I have an audio lecture of his when he talks about “yom - day” being a long period of time and in regard to Genesis 1. Unfortunately, while I have the mp3 file, it is not on the internet at the original link where I downloaded it from. If you reach out to me at agesofjoy@gmail.com I can send it to you. He kind of painfully lays out a case for the old Earth position, but he still is allowing for both.
Hi Joshua (@swamidass), It is very nice to dialog with you. Thank you for setting up this forum. I have not read your book yet, but look forward to doing so. I have heard you explain some of the concepts - I’m sure just scratching the surface - in dialogs with RTB’s Dr. Rana and I believe, Dr. Bill Craig. If I recall, Bill Craig favors the idea that Adam was a Heidelberg Man.
I want to read your book and learn about population genetics. I really want to take a question to Fuz Rana, but you may be in a much better position to do so. I think the idea of chasing the Y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve has turned out to be wild goose chase, as promising as it once appeared. But population genetics could possibly prove this.
In Rana’s first book, Who Was Adam, he and Dr. Ross put A&E in the 50k-100k time frame and argued against Neanderthal intermixing with Sapiens. In the 2nd Edition, he admitted a mistake, which I really respect him for, but I think he admitted the wrong thing. He admitted that Neanderthal did interbreed with humans (new evidence came in and he changed his stance which is the right thing to do). But then he pushed A&E back to as much as 200 kya. I think the real mistake was chasing Y and X chromosomes looking for A&E. Here’s why I think that:
This STEM Talk with Doug Wallace - STEM-Talk: Episode 67: Doug Wallace talks about mitochondria, our human origins and the possibility of mitochondria-targeted therapies on Apple Podcasts
Now I’m sure you are familiar with Dr. Douglas Wallace and his work with mitochondrial DNA. You probably will really enjoy this interview with him. Anyway, the idea is the mDNA is really tuned to a physical environment; therefore if descendants of A&E (say they lived 50k years ago in the Middle East for sake of argument) migrated back into Africa, say among the San people, the San people mDNA (200k-120k old) could quickly become fixed in the A&E descendant population with just a little bit of intermixing. This would make it appear that Eve lived much longer ago that she really did. The surviving San people of today would really be A&E descendants with a bit of ancient mDNA and would have modern human characteristics (and bear the image of God) that their ancient DNA-contributing ancestors may have lacked.
Furthermore, this research https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/how-neanderthals-lost-their-y-chromosome points out how Y-DNA and mDNA of humans became present in Neanderthal, even to the point that some Neanderthal population only contained human Y-DNA. If A&E lived long enough ago, then Neanderthal were their descendants too! But, that flies in the face of the RTB model.
So, you might be able to prove to Dr. Rana that chasing the Y-DNA and mDNA looking for an ancestral Adam and Eve is never going to result in a satisfactory answer.
What do you think?
I believe that this has already happened. See our workshop with them, focusing on his presentation: Human Origins Workshop With Reasons to Believe (January 2020).