage with him on this you can’t just pretend as if that part isn’t there. Adam and Eve are decidedly against virtually all the available science if you take the Genesis story as a literal narrative in line with the typical young earth creationist interpretation. And I’m not just talking about human origins but the whole story of the creation of the earth and life on it is at odds with virtually everything we know from science. So to get us to this place where we say “OK so there’s no science to argue against a literal Adam and Eve” you FIRST have to accept Josh’s theological and Biblical beliefs. I can pick any number of other interpretations of the Bible and come to a radically different conclusion about science and Adam and Eve.
So you wouldn’t think the Bering Sea would reduce gene flow? It’s my impression that the migration across Beringia was predominantly coastal during a period of lower sea level and not across open ocean. Have you read Jennifer Raff’s new book yet John? It’s a good and very recent review of the peopling of the Americas.
I mean don’t you think all this is just the slightest bit weird? Humanity evolves, migrates across the globe, and then one couple magically appears somewhere in the Neat East hundreds of thousands of years later, has babies with those people, and a wave of magical “textual humanity” spreads across the entire globe to absolutely everyone totally without their knowledge and it’s only millennia later that Josh writes a book and explains what happened to everyone. I watched Ken Miller’s video on Josh’s idea and I have to say I agree with him. It all seems sort of contrived and unnecessary.
I mean there’s possible and likely. One particular couple from only 6,000 years ago (not just any couple) being the genealogical ancestors to everyone in every remote isolated corner of the globe seems, being generous, unlikely.
I couldn’t find another name for the language family. Feel free to substitute if you can find it. The point is that it’s a more recent import than the other two American language families and it has speakers in both America and Siberia.
Of course it would. But it wouldn’t reduce it to zero, and you need very little gene flow (migration) to produce genealogical ancestry, which again diffuses much better than genes.
Note that the identity of Adam and Eve as a special couple is irrelevant to the bit of this that’s science. Any random couple anywhere in the world 6000 years ago will (if the simulation is valid) be ancestral either to everyone in the world 4000 years later or to nobody. All that’s required is that there be no completely isolated populations. Tiny amounts of migration are sufficient.
All that Adam and Eve stuff, including “textual humans”, piled on top of the population dynamics is not relevant to this conclusion.
No isolated populations within the 6,000 year time frame. There may be candidates for that.
But any random couple won’t do of course. Only one. So again. There’s what’s possible and what’s likely. What’s more likely? That one miraculous Near East couple versus any other random couple for centuries.
The Adam and Eve stuff is kinda the point isn’t it? I mean we aren’t having these conversations and Josh isn’t writing books about just any random couple, right?