Re: Special Creation

*Only if God takes 20,000 apes and converts them to humans can you maintain
the genetic diversity we see.*

Here is where my limited knowledge of genetics shows. Why is this so?
Let's say God decides today to create a new kind of human with a bigger
brain than ours. He takes my DNA and modifies it to create the first
of these new humans. A couple hundred thousand years from now, someone
analyzes the genetic history of these new humans. Wouldn't their genome
include all the diversty of my genome? And doesn't my genome include all
the diversity of the earlier expansions we've been talking about?

So if we have three waves of hominid migration from Africa with
interbreeding, and God takes material from one of those "third wave"
hominids and modifies it to form the first "human" made in His image,
wouldn't all humans descended from that first Imago Dei Man include all
the earlier genetic markers?

As I understand Templeton, he isn't advocating multiregionalism, so there is
no reason that all presently existing humans couldn't trace their lineage
back to a single set of parents. It's just that that set of parents don't
trace their lineage back to an isolated African population that replaced all
existing homind populations after leaving Africa.

On 3/5/06, glennmorton@entouch.net <glennmorton@entouch.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> David Opderbeck wrote:
>
> >>>>No, it is not. In the YEC appearance of age argument, there is no real
>
> connection at all between what we perceive and what the facts actually
> are.
> The fossil bones were planted even though no such animals ever existed;
> M51
> looks like the remains of a galactic collision untold eons ago even though
>
> no such thing ever happened. I heartily agree with you that such arguments
>
> are vaucous, and indeed dangerous for any kind of rational epistemology.
> But I'm suggesting no such thing. There is data -- our genome is related
> to
> that of earlier hominids -- the data tells us something true and real, but
>
> the question is how to interpret the data. Is the only interpretation that
>
> we evolved in the ordinary fashion? Or is there a possibility that God
> used
> this preexisting material, in a very real way, to fashion an individual
> Adam
> uniquely? In either case we would expect to see the same thing today -- a
> clear genetic connection between us and the eariler hominids.
>
> I will grant to you that ordinary evolution is a more appealing
> explanation
> for those of us steeped in a culture that supremely values the scientific
> method. No doubt, it is a simpler explanation and better survives the test
>
> of Occam's Razor. The only reason to suggest an alternative is if we are a
>
> priori committed to an understanding of the Biblical text that would
> require
> it. And that is the 10,000,000 question, which I don't claim to be able to
>
> resolve. <<<<<
>
> WE may not be so far apart as one thinks.
>
> >>>>>I believe whole-heartedly in miracles. If I object to your scenario,
> it
> isn't because of the need for a miracle. Certainly God taking material
> from
> a dead Homo Erectus and manipulating it to form a single man would qualify
>
> as a miracle as well. So we don't disagree about miracles.
>
> No, you're misunderstanding my suggestion about the "genetic dust." It
> doesn't have to be degraded DNA from a body that has fully decomposed. In
> my scenario it could be material from a recently dead body with intact
> DNA. It really is hardly different at all from your scenario. In fact, if
> we wanted to apply Occam's Razor to our two competing scenarios, mine
> might
> survive longer than yours, because yours requires the additional step of a
>
> resurrection, whearas mine doesn't. <<<<
>
> OK, Then you are wanting the same thing I have advocated for 10 years,
> only you want it much later in hominid history. The problem with that is
> that once again, if you have a bottleneck more recently than 5 million years
> ago, you can't explain the genetic diversity. Only if God takes 20,000 apes
> and converts them to humans can you maintain the genetic diversity we see.
> The alternative is to have him do one or two 5 million years ago. Your
> late-in-time scenario doesn't solve the problem you want it to.
>
>
>
>
> >>>>>It seems difficult to me to stretch the Genesis account of the
> creation of
> Adam back millions of years. I can accept that Adam may not have been
> neolithic, but I can't see anything in the text that suggests he was a
> non-modern-human *homo *species from millions of years ago. If the
> Biblical
> text requires a special creation of Adam, I think something like the
> "genetic dust" scenario solves the "Templeton" problem in a way that is
> more
> consistent with the Biblical context. <<<<
>
>
>
> Actually a recent conversion of one ape's genes to modern human would
> leave us with exactly 2 alleles at each location. If God did 2 apes (adam
> ape and Eve ape) then you have 4 alleles at each location. The MHC complex
> has over 100 alleles. YOu can't generate them in a few 10's of thousands of
> years unless you have a hypermutation rate. You need to move Adam back in
> time.
>
>
Received on Sun Mar 5 14:51:17 2006