On Thu, 31 Aug 1995 20:36:33 -0400 you wrote:
>Stephen Wrote:
SJ>I have no brief for YEC or TE, but perhaps Glenn can elaborate on
>where PC is "in opposition to certain biomolecular data (MHC and
>other allelic diversity) and anthropological data (the nature of
>fossil man)"? <<
GM>Stephen, this is what was discussed a couple of weeks ago. If you
>start humanity with 2 people, 30,000 years ago, as I believe you
>suggested once, every single location in the human genome would have
>at most 4 alleles. Every other allele would have to have arisen
>since that time. Depending upon when you might believe the flood
>occurred, and whether or not it was anthropologically universal, you
>reset the number of alleles at 10. In order to believe in a recent
>origin for mankind, you must believe that the rates of mutation are
>far faster than even the evolutionists believe.
Sorry, but it wasn't me. Firstly, I don't necessarily believe
humanity started with "2 people 30,000 years ago" (see my recent post
re Gn 1 and Gn 2 Adam) and secondly, I don't believe in a global Flood
that "reset the number of alleles at 10."
On 23 August Terry wrote:
TG>"...To be sure, the ages of the
>biblical patriarchs are very large, but we have no reason to argue
>that Adam lived 30,000 years before begetting Cain! The major
>challenge then for this position is to account for a time gap, tens
>of thousands of years long, of which the Bible seems to know nothing.
To which I replied:
SJ>While some of the genealogies must be parent-child, not all of them
>need be. In Eastern genealogies a tribe can take the name of its
>founder. Many of the life-spans appear to be symbolic...
I made no comment about Terry's "30,000 years".
GM>Rather than re-hash this again, check the WWW page for the
>reflector archive for the dates august 13 through the 16th. If you
>can't do that, I ill be glad to send you the relevant posts
>privately.
Thanks, but you don't need to. I didn't say it. I keep *all* my mail
and I ran a search on "30,000". It turned up nothing about "30,000
years" except Terry's post above. If you find that I said it, I will
be *very* surprised! :-)
>Stephen wrote:
SJ>PC does not deny any scientific "data", but it might deny
>certain *interpretations* of that data.<<
GM>There is very little "interpretation" here on this data. Science
>knows how many alleles two individuals can carry, it is 4. We know at
>least some of the alleles at some of the genetic positions. The max
>I have found is 59 in one of the MHC alleles.
GM>If you take the number of genetic substitutions needed to convert
>the alleles back to the coalescence point, (where the alleles would
>be the same, at present rates of mutation it runs into several
>million years. Klein, Takahata and Ayala write,
GM>"An example of a transspecies polymorphism is furnished by two
human alleles at the DRB1 locus...The tree indicates that the two
human alleles diverged from a common ancestral gene before the
ancestors of the human and chimpanzee species separated from each
other..." Jan Klein, Naoyuki Takahata and Francisco J. Ayala, "MHC
Polymorphism and Human Origins." Scientific American, Dec. 1993, p.
80.
Thanks for this information.
GM>This is a problem for all views, including mine!
I do not necessarily disagree with this molecular clock hypothesis,
but the key is "at present rates of mutation". Hence there is a major
issue of "interpretation". I understand that not all scientists
accept it?
In any event, why is this necessarily a "problem" for PC? I could
accept that God could have used either a common design and/or existing
genetic material from a common ancestor with chimps, as part of the
process of "forming man from the dust of the ground" (Gn 2:7).
God bless.
Stephen
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