On 29 Aug 1996 22:45:50 EDT, pdd@gcc.cc.md.us wrote:
>GR>By the way, I will ask this again. Is there any fact which would disprove t
>2-Adam theory? If you don't answer I would presume that nothing could
>disprove it.
PD>Glenn,
>On your web page, regarding your own 2-Adam theory, you state:
>"As I mentioned above, Genesis 2 is a totally separate event occurred
>billions of years after Genesis 1"
>
>and
>
>"Can this scenario be proven?... No,"
>
>So in essence you are saying, I can offer a theory which I cannot prove.
>I ask you for data that will disprove it. There is no force in the
>question.
Thanks Paul. Glenn appears to have his own "2-Adam theory" because
presumably if "Genesis 2 is a totally separate event" which "occurred
billions of years after Genesis 1", then he holds that the "Man" of
Genesis 1 is different from the "Adam" of Genesis 2? The difference
main between Glenn's and my 2-`Adam' theory is that Glenn believes
that Genesis 1 and 2 are separated by "billions of years", whereas I
maintain that the Genesis 1 "Man" and Genesis 2 "Adam" overlap and
may later have converged (eg. Cain's wife -- Gn 4; Sons of God and
daughters of men -- Gn 6, etc.):
GN 1 MAN: |--Homo habilis --- Homo sapiens --------------|
\
\
GN 2 ADAM: |-- Homo sapiens-------------->
PD>At one extreme of science we see the limited working hypothesis by
>which we design specific experimentation. On the other end we have
>the general theory, which guides the design and interpretation of
>all study in a certain field. Then we have theories built upon
>theories. Since you cannot test the 2-Adam evolutionary theory, it
>cannot be proven or disproven.
I cannot speak for Glenn, but I want my "2-`Adam' model" to be
subject to test and rejected if false. I want it to reflect what
actually happened and I am prepared to be flexible in my
interpretation of Genesis 1-11, in order to harmonise God's "book" of
nature with His "book" of Scripture. I am very excited by recent
mtDNA evidence that points to a recent emergence of Homo sapiens from
a very small population:
"The initial work with human mt DNA has been carried out by Allan
Wilson and coworkers at Berkeley. What they have done is to
compare mt DNA from about 150 women from five geographical
populations throughout the world-Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia,
and New Guinea. When the DNA sequences were compared, the
most striking thing was that there was little difference between the
various groups, which implies that they separated from each other
only recently. Another thing that was observed was that the DNAs
fell into two main groups-one that represented only sub-Saharan
Africans, and the other that represented individuals from al groups.
And it was also evident that the sub-Saharan African group was the
longest established of all. That is, the greatest sequence divergence
the largest number of mutational differences-was found when
comparing the African group's mt DNA with a reference DNA. The
principle here is that the most ancient human DNA, that from which
all the others were derived, would be that with the greatest number of
sequence differences. Thus, the mt DNAs from the sub-Saharan
Africans were assumed to be derived from a common ancestor of all
modern humans. This so-called mitochondrial Eve was from South or
East Africa and was probably derived from an ancestor of the
present-day Khoisan people of South Africa, perhaps one hundred
thousand years ago. In other words, the mt DNA samples of the sub-
Saharan group of six individuals contain the most divergent
sequences- the most divergent human branches or lineages-and all
live in a single population of Kung Bushmen in the Xangua Valley in
northwest Botswana It is most likely that these Bushmen are
descended from a series of wandering bands that had separated from
an original small population elsewhere and it is possible that all
of us are derived from the same small population!" (Templeton J.M.
& Herrmann R.L., "Is God the Only Reality?: Science Points to a
Deeper Meaning of the Universe", Continuum: New York, 1994, pp133-134).
Wills suggests that this "small population" may have numbered only a
"few dozen":
"Recently, more evidence has surfaced that there has been a size
bottleneck or some strong selective event affecting the mitochondria
in our past. I favor the possibility of a bottleneck-such
bottlenecks seem to have happened among our close relatives.
Recently, the isolated populations of mountain gorillas in Central
Africa have been found to have almost no mitochondrial variation,
while lowland gorilla populations are filled with it. Probably at
just about the time of our mitochondrial ancestor, the numbers of our
species diminished dangerously-not to two, as the Garden of Eden myth
suggests, hut perhaps to a few hundred or even briefly to a few dozen
over the space of a few generations. During this time, one
particular mitochondrial type came to predominate in the population,
the way one surname might become common in an isolated village.
Then, later, perhaps as the population was recovering from the
bottleneck, the other types that remained died out, so that when we
look back from the present we can trace all our mitochondria back to
a single type." (Wills C., "The Runaway Brain: the Evolution of
Human Uniqueness", Harper-Collins: London, 1994, pp40-41)
Wills notes that this last common female human ancestor may have
lived as little as 60,000 years ago, but more probably 130,000 years
ago:
"After the publication of the Cann and Stoneking data, Linda
Vigilant, working in Wilson's laboratory and now at Pennsylvania
State University, collected samples from many Africans and from
numerous representatives of other racial groups. She used newer
techniques to look directly at the DNA sequences themselves, so it
was not possible to pool her data with those of Cann and Stoneking.
Recently, she, Mark Stoneking, and others analyzed her data and
decided that Eve probably lived about 130,000 years ago.
Unfortunately, the tree- building method they used had enormous
errors built into it, and they had to admit that Eve might have lived
as little as 60,000 years ago and as long as 400,000 years ago!"
(Wills C., "The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness",
Harper-Collins: London, 1994, p52-53)
Indeed, geneticist David Wilcox has pointed out that the common
female human ancestor may only be 85,000-105,000 years ago:
"Unlike the chimpanzee lineage, which has uniform branching back to
its root, the human lineage has a very large bulge at a little less than
half the distance back to its root. Chimpanzees have stayed in the
African forests. Modern humans exploded across the map of the
world around 40,000 years ago. If the bulge is that dispersal, the
human common root is only about 85,000 to 105,000 years ago."
(Wilcox D., "Created in Eternity, Unfolded in Time," manuscript
in preparation, St. Davids, Penn: Eastern College, 1990, p11)
(Templeton J.M. & Herrmann R.L., "Is God the Only Reality?:
Science Points to a Deeper Meaning of the Universe", Continuum:
New York, 1994, p135)
Moreover, while an African origin is favoured, an Asian location is
possible:
"When these distortions are removed, you get a tree...Because I did
not want to insert any of those fictitious branch-separating lines, I
had to draw the tree in the form of a starburst...I also made the
lengths of the various branches reflect the actual numbers of
mutations that were detected, so that some of the branches are much
longer than others. This tree is an unrooted tree-no attempt has
been made to specify where the mitochondrial Eve might be, and indeed
you can see that it would be very difficult to decide where to put
her. Somewhere in the middle of the starburst, undoubtedly, but it
is not obvious where. She could have been African, Asian, or even
European. Indeed, the famous African branch-you can still see it at
twelve o'clock on the tree-now has some Asians in it." (Wills C.,
"The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness",
Harper-Collins: London, 1994, p52-53)
On Thu, 29 Aug 1996 23:14:57, Glenn Morton wrote:
PD>On your web page, regarding your own 2-Adam theory, you state:
GM>Paul, my view is not a 2-Adam theory. A two adam theory has
>Genesis 1 man being sub human and genesis 2 man being like us.
No. My version of the two `Adam' model has Genesis 1 man spanning
the range "sub human" to human, ie. Homo habilis - Homo sapiens.
Glenn seemingly needs to continually misrepresent my model in order
for his own to survive.
GM>I don't believe that. Your assumption here is wrong. I believe
>that Adam did not look like you or me. That does not make him
sub-human.
This is a verbal shell-game, playing on the loaded word "human". :-)
Homo habilis did not only look different, he *was* different, with
only 1/2- 1/3 our brain-size and only a rudimentary language at best:
Habilis, "handy man", was so called because of evidence of tools
found with him. Habilis existed between 2.5 and 1.5 million years
ago. It is very similar to australopithecines in many ways. The
face is still primitive, but it projects less, the back teeth are
smaller, and the average brain size, at 650 cc, is considerably
larger than in australopithecines. Brain size varies between 500
and 800 cc, overlapping the australopithecines at the low end and
Homo erectus at the high end. The brain shape is also more human-
like. The bulge of Broca's area, essential for speech, is visible
in habilis brain casts, indicates it was probably capable of
rudimentary speech. Habilis is thought to have been about 127 cm
(5'0") tall, and about 45 kg (100 lb) in weight." (Foley J.,
"Fossil Hominids FAQ", 1995)
Note that the important thing here is the ratio of brain size to body
weight:
"Brain sizes have been given in many cases. It should be noted that
brain size can vary widely in a species (between 1000 and 2000 cc for
modern humans), and is not usually correlated with intelligence.
Between species, however, average brain size, when a correction for
body size is applied, is a good indicator of relative intelligence.
Chimps, for example, have a brain size between 300 and 400 cc, and
weigh between 45 and 80 kg (100 and 175 lbs). Gracile
australopithecines had an average brain size of about 450 cc and an
upper body weight of about 45 kg (100 lbs), we we can be fairly
confident that they were smarter than chimps. Gould (1978) contains
a graph which plots brain vs. body size for many apes and hominids,
showing that australopithecines and are intermediate between humans
and apes in relative brain size." (Foley J., "Fossil Hominids FAQ",
1995)
Not only is H. habilis between 1/2 and 1/3 our average brain size,
but he was much lighter. Therefore his intelligence was probably less
than 1/3 ours, ie. what we would call in a Homo sapiens
adault severely mentally retarded.
[continued]
God bless.
Steve
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