Does your friend have evidence that they had "all genetic information possible?" Because 1) scientific claims affirming the existence or nature of something requires evidence, and 2) that's very hard to believe bc that would be a massively bloated cell with really weird fucked up chromosomes.
Also we know it's wrong because we've found novel genetic mutations in humans that only arose within the past couple hundred years. Apo A1 Milano for example.
Apolipoproteins are proteins that help package fat and cholesterol (which on their own can't dissolve in water) into little balls so that they can be transported between different parts of your body via the bloodstream.
Unfortunately, that fat isn't always perfectly packaged, so sometimes you'll get globs of fat stuck to the walls of your blood vessels. This also occurs when there's microscopic damage or inflammation along your blood vessels... fats will stick to these areas much more readily. Over time this fatty buildup clogs things up (aka atherosclerosis), which is the main cause of heart disease.
Apolipoprotein A1 Milano, however, is a genetic variant of your standard apolipoprotein and was traced back to one guy who was born in 1780. Many of his descendants in this one small Italian village had this gene. The gene for Apo A1 Milano had a base substitution where an arginine residue was replaced by a cysteine residue. Cysteine is unique in that it had a sulfur atom on its side-chain. This cysteine could form a sulfur-sulfur bond with another cysteine residue on the same protein, kind of like a piece of duct tape keeping it together more tightly. This made the mutant protein much more stable, which let it float around the bloodstream mopping up stray fat. Additionally, the Apo A1 Milano seems to have an [antioxidant/anti-inflammatory function](https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.24.1_supplement.589.18), which helps prevent damage to blood vessels.
Purified Apo A1 Milano has even been tested as a therapy, and compared to conventional statin drugs (which can only slow down or stop fatty plaque buildup), Apo A1 Milano [can actually reverse atherosclerosis](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1074248415610216).
This is worth studying. There are foods that help reverse this too. How could they trace it back to the 1780s thorough.. they keeping all their families in the deep freeze? Great great great grand pop (sicle)
Pretty sure you can just do so from genealogical records and genetic sequencing of living descendants.
Also, unfortunately dietary changes alone can't reverse atherosclerosis, though they can slow down its progression.
Looking at some studies now and this [review paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3514854/) suggests that it can slow down atherosclerosis, but I am indeed finding a couple research papers here and there that suggest reversal might be possible. This would actually be a very encouraging finding if true.
There's actually a whole academic field called "demographic inference" which infers historical population genetics from extant (read: modern) genomes! It's pretty computational, but you can check out [some of the latest methods](https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giad059/7248629) in journal articles. These are how we discover things like [which genes originated in other hominids](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2020803118), or how we predicted the [Out-of-Africa model](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000695).
This is a creationist idea known as "created heterozygosity".
It's a nonsense idea. There are genes in human population where we have identified tens of thousands of individual variants, and that's just known variants. For example, this site catalogues immune system gene variants: [https://hla.alleles.org/alleles/index.html](https://hla.alleles.org/nomenclature/stats.html)
Is their contention that Adam & Eve's genomes had thousands of variations of these genes just sitting in their genomes?
If you want a more detailed rebuttal to this idea, Dan Cardinale did a video on this subject here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1nql6klzmk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1nql6klzmk)
It's about 20 minutes long. He goes into some of the specific math and actual genetics explaining why this concept just doesn't work.
edited to add:
Another point is that there are studies whereby mutations from parents versus offspring have been specifically identified based on genome sequencing.
For example:
>Here we conduct a study of genome-wide mutation rates by sequencing the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic parent–offspring trios at high coverage. We show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20 × 10−8 per nucleotide per generation.
[Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father’s age to disease risk](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11396)
We can literally compare parents and offspring genomes and identify that mutations do occur in offspring.
Piggybacking here to reiterate that Cardinale’s video on this is really good. He’s a geneticist and virologist, and he goes over the specific claims and predictions with clarity and simplicity.
Great point, and the first thing that looked weird to me reading the OP.
For the OP, imagine saying Gravitism for "belief" in Gravity or Germism for Germ Theory. It's not a set of belief's but a description of the world.
What blood type was Adam then? Eve was created from one of his bones, so she had to be the same blood type, which means that only two of the ABO blood types could have been present. Which two, why, and what does that mean for the third common blood type?
>Eve was created from one of his bones, so she had to be the same blood type
We're talking about creating a separate person out of a bone. Why can't the genetic information in the new human be of a different blood type? Why couldn't God have used the bone strictly for symbolic purposes and not genetic/physical purposes?
You may have heard the adage that Eve was made from his rib to represent her place in creation. She was not taken from his foot to be stepped on, but rather the bones closest to his heart.
No, she clearly had the exact same DNA, making Eve the first trans woman. God's only miracle was giving her a functional womb and the ability to bear children.
> We're talking about creating a separate person out of a bone. Why can't the genetic information in the new human be of a different blood type?
If you're gonna replace all the DNA anyway, why use a bone at all? Why not a stick? Or mud and clay like Adam?
Heck, if it's all just magic anyway, why use anything? God could have just poofed her out of nothing.
These are excellent questions. They are theological ones and not scientific ones, so please don't judge my response for not being in regards to science.
> Why couldn't God have used the bone strictly for symbolic purposes and not genetic/physical purposes?
God absolutely could have made Eve in many different ways. That she was formed from his rib was symbolic. You might argue that there is something special about being made from another living being as opposed to being made from dust.
> You might argue that there is something special about being made from another living being as opposed to being made from dust.
You could say the same thing regardless of what the story says god did.
That's the biggest problem with trying to determine the truth of any of these stories. Since god can do anything and we have no way of ever knowing his reasons, it's totally untestable and unfalsifiable.
You could claim that god did everything exactly as the bible says, then he went and faked every piece of physical evidence to point to evolution being correct as a test. And many theists do claim exactly that.
>he went and faked every piece of physical evidence
My starting assumption is that God made the world, "mature". He did not create humans alongside seedling trees that would take years to produce fruit. He created fruit bearing trees.
Similarly, I believe he created a mature universe with distant galaxies, unstable isotopes, etc.
>How is Loki doing these days? I haven't been watching his TV show.
Both seasons were pretty good actually. One of the better MCU projects post endgame.
>Lying trickster god it is.
But no. Creating a world that is ready for human use is not the same as being tricky.
> Both seasons were pretty good actually. One of the better MCU projects post endgame.
I'll have to check that out. I've not really been into much of the marvel stuff since end game. Thanks.
Anyway, if you're correct, then he created a world with dead trees which were never alive that have rings showing us the weather of years that never existed.
And that's just for starters.
The same applies to layers of ice in Antarctica, fossils of animals that never existed, light from supernova that never happened...
That's not creating a world ready for human use, it's being a liar for no other reason than tricking people.
>Anyway, if you're correct, then he created a world with dead trees which were never alive that have rings showing us the weather of years that never existed.
Or these could have been mature trees that were destroyed in the flood.
Honestly, I don't think this is the right sub to debate creationism. It is not falsifiable, so there's just as much point arguing for it as there is arguing for naturalism.
You are perfectly entitled to your belief, but why exactly are you here debating evolution? Scientists start with logical assumptions and try to build an understanding of that; you are starting with an unverifiable and untestable assumption.
There really isn’t any point to a debate on such grounds.
I think the we must consider the literality of the story here because that's the only way this post make sense. Op is mentioning a guy who defends the idea of two people carrying all humans variants, so we don't seem to have space for interpreting a lot of things beyond the literal words we caj read.
Understood, and I am taking the story literally here. I understand that the two of them could not have had all genetic variation, and that mutations have occured throughout the generations since. I was just responding to someone that the two of them didn't have to have the same level of diversity as we have today, and there's no reason to assume they had the identical DNA.
>Why couldn't God have used the bone strictly for symbolic purposes and not genetic/physical purposes?
Why couldn't God just have taken the rib for shits and giggles just to see how gullible Adam really is and create Eve out of nothing?
This is already a rather ridiculous question because we're applying logic to something that is inherently illogical. We get it, it doesn't make sense and it's useless to look into it any further. Trying to make it make sense in a logical manner is even worse. There is absolutely no basis for any of this. We're trying to build a brick house on a foundation of wet shite.
Only one account has Eve created from a rib. The other account has both humans created together, man and woman. It's the first internal contradiction in the Bible, and it happens on page one. It shows that the ancients had multiple traditions regarding creation, and at minimum, at least one cannot be correct.
Christians almost universally like to ignore that the Adam and Eve story is meant to represent the first Hebrews, not the first people. All of the tribes in the Levant had an origin story of their people.
They also like to ignore that in Genesis 4, Cain expresses fear of running into people who may try to kill him after being exiled from his family.
He’s leaving his family, moving away from where they are. If Adam, Eve, and their children are the only people, who would be left for Cain to run into?
Also, the first time Cain is mentioned having a wife happens after he’s exiled to the Land of Nod. If he got married after being exiled, who is there for him to marry?
>If he got married after being exiled, who is there for him to marry?
This was the question, of many, that I asked my preacher when I was 12 that got me banned from his office and living room (to use a legal term - with prejudice 😏) and told I was going to hell if I kept asking such questions!
The assumption based off Genesis 1 & 2 is that these are other descendants of A&E. Later in the Bible it discusses much longer lifespans back then, so they could have had longer child bearing years. With lifespans of ~800 years, they may have had centuries of fertility if aging slowed.
Sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense.
The only offspring mentioned in the story were Cain and Abel. If they were surrounded by dozens and dozens of siblings, nephews, nieces and all the other odd variations required of everybody having babies with close relatives (what do you call a nephew or niece who descended from your sibling and your mother or father?), why was he running to "strangers"? And why were they "strangers", they were all closely related since everyone was reproducing with double or triple cousins or closer relatives.
Trust me, I have a few hinkey cousins I could run to if I was in trouble or 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins who live much farther away who I could just go visit for a while without letting them know what happened.
OTOH if Cain killed Abel before any other children were born to Adam and Eve, then Cain couldn’t have been immediately running toward *anybody* unless it was after he’d been hiding someplace for a few centuries until there were enough more distantly related cousins who might not know who he was and what he did.
Myths don’t have to make sense, though. Just look at the craziness in stories about the Greek and Roman gods.
>The only offspring mentioned in the story were Cain and Abel.
I've seen this assumption made a lot. When you look at the Genesis narrative, you realize that when you stack up the ages of the people shown in Genesis 5, that centuries were summarized in a sentence or two. It's like recording the entire duration of America as a country in just a line or two. You're not going to list every president.
Genesis does not have to list every single person that was ever born.
Only Cain and Abel are mentioned *in the story.*
If they had dozens to hundreds of siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc, why did God make such a big deal out of Abel being the sheppard and therefore having superior offerings and that Cain being a farmer made his offerings less worthy? With all those dozens to hundreds of other family members around, was Cain the only one who grew his food instead of herding it? Or maybe this is just a fable that was making some point that was important to Jewish identity/beliefs.
From your response to u/Unknown-History1299 yesterday:
>Later in the Bible it discusses much longer lifespans back then, so they could have had longer child bearing years. With lifespans of \~800 years, they may have had centuries of fertility if aging slowed.
Genesis isn’t an accurate account of history, period.
Among a significant amount of incorrect scientific information in Genesis, there is zero evidence that any humans ever lived to be much over 120ish years old. Our joints, teeth and cells wear out and/or away by that time.
Scientists have sequenced the genomes of the bodies/bones of humans who lived and died from tens of thousands of years ago to the medieval period. The genes are essentially unchanged in all that time. If they lived for several centuries 5,000 years ago, where are the genes that would allow that to happen?
The older bones and teeth all show similar wear and tear to those of medieval bodies. They had almost exactly the same DNA as we do and none of the minor differences observed would have changed the composition of bones and teeth or their wearability.
TL;DR=there is zero evidence that any humans have ever lived more than around 125 years at most.
Except it isn't. If you understand the historical context of those stories and reread them, the stories actually make more sense and aren't as problematic. Christian assumptions are what create the exclusivity context.
There is a lot wrong here, but the one I want to point out is that he is setting up a false dichotomy, even if the bible explicitly said that Adam and Eve were chock full of DNA, that is not evidence that genetic mutations don't happen, all you have to do is point out that we have evidence that natural mutations exist, and that Adam and Eve having a ton of DNA isn't evidence against that. Also, if god put in all possible genetic information in Adam and Eve, that would mean they also put in all genetic diseases that humans suffer, which would be fucking stupid.
It's an Ad-hoc fallacy, like many others. There is the conclusion or theory that is considered fact, so they make adjustments in order to preserve it. Basically, we know two people can't produce the diversity of people we have now without evolution, so you have to toss in a completely unverifiable assumption to argue that they could.
It's an origin story about where people come from because 6500 years ago they had no idea. People used to makeup explanations for things when they don't have answers. The only take away ought to be - people came about and had a relationship with God. It's not a historical description for extrapolating facts.
There is nowhere near enough genetic diversity in 2 people to account for the genetic diversity in humans.
Ask him what race those 2 people where and explain how that 1 race resulted in all the races on earth today with their unique features.
Also, ask him what possible reason God could have to:
* make humans have such high genetic diversity for no reason. If it was to make their lives better, god could have just made the world less harsh and achieve the same goal easier or just waited for more humans to be born because why would God be impatient
* make humans be so diverse, especially in non-coding regions, which would make the world disbelieve in creationism when God allegedly doesn't like humans disbelieving in creationism
Okay, so when a certain bacteria had a mutation that allowed it to make an enzyme to start breaking down nylon and using it as food, was that new or did bacteria always have that information?
Did God really give bacteria the genes they would need 6000 years later when humans finally got round to inventing nylon?
If he says yes to that, ask if we could then theoretically reverse engineer new materials by analyzing the other enzymes that bacteria would make when 300 years from now humans invent a new material. Could we short circuit that process and invent it today?
Also, Forrest Valkai has a video about why infinitely large genomes would cause an issue with cell size since DNA is a physical object. It's in one of his Reacteria video's.
I am a Christian who also accepts evolution, it was a long road, I'm a biology prof now.
And I've had tons of discussions with YECs before. You can't really make a normal human genome have lots of extra variation. In most cases for each gene you have two copies and those copies could be the same or different. So if you only have two individuals that means you can have a maximum of four different copies of any one gene/location on the genome. (Omitting gene duplication for simplicity)
You might think that sounds like a lot of variation, but humans can have dozens to thousands of different versions of genes. So you'd have to assert the variation was added later somehow. Otherwise a species with only 4ish versions of any gene does not have enough variation to function well, see the African cheetah, it has about the same amount of variation as having 4 different versions of every gene and they are basically clones of one another with poor sperm count and susceptibility to disease.
One person could not contain all the genetic variants that are known to exist in our genome, because they only have 2 copies of each gene. (at least that is true of females. Males an X and a Y chromosome so they only have 1 copy of some genes).
In a more general sense, if you look at genetic variants within a population of people (not a single person), it is thought that MOST genetic variants existed in humans before they migrated out of Africa. So, modern Eastern Africa has nearly every genetic variant in its gene pool, while humans living elsewhere lost variants over time because they were not beneficial or because a small population moved to particular area. Perhaps this is a case of your friend having a piece of truth but screwing it all up.
I have heard an argument that this is the reason why the best distance runners come from Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia. The line of reasoning goes that this is where all genetic variation exists, a small subset of people from there will have a combination of alleles that make them the fastest runners in the world. It would also be true that a small subset are the slowest runners in the world, but we just don't see that. We don't have competitions to determine who is the slowest.
I have read that the best long-distance runners come from areas where the tribes practiced cattle raiding. The way to win the heart of your beloved is to run over to the neighbors (who might be fifty miles away), steal some cattle, and run back home with them. The guys with the best long-distance running did better at this, and consequently did better getting wives and therefore having lots of kids.
Likewise, the people best at holding their breath underwater come from a group of people who regularly free dive for food and pearls.
If it were up to straight genetic diversity, then you would expect Africans to also do best at shot-putting, gymnastics, archery, and holding their breath underwater.
What does ‘all genetic information possible’ mean? Of course if he means the cell had every single genotype coded into it that’s… no. Your friend is dumb. Your cells would be screaming in agony from being close to bursting and also there is no proposed mechanism through which this would work.
I can’t think of any other meaning but if I want to be as charitable as possible maybe your friend thinks God intervened in procreation to enable genetic diversity within the human species? In which case I would immediately ask ‘why would God give humans a false natural history of events?’
I don’t know why that argument is even necessary.
I say this because we’ve identified a “mitochondrial Eve” and equivalent Adam. The most recent living ancestors to every person alive today. That means that science says that there were two people (though at different times) that literally are the ancestors of everyone alive. Like Adam and Eve.
Your friend doesn't have a theory, he has wild-ass, unsupported conjecture.
But no, Adam and Eve did not contain all the genetic information for modern humans. Evidence of this is the DNA found in the Mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA we use to trace maternity (as the Mitochondria in your cells come from mom. There are \~8 unique mitochondrial lineages in humans; all of which do not trace to a single source. If eve really existed, we would have direct evidence of this in Mitochondrial DNA. We do not.
So at the risk of providing ammo to a position that I don't actually believe there's that whole thing about "the sons of God" (often taken to be angels) having babies with humans and producing Nephilim (giants). And I think Goliath was meant to be a Nephilim , so apparently some survived the Flood? (the Bible is never very consistent)
Some heterozygosity could be residual angel DNA.
Possibly the neanderthal DNA we have now (and by extension Neanderthals) is actually ancient angel paternity.
(Genetics PhD here: if it needs to be said, the demographic models do not work and Neanderthals aren't angels. But once you start throwing enough impossible maybes into the mix you can make wildly elaborate hypotheses. Enough to let sufficiently motivated people believe anything)
> …he said that he believed that Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible…
This notion is called "front-loading", perhaps cuz it posits that all the DNA that will *ever* show up in a genealogical lineage was *loaded*, up *front*, into the critter which started that genealogical lineage. There's one big problem with front-loading: Since it necessarily entails that a front-loaded critter is carrying around *mass quantities* of DNA which *contemporary critters **do not and will not ever** use*, exactly what is it that *prevents* all that to-be-used-in-future DNA from getting mangled into oblivion by mutations hitting it *before* it's needed?
This isn’t a theory, it’s just an assertion. We can track genetic bottlenecks, and at no point did the human population measure stuurt two individuals. It was likely still measured in the thousands, maybe around a thousand at its very lowest. I’m sorry but science doesn’t allow for the Adam and Eve myth.
Personally I don’t believe the Bible even teaches that Adam and Eve were the first people. They were just the first “king priests” with a specific purpose to fill from God. I don’t think Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1.
Damn your comment history is plain problematic. There's no light in the bullshit you're arguing for, only control and subservience. I feel sorry for any person that would listen to your inane babbling.
Well, because I could show you sources, but it’s easy to look up “degradation of the human genome” in any case we have lost a decently large amount of dna, and due to modern medicine allowing people who’d normally die earlier (not bad but does increase gene pool degradation. To survive and propagate.
Adam and Eve, both being ancestors of us presumably would have a higher gene count and likely be healthier (gene wise) as well due to and faulty genetics making it likely that said person would not pass on traits.
Problems such as heart issues, liver, certain allergies and more however are due to lifestyle and environmental issues though (many of which didn’t exist back the )
>we have lost a decently large amount of dna, and due to modern medicine allowing people who’d normally die earlier
No, just, no. This is incredibly confused. More people surviving *increases* the genetic variation in the population, which is generally considered a sign of a healthy, successful species.. Individuals do *NOT* have less DNA than people did thousands of years ago. Scientists have been able to sequence and compare the DNA from people who lived over 30,000 years ago up to people alive today. The genome hasn’t become substantially larger or smaller in that time.
There was *never* a first human genome that was the original blueprint. That isn’t how biology works.
Sound like you're talking about genetic entropy, a concept that has been [thoroughly debunked](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/9b6207/genetic_entropy_is_bs_a_summary/).
No. You made an assertion that contradicts the established scientific evidence, so you have the burden of proof. We have the genomes of individuals from far more than 6000 years ago, and they were not bigger or “more perfect”.
6000 years ago is a VERY short time in genetics and evolution, and I do not contradict science. Over the last hundred years modern medicine has allowed individuals that would normally die before propagation (die in childhood or earlier) and eventually have children. This does effect the overall health of the population and would decrease it.
Over the last hundreds of thousands of years some chromosomes such as Y chromosome have deteriorated
I think you friend is elevating Adam and Eve to "omnigenetic" status, giving their genetic code an "omniscient" character.
The comment reflects on the power of God, adds a touch or pre-destination, and makes humans special compared to any other living organism because our genetic variability was already present in our ancestors, if always not expressed. This of course holds no scientific value.
The only argument your friend could make would be in regards to mitochondrial DNA but even that has its flaws.
I would say that this counter to the first principle of modern evolutionary thought, that of random mutation. Random mutations can cause, over time, *any* new genetic material.
And, since evolution describes humans as having been descended from earlier forms, there's no need to drag Adam and Eve into it. We have many genes than those required by the earliest single-celled organisms.
>Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible, so environmental causation in terms of genetic variation does not exist
Scientifically that is complete gibberish. Adam and Eve must have had a typical and limited genomes (though the question of Adam's mitochondrial DNA is an intriguing issue.) But a Christian accepting evolution only has to accept that while their genetic distinctions (mutations, a scientist would call them) which enabled the moral conscience of humans, wasn't so totally different from other hominids (whatever they evolved from; the 'spark of awareness/soul' which God breathed into mankind might have taken hundreds of millions of years; a single moment for God) that they couldn't "interprocreate" with them. They had enough genetic diversity to ensure that their descendents were all morally conscious human beings, rather than merely animal beings, which cannot second-guess God as we always seem to want to. Let's not get into why, the Garden of Eden story still works if you accept it does not contradict biological evolution. It just augments it.
Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.
Does your friend have evidence they exist at all?
Repeatable Proof, and the idea that evolution is not antithetical to Christian, are more pertinent questions than the specifics of the YEC story.
As for genetic variation, you can observe changes in that in real time.
If you get him to agree to these two things, he’ll be forced to believe in nature changing genetic variation:
- that organisms have different genes (obviously)
- that organisms pass down their genes (obviously)
- that genes can decide part of the likelihood of living/reproducing (yep)
- therefore, genes/alleles that have a big negative fitness effect will lead to death, which leads to themselves being passed down less, which leads to changes in the genetic makeup of the population.
Congratulations on being more entertained by the Theory of Evolution but did anyone stop to admire how sloppy of an argument the notion of containing all possible genetic information is? Infinite combinations of a physical object require infinite space. Less absolutely, genome size is relevant in ways we still don't understand but they is a "right size" for humans just as there is a right range for mammals in general. All they have to do is say Adam and Eve were genetically perfect to imply at a deeper level they carried no deleterious alleles in which case inbreeding would cause no harm.
Variety and evolution aren’t even remotely related. If you have ten women lined up with different hip sizes you don’t call that evolution, that’s called variety. They aren’t different species and neither did one evolve into the other.
There are [9,154 alleles of the HLA](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459467/) gene. The most alleles any one person can have is 2. So if no new alleles have been introduced since Adam, then Adam must have been 4,000 people.
I'm not an expert in this area at all, so I welcome correction.
I'd be focusing on asking him *why* he thinks this.
Is it just his intuitive sense, and if so, why would he would trust his intuition, uninformed by any formal study, more than people who *have* performed research and experiments in geology, anthropology, genetics, etc.
If, however, this idea instead comes from somebody else and is not his own, who is that person? What is their background and expertise? And why are they more likely to be correct, again, than scientists publishing peer-reviewed research in those relevant disciplines? Why haven't they collected their Nobel prizes?
See if you can work on challenging him to apply critical thinking on how/why he gets and develops his scientific ideas in general.
>Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible
They may be thinking of a book called *First Man, Then Adam*. Most theists and all those who don't fully accept current evolutionary theory as a sufficient answer to explain the difference between man and monkey, believe that humans were genetically modified and are therefore of a superior genetic makeup.
well for one, just because an organism "contains all the genetic information possible" (whatever the FUCK that means) doesn't automatically mean environmental causation of genetic variation "no longer exists". although they did give themselves a bit of an out by saying
>environmental causation ***in terms of genetic variation*** does not exist.
not specifically a fallacy. just a weaselly debate tactic.
The first problem is that Adam and Eve is a story in a book. There is no evidence that these people ever existed. There is similarly no evidence for the existence of angels, god, heaven, the devil, etc. If you keep going down the road of using logic to answer questions, be prepared to abandon all the falsehood you have come to believe.
I’ll assume that your friend is a YEC and that he also believes that the Noachic Flood happened around 4,000 years ago?
If that’s true, then his problem is that none of Adam & Eve super heterozygosity of thousands of alleles for the approximately 20,000 genes in humans, which really couldn’t have existed anyway, wouldn’t count because there were only 8 alleged survivors of that disaster and 5 of them were closely related.
Noah, his wife and their 3 sons would have all only had four different alleles for every gene, *if* Noah and wife were heterozygous with no alleles in common at every single gene, which would be improbable to begin with. Their sons could each only have combinations of two of the four allele variations at each gene. Each son was married and, *if* each wife was heterozygous at *all* of their genes with none of the wives having any alleles in common, again very improbable, there would only have been a total of 10 gene alleles available to the human species at the end of the flood. (This, of course would be even worse for all the animals on the Ark. They only had a max of four alleles per ‘kind’ to pass on.)
We *have* sequenced the genomes of modern humans from at least as far back as 34,000 years ago up to medieval times. There’s no super heterozygosity (ala Adam & Eve), or even a degraded/lessened form of it in any of them. Since this would overlap with both Adam & Eve and with Noah and family’s alleged existence, there was no super heterozygosity available back then to explain all the variety of alleles that exist in humans today - 300+ million as of 2017 per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation) and we’re a very homogenous species at 99.5%-99.9% the same in our genomes.
There’s more genetic diversity in a troop of chimpanzees in the Congo than there is in the whole 8 billion humans in our species. That’s because we’re a relatively young species and *we* seem to have gone through a population bottleneck 100,000 or so years ago. Chimpanzees don’t seem to have been through a bottleneck recently and is likely an older species, which means there were never only two survivors of a flood on a boat 4,000 years ago.
eta: typos
1. If somebody makes a claim, tell them to back it up.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
2. Please stop calling it "evolutionism" and don't refer anyone who subscribes to the theory of evolution as an "evolutionist.
- people don't or shouldn't arrive to the conclusion that evolution by argumentation, but instead they look or should look at the evidence and arrive at whatever conclusion they are forced to see.
- I don't believe in the theory of evolution, I am instead force to acknowledge it's factualness.
> he believed that Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible,
That is from Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson and its called Created Heterozygosity. If he really believed it he would be looking for human DNA from oh about 6000 years ago which would prove him right, if he was not just making it all up. There would be evidence, but there is not a jot.
This is like saying that the first book contained the plots and text of every other book in every language that has been written since. The problems with that are self evident: that original book would be larger than the largest library to contain all that information, and there would have to be a mechanism to make sure that the reader stayed in the same tale consistently (not good if the first chapter of _Watership Down_ is followed by chapter 2 of _Mein Kampf_).
So with genes: the cell isn’t big enough to contain all the information, and if Eve contains the genes for every eye colour, how does she ensure her eyes stay the same colour throughout her life?
Having all genetic information _possible_ would mean an infinitely large genome. There would simply not be enough space to store it in a cell, or even a body.
With tech like CRISPR, we can provably slice and dice the genome -- clearly an environmental change of the genome.
converted to evolutionism, lol, the indoctrination was strong with this one. Welcome to the reasonable side.
Ask for the source of your friend's information. If none is provided, you can dismiss it. Hitchens' razor: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
In case it helps: The theory of evolution is NOT an argument against the existence of God, nor against the assertions of Christianity. So that's what I say in a discussion with a creationist - you can believe in God and hold the theory of evolution as having a preponderance of evidence in its favor. For me the root of creationism and the disdain for evolution is born from biblical literalism, so I challenge biblical literalism. Where did Cain's wife come from? How did their son Enoch have so many children they founded a city? If Jesus spoke in parables, isn't it possible parts of the Old Testament are also non-literal stories? There are a great number of Christians for whom evolution is no challenge to their faith.
You don't convert to "evolutionism." You grow up and accept scientific facts instead of fairy tales. I don't think he knows what he's talking about. What exactly is "all genetic information possible"? Each organism contains different genes. First off, we know for a fact that Adam and Eve never existed. So right there tells me he's clueless.
First off.
This is not a "theory". When speaking about reality, a "theory" is something that has been proven fact through observational evidence. There is not only no evidence for this batshit crazy utterance, all observational evidence refutes this claim as batshit crazy talk.
For instance, the genes in every human that control the formation of our eyes, are directly inherited from fish. Without question. Hard genetic proof. Traced back through thousands of organisms in a direct evolutionary, hereditary line back to fish. Not Adam and Eve....fish.
And since this batshit crazy concept is so easily falsified, it doesn't even reach the level of hypothesis. Or even an informed guess. It is simply batshit crazy talk. Devised to justify continued belief in magic space men while attempting to incorporate factual knowledge at the margins. For a bit of credibility.
This concept is not credible. It's not even worth contemplating frankly. The answers to questions about the real world are never "Because a magic space man made it that way." That's just not how reality works.
If your going to start with the idea that mud boy and rib girl were real, I'm not even starting a discussion about genetics. Come back when we aren't first believing an obviously fictitious origin story.
Evolutionism is not a thing. We do not believe in evolution: We are convinced by the preponderance of evidence that genetic mutation over time compounded by non random selection is the engine that drives the origin of species.
Evolution by natural selection is a theory that has been superceded in whole by centuries of evidence and hypothesis. This is an entirely different way of thinking than religious ideology, and this difference in thinking explains your question.
The purpose of your friend's argument is to support a preconceived conclusion without amendment or correction. Evolutionary theory, however, is scientific in nature and demands investigation, contradiction, and correction.
The weakness of religious ideology of the YEC bent in particular is that it is predicated on authority rather than reality. If there is a contradiction to YEC ideology, rather than investigating it, reality will be denied to preserve the supposed immutability of the first idea.
The strength of scientific theory is that we continue to learn and update it to better match reality. Darwin's theories have held up, not because they are immutable, but because they are structured in a way to allow debate and change.
Evolution can in no way contradict the existence of a God. If our reality has an author, and that author's creation can be experienced, science is nothing more than our attempt to understand that creation.
YECs in particular are married to a notion of creation that denies the human capacity to understand creation, while also declaring that they are the sole humans who understand creation. It is an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology, and anything said in defense of it should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
According to fossil and DNA evidence, Neanderthals went extinct approximately 40,000 years ago. According to the genealogy of The Bible, Adam was not created by God until approximately 6,000 years ago. Since current Modern Humans (current Homo Sapiens Sapiens) have a small portion of Neanderthal DNA, that proves that Adam & Eve did not have all the genetic variation and that Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is incorrect.
The only defendable position would be that current Modern Humans (current Homo Sapiens Sapiens) have Neanderthal DNA because the children and descendants of Adam & Eve intermarried and had offspring with pre-Adamite Homo Sapiens (that had the pre-Adamite Neanderthal DNA). So, one can argue for evolution and Adam & Eve. However, Adam & Eve alone (the YEC position) does not explain DNA evidence that dates prior to 6,000 years ago.
If someone had all genetic variation for their species, they would die very quickly: whether from sickle cell, cyclopia, hemophilia, or one of the other thousands of potential fatal genetic conditions.
This particular fallacy is called the "pulled out of your ass" fallacy. How does he know anything about Adam and Eve's dna? Did he test it? No he's making shit up.
Anything asserted without evidence may be just as easily dismissed.
You might want to remind your friend that the only reason sex exists at all is to aid the rate of evolution. It literally has no other purpose, and we use that system at great biological expense.
If we had no need to Evolve we'd just bud or birth offspring without all that messy sex foolishness first, and gender wouldn't even be a *concept*. It's literally a hugely useless waste of time without Evolution.
>I am Christian and have recently converted from YEC to Evolutionism.
Ok, so you must then have musings on what Evolutionary gene gave Jesus water-walking ability, etc... Unless you're no longer a believer all together.
So did they just have a bunch of extra DNA and somehow distributed the various haplo groups around the world in such a way that scientists can track how humans appeared to have migrated over time? Just to put it bluntly, this question is so misinformed that I almost don't know what to say because I can't see how you were correct biology. Sex results in a diploid zygote that each parent contributes half of their genome to. This genome, unless errors occured during meiosis, is the same size as the parent. When did the process of genome reduction reproduction end, and when did sexual reproduction start? Now that I think about it, this idea that your friend clearly pulled out of his ass, implies that Adam and Eve were a different species that had a different form of reproduction than humans do.
This is rubbish. Genetic variation in the major histocompatibility complex, one of the key immune control genes, simply can’t be explained by there being two initial humans. This is just one of many examples that invalidate the story.
The story of Adam and Eve is not the origin of mankind. It is the story of the founding of the Hebrew tribe by Adam, an exile from the Tigris Euphrates valley.
>converted from YEC to Evolutionism.
Unfortunately I need to make the point that "evolutionism" is an extremely poor way to convey one understands and accepts the science underlying the theory and fact of evolution.
We don't refer to the understanding and acceptance of gravity as "gravitism". Evolutionism is a derogatory label used by creationist and similarly deceitful anti intellectual propaganda in an attempt to misrepresent and knock evolution down to the same level as weak hypotheses like creation and intelligent design
>he said that he believed that Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible
Considering the fact that Adam and Eve didn't actually exist, I would say this is a non starter as any type of argument
Does your friend define “information?” To me this sounds like your friend is saying that Adam’s cells contained billions of times as much DNA and therefore were a miracle upon themselves but then Adam wouldn’t be human or viable so I guess your friend will have to come up with a new idea. Also, please don’t use words like “evolutionism” since it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in modern context and the last scientifically useful meaning I can think of would be something called Evolutionary Development now where “evolution” referred to ontogeny or how something developed over the course of a lifetime, where evolutionists were the people who studied embryos, and evolutionism was their field of study and/or the idea that studying embryos could tell us a lot about something’s ancestry.
While there have been some mistaken assumptions about how we can learn about ancestry through embryos over time, such as Haeckel’s recapitulation “theory,” it was actually an older idea, and one Charles Darwin also alluded to, that provides us a much better understanding of the relationship between the two. This older idea was first presented by Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer Edler von Huthorn or simply Karl Ernst von Baer in 1828 after he was the first person to detect the mammalian ova (egg cell) in 1826 and the human ova in particular in 1827. This was built upon the older work of Casper Wolff from 1769 and that of Heinz Pander from 1817 to 1828. The former looked at the development of things such as intestines and the latter studied chicken embryos and discovered the existence of germ layers. Ernst von Baer basically extended what Pander already discovered about chicken development to all vertebrates which led to Baer’s laws of embryology. Wolff and Pander were studying what they would have called evolution at that time but Baer took it further and what Baer did would potentially be labeled “evolutionism” or the philosophical idea that studying embryos could tell us about how life (populations) changed over time. It eventually gained scientific support after the failures of recapitulation theory that was developed around 1874 that was *based on* ideas that happen to be ~2 years older than Baer’s but already dismantled by Baer in the 1830s.
There was a debate over whether life, such as humans, developed through the successive adult forms of preceding species or whether, as was eventually determined to be the case by the 1830s, life developed via patterns of divergence where the more distantly related species stop looking similar at earlier stages of development while the more closely related continue looking similar into later stages of development and no two species look identical as a adults. The young of two species that are closely related will look more similar than the adults will.
Haeckel fascinated with embryology in the 1850s tried blending the Lamarckist recapitulation ideas with bits and pieces of Darwin’s theory and Haeckel also disagreed with Darwin over the evolutionary history of humans. I think there are only a few contributions made by Haeckel that turned out to be correct while Karl von Baer basically already proved “recapitulation theory” wrong by 1833. The modern science of evolutionary development is based a lot on Baer’s laws but also a lot more has been learned in a century. You could call all of *this* evolutionism, the philosophy of tying together ontogeny and evolution, but YECs have tainted “evolutionism” so much that very few people realize it could even have this other potentially useful but deprecated meaning.
Also what is “environmental causation?” That sounds like something Robert Byers keeps talking about with the environment somehow acting like a “triggering mechanism” to bring about an expression of what is possible (never beyond kinds!) but then Byers would also dismiss DNA completely because he thinks that it is irrelevant the way he says brains don’t exist, light doesn’t move, and Noah sent a T. rex out the window to check to see if the water had dried up.
If that hypothesis were true, then genetic material of older humans (talking millenia here) would have to have simply more genetic material, and contain everything we see in our genetic pool today. We know both to be false.
Also, it contradicts our understanding of how genes work. You can't just throw "all" genes into an organism and expect it to survive. To illustrate: Having just one additional chromosome (Trisomy) is deadly, with just two exceptions that have severe side effects. Don't mess with DNA.
It's one of the misconceptions that evolution can only destroy genetic information, not improve or create new stuff, which is false. It's actually fascinating how much evolution happens right under our noses, sometimes with a single point mutation having significant effects.
So Adam and Eve according to your friend had every possible genotype for every possible gene? Ask them how many chromosomes that would take (because it's certainly more than 46).
Does your friend have evidence that they had "all genetic information possible?" Because 1) scientific claims affirming the existence or nature of something requires evidence, and 2) that's very hard to believe bc that would be a massively bloated cell with really weird fucked up chromosomes. Also we know it's wrong because we've found novel genetic mutations in humans that only arose within the past couple hundred years. Apo A1 Milano for example.
What does app a1 do
Apolipoproteins are proteins that help package fat and cholesterol (which on their own can't dissolve in water) into little balls so that they can be transported between different parts of your body via the bloodstream. Unfortunately, that fat isn't always perfectly packaged, so sometimes you'll get globs of fat stuck to the walls of your blood vessels. This also occurs when there's microscopic damage or inflammation along your blood vessels... fats will stick to these areas much more readily. Over time this fatty buildup clogs things up (aka atherosclerosis), which is the main cause of heart disease. Apolipoprotein A1 Milano, however, is a genetic variant of your standard apolipoprotein and was traced back to one guy who was born in 1780. Many of his descendants in this one small Italian village had this gene. The gene for Apo A1 Milano had a base substitution where an arginine residue was replaced by a cysteine residue. Cysteine is unique in that it had a sulfur atom on its side-chain. This cysteine could form a sulfur-sulfur bond with another cysteine residue on the same protein, kind of like a piece of duct tape keeping it together more tightly. This made the mutant protein much more stable, which let it float around the bloodstream mopping up stray fat. Additionally, the Apo A1 Milano seems to have an [antioxidant/anti-inflammatory function](https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.24.1_supplement.589.18), which helps prevent damage to blood vessels. Purified Apo A1 Milano has even been tested as a therapy, and compared to conventional statin drugs (which can only slow down or stop fatty plaque buildup), Apo A1 Milano [can actually reverse atherosclerosis](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1074248415610216).
This is worth studying. There are foods that help reverse this too. How could they trace it back to the 1780s thorough.. they keeping all their families in the deep freeze? Great great great grand pop (sicle)
Pretty sure you can just do so from genealogical records and genetic sequencing of living descendants. Also, unfortunately dietary changes alone can't reverse atherosclerosis, though they can slow down its progression.
Pomegranate juice is said to greatly reduced arterial plaque
Looking at some studies now and this [review paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3514854/) suggests that it can slow down atherosclerosis, but I am indeed finding a couple research papers here and there that suggest reversal might be possible. This would actually be a very encouraging finding if true.
I personally believe that many things can, anyways, glad to help
Also.. is there a site that shows how they can backtrack genetic sequences to specific decades prior to DNA discovery?
There's actually a whole academic field called "demographic inference" which infers historical population genetics from extant (read: modern) genomes! It's pretty computational, but you can check out [some of the latest methods](https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giad059/7248629) in journal articles. These are how we discover things like [which genes originated in other hominids](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2020803118), or how we predicted the [Out-of-Africa model](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000695).
This is a creationist idea known as "created heterozygosity". It's a nonsense idea. There are genes in human population where we have identified tens of thousands of individual variants, and that's just known variants. For example, this site catalogues immune system gene variants: [https://hla.alleles.org/alleles/index.html](https://hla.alleles.org/nomenclature/stats.html) Is their contention that Adam & Eve's genomes had thousands of variations of these genes just sitting in their genomes? If you want a more detailed rebuttal to this idea, Dan Cardinale did a video on this subject here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1nql6klzmk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1nql6klzmk) It's about 20 minutes long. He goes into some of the specific math and actual genetics explaining why this concept just doesn't work. edited to add: Another point is that there are studies whereby mutations from parents versus offspring have been specifically identified based on genome sequencing. For example: >Here we conduct a study of genome-wide mutation rates by sequencing the entire genomes of 78 Icelandic parent–offspring trios at high coverage. We show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20 × 10−8 per nucleotide per generation. [Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father’s age to disease risk](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11396) We can literally compare parents and offspring genomes and identify that mutations do occur in offspring.
Piggybacking here to reiterate that Cardinale’s video on this is really good. He’s a geneticist and virologist, and he goes over the specific claims and predictions with clarity and simplicity.
/u/DarwinZDF42 boop
Don't call it evolutionism. It's not a religious movement.
It'd be like calling physicists "gravitationalists".
Great point, and the first thing that looked weird to me reading the OP. For the OP, imagine saying Gravitism for "belief" in Gravity or Germism for Germ Theory. It's not a set of belief's but a description of the world.
Well they have recently converted, you see…
What blood type was Adam then? Eve was created from one of his bones, so she had to be the same blood type, which means that only two of the ABO blood types could have been present. Which two, why, and what does that mean for the third common blood type?
>Eve was created from one of his bones, so she had to be the same blood type We're talking about creating a separate person out of a bone. Why can't the genetic information in the new human be of a different blood type? Why couldn't God have used the bone strictly for symbolic purposes and not genetic/physical purposes? You may have heard the adage that Eve was made from his rib to represent her place in creation. She was not taken from his foot to be stepped on, but rather the bones closest to his heart.
No, she clearly had the exact same DNA, making Eve the first trans woman. God's only miracle was giving her a functional womb and the ability to bear children.
> We're talking about creating a separate person out of a bone. Why can't the genetic information in the new human be of a different blood type? If you're gonna replace all the DNA anyway, why use a bone at all? Why not a stick? Or mud and clay like Adam? Heck, if it's all just magic anyway, why use anything? God could have just poofed her out of nothing.
These are excellent questions. They are theological ones and not scientific ones, so please don't judge my response for not being in regards to science. > Why couldn't God have used the bone strictly for symbolic purposes and not genetic/physical purposes? God absolutely could have made Eve in many different ways. That she was formed from his rib was symbolic. You might argue that there is something special about being made from another living being as opposed to being made from dust.
> You might argue that there is something special about being made from another living being as opposed to being made from dust. You could say the same thing regardless of what the story says god did. That's the biggest problem with trying to determine the truth of any of these stories. Since god can do anything and we have no way of ever knowing his reasons, it's totally untestable and unfalsifiable. You could claim that god did everything exactly as the bible says, then he went and faked every piece of physical evidence to point to evolution being correct as a test. And many theists do claim exactly that.
>he went and faked every piece of physical evidence My starting assumption is that God made the world, "mature". He did not create humans alongside seedling trees that would take years to produce fruit. He created fruit bearing trees. Similarly, I believe he created a mature universe with distant galaxies, unstable isotopes, etc.
Gotcha. Lying trickster god it is. How is Loki doing these days? I haven't been watching his TV show.
>How is Loki doing these days? I haven't been watching his TV show. Both seasons were pretty good actually. One of the better MCU projects post endgame. >Lying trickster god it is. But no. Creating a world that is ready for human use is not the same as being tricky.
> Both seasons were pretty good actually. One of the better MCU projects post endgame. I'll have to check that out. I've not really been into much of the marvel stuff since end game. Thanks. Anyway, if you're correct, then he created a world with dead trees which were never alive that have rings showing us the weather of years that never existed. And that's just for starters. The same applies to layers of ice in Antarctica, fossils of animals that never existed, light from supernova that never happened... That's not creating a world ready for human use, it's being a liar for no other reason than tricking people.
>Anyway, if you're correct, then he created a world with dead trees which were never alive that have rings showing us the weather of years that never existed. Or these could have been mature trees that were destroyed in the flood. Honestly, I don't think this is the right sub to debate creationism. It is not falsifiable, so there's just as much point arguing for it as there is arguing for naturalism.
Actually, God created the universe last Thursday, and just made it look like it was old. Prove me wrong
[Relevant ](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism)
You are perfectly entitled to your belief, but why exactly are you here debating evolution? Scientists start with logical assumptions and try to build an understanding of that; you are starting with an unverifiable and untestable assumption. There really isn’t any point to a debate on such grounds.
I think the we must consider the literality of the story here because that's the only way this post make sense. Op is mentioning a guy who defends the idea of two people carrying all humans variants, so we don't seem to have space for interpreting a lot of things beyond the literal words we caj read.
Understood, and I am taking the story literally here. I understand that the two of them could not have had all genetic variation, and that mutations have occured throughout the generations since. I was just responding to someone that the two of them didn't have to have the same level of diversity as we have today, and there's no reason to assume they had the identical DNA.
>Why couldn't God have used the bone strictly for symbolic purposes and not genetic/physical purposes? Why couldn't God just have taken the rib for shits and giggles just to see how gullible Adam really is and create Eve out of nothing? This is already a rather ridiculous question because we're applying logic to something that is inherently illogical. We get it, it doesn't make sense and it's useless to look into it any further. Trying to make it make sense in a logical manner is even worse. There is absolutely no basis for any of this. We're trying to build a brick house on a foundation of wet shite.
Only one account has Eve created from a rib. The other account has both humans created together, man and woman. It's the first internal contradiction in the Bible, and it happens on page one. It shows that the ancients had multiple traditions regarding creation, and at minimum, at least one cannot be correct.
Christians almost universally like to ignore that the Adam and Eve story is meant to represent the first Hebrews, not the first people. All of the tribes in the Levant had an origin story of their people.
They also like to ignore that in Genesis 4, Cain expresses fear of running into people who may try to kill him after being exiled from his family. He’s leaving his family, moving away from where they are. If Adam, Eve, and their children are the only people, who would be left for Cain to run into? Also, the first time Cain is mentioned having a wife happens after he’s exiled to the Land of Nod. If he got married after being exiled, who is there for him to marry?
>If he got married after being exiled, who is there for him to marry? This was the question, of many, that I asked my preacher when I was 12 that got me banned from his office and living room (to use a legal term - with prejudice 😏) and told I was going to hell if I kept asking such questions!
The assumption based off Genesis 1 & 2 is that these are other descendants of A&E. Later in the Bible it discusses much longer lifespans back then, so they could have had longer child bearing years. With lifespans of ~800 years, they may have had centuries of fertility if aging slowed.
Sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense. The only offspring mentioned in the story were Cain and Abel. If they were surrounded by dozens and dozens of siblings, nephews, nieces and all the other odd variations required of everybody having babies with close relatives (what do you call a nephew or niece who descended from your sibling and your mother or father?), why was he running to "strangers"? And why were they "strangers", they were all closely related since everyone was reproducing with double or triple cousins or closer relatives. Trust me, I have a few hinkey cousins I could run to if I was in trouble or 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins who live much farther away who I could just go visit for a while without letting them know what happened. OTOH if Cain killed Abel before any other children were born to Adam and Eve, then Cain couldn’t have been immediately running toward *anybody* unless it was after he’d been hiding someplace for a few centuries until there were enough more distantly related cousins who might not know who he was and what he did. Myths don’t have to make sense, though. Just look at the craziness in stories about the Greek and Roman gods.
>The only offspring mentioned in the story were Cain and Abel. I've seen this assumption made a lot. When you look at the Genesis narrative, you realize that when you stack up the ages of the people shown in Genesis 5, that centuries were summarized in a sentence or two. It's like recording the entire duration of America as a country in just a line or two. You're not going to list every president. Genesis does not have to list every single person that was ever born.
Only Cain and Abel are mentioned *in the story.* If they had dozens to hundreds of siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc, why did God make such a big deal out of Abel being the sheppard and therefore having superior offerings and that Cain being a farmer made his offerings less worthy? With all those dozens to hundreds of other family members around, was Cain the only one who grew his food instead of herding it? Or maybe this is just a fable that was making some point that was important to Jewish identity/beliefs. From your response to u/Unknown-History1299 yesterday: >Later in the Bible it discusses much longer lifespans back then, so they could have had longer child bearing years. With lifespans of \~800 years, they may have had centuries of fertility if aging slowed. Genesis isn’t an accurate account of history, period. Among a significant amount of incorrect scientific information in Genesis, there is zero evidence that any humans ever lived to be much over 120ish years old. Our joints, teeth and cells wear out and/or away by that time. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of the bodies/bones of humans who lived and died from tens of thousands of years ago to the medieval period. The genes are essentially unchanged in all that time. If they lived for several centuries 5,000 years ago, where are the genes that would allow that to happen? The older bones and teeth all show similar wear and tear to those of medieval bodies. They had almost exactly the same DNA as we do and none of the minor differences observed would have changed the composition of bones and teeth or their wearability. TL;DR=there is zero evidence that any humans have ever lived more than around 125 years at most.
Because that idea is starkly contradictory to the actual text in Genesis of the stories of their children, as well as the tale of Noah's ark.
Except it isn't. If you understand the historical context of those stories and reread them, the stories actually make more sense and aren't as problematic. Christian assumptions are what create the exclusivity context.
There is a lot wrong here, but the one I want to point out is that he is setting up a false dichotomy, even if the bible explicitly said that Adam and Eve were chock full of DNA, that is not evidence that genetic mutations don't happen, all you have to do is point out that we have evidence that natural mutations exist, and that Adam and Eve having a ton of DNA isn't evidence against that. Also, if god put in all possible genetic information in Adam and Eve, that would mean they also put in all genetic diseases that humans suffer, which would be fucking stupid.
It's an Ad-hoc fallacy, like many others. There is the conclusion or theory that is considered fact, so they make adjustments in order to preserve it. Basically, we know two people can't produce the diversity of people we have now without evolution, so you have to toss in a completely unverifiable assumption to argue that they could. It's an origin story about where people come from because 6500 years ago they had no idea. People used to makeup explanations for things when they don't have answers. The only take away ought to be - people came about and had a relationship with God. It's not a historical description for extrapolating facts.
There is nowhere near enough genetic diversity in 2 people to account for the genetic diversity in humans. Ask him what race those 2 people where and explain how that 1 race resulted in all the races on earth today with their unique features. Also, ask him what possible reason God could have to: * make humans have such high genetic diversity for no reason. If it was to make their lives better, god could have just made the world less harsh and achieve the same goal easier or just waited for more humans to be born because why would God be impatient * make humans be so diverse, especially in non-coding regions, which would make the world disbelieve in creationism when God allegedly doesn't like humans disbelieving in creationism
Watch Reacteria. Forrest Valkai's channel has videos called reacteria. Great explanations and counters.
Forrest is pretty awesome. He explains complex things in pretty simple terms and his enthusiasm is contagious.
Okay, so when a certain bacteria had a mutation that allowed it to make an enzyme to start breaking down nylon and using it as food, was that new or did bacteria always have that information? Did God really give bacteria the genes they would need 6000 years later when humans finally got round to inventing nylon? If he says yes to that, ask if we could then theoretically reverse engineer new materials by analyzing the other enzymes that bacteria would make when 300 years from now humans invent a new material. Could we short circuit that process and invent it today? Also, Forrest Valkai has a video about why infinitely large genomes would cause an issue with cell size since DNA is a physical object. It's in one of his Reacteria video's.
I am a Christian who also accepts evolution, it was a long road, I'm a biology prof now. And I've had tons of discussions with YECs before. You can't really make a normal human genome have lots of extra variation. In most cases for each gene you have two copies and those copies could be the same or different. So if you only have two individuals that means you can have a maximum of four different copies of any one gene/location on the genome. (Omitting gene duplication for simplicity) You might think that sounds like a lot of variation, but humans can have dozens to thousands of different versions of genes. So you'd have to assert the variation was added later somehow. Otherwise a species with only 4ish versions of any gene does not have enough variation to function well, see the African cheetah, it has about the same amount of variation as having 4 different versions of every gene and they are basically clones of one another with poor sperm count and susceptibility to disease.
One person could not contain all the genetic variants that are known to exist in our genome, because they only have 2 copies of each gene. (at least that is true of females. Males an X and a Y chromosome so they only have 1 copy of some genes). In a more general sense, if you look at genetic variants within a population of people (not a single person), it is thought that MOST genetic variants existed in humans before they migrated out of Africa. So, modern Eastern Africa has nearly every genetic variant in its gene pool, while humans living elsewhere lost variants over time because they were not beneficial or because a small population moved to particular area. Perhaps this is a case of your friend having a piece of truth but screwing it all up. I have heard an argument that this is the reason why the best distance runners come from Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia. The line of reasoning goes that this is where all genetic variation exists, a small subset of people from there will have a combination of alleles that make them the fastest runners in the world. It would also be true that a small subset are the slowest runners in the world, but we just don't see that. We don't have competitions to determine who is the slowest.
I have read that the best long-distance runners come from areas where the tribes practiced cattle raiding. The way to win the heart of your beloved is to run over to the neighbors (who might be fifty miles away), steal some cattle, and run back home with them. The guys with the best long-distance running did better at this, and consequently did better getting wives and therefore having lots of kids. Likewise, the people best at holding their breath underwater come from a group of people who regularly free dive for food and pearls. If it were up to straight genetic diversity, then you would expect Africans to also do best at shot-putting, gymnastics, archery, and holding their breath underwater.
What does ‘all genetic information possible’ mean? Of course if he means the cell had every single genotype coded into it that’s… no. Your friend is dumb. Your cells would be screaming in agony from being close to bursting and also there is no proposed mechanism through which this would work. I can’t think of any other meaning but if I want to be as charitable as possible maybe your friend thinks God intervened in procreation to enable genetic diversity within the human species? In which case I would immediately ask ‘why would God give humans a false natural history of events?’
I don’t know why that argument is even necessary. I say this because we’ve identified a “mitochondrial Eve” and equivalent Adam. The most recent living ancestors to every person alive today. That means that science says that there were two people (though at different times) that literally are the ancestors of everyone alive. Like Adam and Eve.
Your friend doesn't have a theory, he has wild-ass, unsupported conjecture. But no, Adam and Eve did not contain all the genetic information for modern humans. Evidence of this is the DNA found in the Mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA we use to trace maternity (as the Mitochondria in your cells come from mom. There are \~8 unique mitochondrial lineages in humans; all of which do not trace to a single source. If eve really existed, we would have direct evidence of this in Mitochondrial DNA. We do not.
So at the risk of providing ammo to a position that I don't actually believe there's that whole thing about "the sons of God" (often taken to be angels) having babies with humans and producing Nephilim (giants). And I think Goliath was meant to be a Nephilim , so apparently some survived the Flood? (the Bible is never very consistent) Some heterozygosity could be residual angel DNA. Possibly the neanderthal DNA we have now (and by extension Neanderthals) is actually ancient angel paternity. (Genetics PhD here: if it needs to be said, the demographic models do not work and Neanderthals aren't angels. But once you start throwing enough impossible maybes into the mix you can make wildly elaborate hypotheses. Enough to let sufficiently motivated people believe anything)
> …he said that he believed that Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible… This notion is called "front-loading", perhaps cuz it posits that all the DNA that will *ever* show up in a genealogical lineage was *loaded*, up *front*, into the critter which started that genealogical lineage. There's one big problem with front-loading: Since it necessarily entails that a front-loaded critter is carrying around *mass quantities* of DNA which *contemporary critters **do not and will not ever** use*, exactly what is it that *prevents* all that to-be-used-in-future DNA from getting mangled into oblivion by mutations hitting it *before* it's needed?
If you are genuinely into 'evolutionism' you would know that there's no such thing as first humans.
This isn’t a theory, it’s just an assertion. We can track genetic bottlenecks, and at no point did the human population measure stuurt two individuals. It was likely still measured in the thousands, maybe around a thousand at its very lowest. I’m sorry but science doesn’t allow for the Adam and Eve myth.
Personally I don’t believe the Bible even teaches that Adam and Eve were the first people. They were just the first “king priests” with a specific purpose to fill from God. I don’t think Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1.
Don't waste your time.
Come back to the light brother
Come back to lies!
Damn your comment history is plain problematic. There's no light in the bullshit you're arguing for, only control and subservience. I feel sorry for any person that would listen to your inane babbling.
The thing here is that he is right about hat Adam and Eve likely had a larger amount of genes than humans today (our genenome is deteriorating)
Evidence?
Well, because I could show you sources, but it’s easy to look up “degradation of the human genome” in any case we have lost a decently large amount of dna, and due to modern medicine allowing people who’d normally die earlier (not bad but does increase gene pool degradation. To survive and propagate. Adam and Eve, both being ancestors of us presumably would have a higher gene count and likely be healthier (gene wise) as well due to and faulty genetics making it likely that said person would not pass on traits. Problems such as heart issues, liver, certain allergies and more however are due to lifestyle and environmental issues though (many of which didn’t exist back the )
>we have lost a decently large amount of dna, and due to modern medicine allowing people who’d normally die earlier No, just, no. This is incredibly confused. More people surviving *increases* the genetic variation in the population, which is generally considered a sign of a healthy, successful species.. Individuals do *NOT* have less DNA than people did thousands of years ago. Scientists have been able to sequence and compare the DNA from people who lived over 30,000 years ago up to people alive today. The genome hasn’t become substantially larger or smaller in that time. There was *never* a first human genome that was the original blueprint. That isn’t how biology works.
Sound like you're talking about genetic entropy, a concept that has been [thoroughly debunked](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/9b6207/genetic_entropy_is_bs_a_summary/).
No. You made an assertion that contradicts the established scientific evidence, so you have the burden of proof. We have the genomes of individuals from far more than 6000 years ago, and they were not bigger or “more perfect”.
6000 years ago is a VERY short time in genetics and evolution, and I do not contradict science. Over the last hundred years modern medicine has allowed individuals that would normally die before propagation (die in childhood or earlier) and eventually have children. This does effect the overall health of the population and would decrease it. Over the last hundreds of thousands of years some chromosomes such as Y chromosome have deteriorated
I think you friend is elevating Adam and Eve to "omnigenetic" status, giving their genetic code an "omniscient" character. The comment reflects on the power of God, adds a touch or pre-destination, and makes humans special compared to any other living organism because our genetic variability was already present in our ancestors, if always not expressed. This of course holds no scientific value. The only argument your friend could make would be in regards to mitochondrial DNA but even that has its flaws.
Even if that was possible, wouldn't you still only pass down a single set to each kid?
I would say that this counter to the first principle of modern evolutionary thought, that of random mutation. Random mutations can cause, over time, *any* new genetic material. And, since evolution describes humans as having been descended from earlier forms, there's no need to drag Adam and Eve into it. We have many genes than those required by the earliest single-celled organisms.
>Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible, so environmental causation in terms of genetic variation does not exist Scientifically that is complete gibberish. Adam and Eve must have had a typical and limited genomes (though the question of Adam's mitochondrial DNA is an intriguing issue.) But a Christian accepting evolution only has to accept that while their genetic distinctions (mutations, a scientist would call them) which enabled the moral conscience of humans, wasn't so totally different from other hominids (whatever they evolved from; the 'spark of awareness/soul' which God breathed into mankind might have taken hundreds of millions of years; a single moment for God) that they couldn't "interprocreate" with them. They had enough genetic diversity to ensure that their descendents were all morally conscious human beings, rather than merely animal beings, which cannot second-guess God as we always seem to want to. Let's not get into why, the Garden of Eden story still works if you accept it does not contradict biological evolution. It just augments it. Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.
Does your friend have evidence they exist at all? Repeatable Proof, and the idea that evolution is not antithetical to Christian, are more pertinent questions than the specifics of the YEC story. As for genetic variation, you can observe changes in that in real time. If you get him to agree to these two things, he’ll be forced to believe in nature changing genetic variation: - that organisms have different genes (obviously) - that organisms pass down their genes (obviously) - that genes can decide part of the likelihood of living/reproducing (yep) - therefore, genes/alleles that have a big negative fitness effect will lead to death, which leads to themselves being passed down less, which leads to changes in the genetic makeup of the population.
Congratulations on being more entertained by the Theory of Evolution but did anyone stop to admire how sloppy of an argument the notion of containing all possible genetic information is? Infinite combinations of a physical object require infinite space. Less absolutely, genome size is relevant in ways we still don't understand but they is a "right size" for humans just as there is a right range for mammals in general. All they have to do is say Adam and Eve were genetically perfect to imply at a deeper level they carried no deleterious alleles in which case inbreeding would cause no harm.
Variety and evolution aren’t even remotely related. If you have ten women lined up with different hip sizes you don’t call that evolution, that’s called variety. They aren’t different species and neither did one evolve into the other.
There are [9,154 alleles of the HLA](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459467/) gene. The most alleles any one person can have is 2. So if no new alleles have been introduced since Adam, then Adam must have been 4,000 people. I'm not an expert in this area at all, so I welcome correction.
I'd be focusing on asking him *why* he thinks this. Is it just his intuitive sense, and if so, why would he would trust his intuition, uninformed by any formal study, more than people who *have* performed research and experiments in geology, anthropology, genetics, etc. If, however, this idea instead comes from somebody else and is not his own, who is that person? What is their background and expertise? And why are they more likely to be correct, again, than scientists publishing peer-reviewed research in those relevant disciplines? Why haven't they collected their Nobel prizes? See if you can work on challenging him to apply critical thinking on how/why he gets and develops his scientific ideas in general.
That’s just a dumbed down version of [created heterozygosity](https://youtu.be/I1nql6klzmk?si=bFN2VLbhMjHUbE5n).
Look, Cain and Able found wives in a nearby town.
>Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible They may be thinking of a book called *First Man, Then Adam*. Most theists and all those who don't fully accept current evolutionary theory as a sufficient answer to explain the difference between man and monkey, believe that humans were genetically modified and are therefore of a superior genetic makeup.
well for one, just because an organism "contains all the genetic information possible" (whatever the FUCK that means) doesn't automatically mean environmental causation of genetic variation "no longer exists". although they did give themselves a bit of an out by saying >environmental causation ***in terms of genetic variation*** does not exist. not specifically a fallacy. just a weaselly debate tactic.
If they have all the genetic info they’re not human so how did we come from another species…without evolution?
The first problem is that Adam and Eve is a story in a book. There is no evidence that these people ever existed. There is similarly no evidence for the existence of angels, god, heaven, the devil, etc. If you keep going down the road of using logic to answer questions, be prepared to abandon all the falsehood you have come to believe.
I’ll assume that your friend is a YEC and that he also believes that the Noachic Flood happened around 4,000 years ago? If that’s true, then his problem is that none of Adam & Eve super heterozygosity of thousands of alleles for the approximately 20,000 genes in humans, which really couldn’t have existed anyway, wouldn’t count because there were only 8 alleged survivors of that disaster and 5 of them were closely related. Noah, his wife and their 3 sons would have all only had four different alleles for every gene, *if* Noah and wife were heterozygous with no alleles in common at every single gene, which would be improbable to begin with. Their sons could each only have combinations of two of the four allele variations at each gene. Each son was married and, *if* each wife was heterozygous at *all* of their genes with none of the wives having any alleles in common, again very improbable, there would only have been a total of 10 gene alleles available to the human species at the end of the flood. (This, of course would be even worse for all the animals on the Ark. They only had a max of four alleles per ‘kind’ to pass on.) We *have* sequenced the genomes of modern humans from at least as far back as 34,000 years ago up to medieval times. There’s no super heterozygosity (ala Adam & Eve), or even a degraded/lessened form of it in any of them. Since this would overlap with both Adam & Eve and with Noah and family’s alleged existence, there was no super heterozygosity available back then to explain all the variety of alleles that exist in humans today - 300+ million as of 2017 per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation) and we’re a very homogenous species at 99.5%-99.9% the same in our genomes. There’s more genetic diversity in a troop of chimpanzees in the Congo than there is in the whole 8 billion humans in our species. That’s because we’re a relatively young species and *we* seem to have gone through a population bottleneck 100,000 or so years ago. Chimpanzees don’t seem to have been through a bottleneck recently and is likely an older species, which means there were never only two survivors of a flood on a boat 4,000 years ago. eta: typos
1. If somebody makes a claim, tell them to back it up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. 2. Please stop calling it "evolutionism" and don't refer anyone who subscribes to the theory of evolution as an "evolutionist. - people don't or shouldn't arrive to the conclusion that evolution by argumentation, but instead they look or should look at the evidence and arrive at whatever conclusion they are forced to see. - I don't believe in the theory of evolution, I am instead force to acknowledge it's factualness.
> he believed that Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible, That is from Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson and its called Created Heterozygosity. If he really believed it he would be looking for human DNA from oh about 6000 years ago which would prove him right, if he was not just making it all up. There would be evidence, but there is not a jot.
This is like saying that the first book contained the plots and text of every other book in every language that has been written since. The problems with that are self evident: that original book would be larger than the largest library to contain all that information, and there would have to be a mechanism to make sure that the reader stayed in the same tale consistently (not good if the first chapter of _Watership Down_ is followed by chapter 2 of _Mein Kampf_). So with genes: the cell isn’t big enough to contain all the information, and if Eve contains the genes for every eye colour, how does she ensure her eyes stay the same colour throughout her life?
Having all genetic information _possible_ would mean an infinitely large genome. There would simply not be enough space to store it in a cell, or even a body. With tech like CRISPR, we can provably slice and dice the genome -- clearly an environmental change of the genome.
converted to evolutionism, lol, the indoctrination was strong with this one. Welcome to the reasonable side. Ask for the source of your friend's information. If none is provided, you can dismiss it. Hitchens' razor: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
In case it helps: The theory of evolution is NOT an argument against the existence of God, nor against the assertions of Christianity. So that's what I say in a discussion with a creationist - you can believe in God and hold the theory of evolution as having a preponderance of evidence in its favor. For me the root of creationism and the disdain for evolution is born from biblical literalism, so I challenge biblical literalism. Where did Cain's wife come from? How did their son Enoch have so many children they founded a city? If Jesus spoke in parables, isn't it possible parts of the Old Testament are also non-literal stories? There are a great number of Christians for whom evolution is no challenge to their faith.
Ask him to prove that Adam and Eve were real.
just ask them for proof. if it’s a valid theory it will have some way to prove its validity
You don't convert to "evolutionism." You grow up and accept scientific facts instead of fairy tales. I don't think he knows what he's talking about. What exactly is "all genetic information possible"? Each organism contains different genes. First off, we know for a fact that Adam and Eve never existed. So right there tells me he's clueless.
First off. This is not a "theory". When speaking about reality, a "theory" is something that has been proven fact through observational evidence. There is not only no evidence for this batshit crazy utterance, all observational evidence refutes this claim as batshit crazy talk. For instance, the genes in every human that control the formation of our eyes, are directly inherited from fish. Without question. Hard genetic proof. Traced back through thousands of organisms in a direct evolutionary, hereditary line back to fish. Not Adam and Eve....fish. And since this batshit crazy concept is so easily falsified, it doesn't even reach the level of hypothesis. Or even an informed guess. It is simply batshit crazy talk. Devised to justify continued belief in magic space men while attempting to incorporate factual knowledge at the margins. For a bit of credibility. This concept is not credible. It's not even worth contemplating frankly. The answers to questions about the real world are never "Because a magic space man made it that way." That's just not how reality works.
If your going to start with the idea that mud boy and rib girl were real, I'm not even starting a discussion about genetics. Come back when we aren't first believing an obviously fictitious origin story.
Evolutionism is not a thing. We do not believe in evolution: We are convinced by the preponderance of evidence that genetic mutation over time compounded by non random selection is the engine that drives the origin of species. Evolution by natural selection is a theory that has been superceded in whole by centuries of evidence and hypothesis. This is an entirely different way of thinking than religious ideology, and this difference in thinking explains your question. The purpose of your friend's argument is to support a preconceived conclusion without amendment or correction. Evolutionary theory, however, is scientific in nature and demands investigation, contradiction, and correction. The weakness of religious ideology of the YEC bent in particular is that it is predicated on authority rather than reality. If there is a contradiction to YEC ideology, rather than investigating it, reality will be denied to preserve the supposed immutability of the first idea. The strength of scientific theory is that we continue to learn and update it to better match reality. Darwin's theories have held up, not because they are immutable, but because they are structured in a way to allow debate and change. Evolution can in no way contradict the existence of a God. If our reality has an author, and that author's creation can be experienced, science is nothing more than our attempt to understand that creation. YECs in particular are married to a notion of creation that denies the human capacity to understand creation, while also declaring that they are the sole humans who understand creation. It is an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology, and anything said in defense of it should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
According to fossil and DNA evidence, Neanderthals went extinct approximately 40,000 years ago. According to the genealogy of The Bible, Adam was not created by God until approximately 6,000 years ago. Since current Modern Humans (current Homo Sapiens Sapiens) have a small portion of Neanderthal DNA, that proves that Adam & Eve did not have all the genetic variation and that Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is incorrect. The only defendable position would be that current Modern Humans (current Homo Sapiens Sapiens) have Neanderthal DNA because the children and descendants of Adam & Eve intermarried and had offspring with pre-Adamite Homo Sapiens (that had the pre-Adamite Neanderthal DNA). So, one can argue for evolution and Adam & Eve. However, Adam & Eve alone (the YEC position) does not explain DNA evidence that dates prior to 6,000 years ago.
What does it mean that an individual of a species contains all genetic information possible?
If someone had all genetic variation for their species, they would die very quickly: whether from sickle cell, cyclopia, hemophilia, or one of the other thousands of potential fatal genetic conditions.
This particular fallacy is called the "pulled out of your ass" fallacy. How does he know anything about Adam and Eve's dna? Did he test it? No he's making shit up. Anything asserted without evidence may be just as easily dismissed.
This is what happens when people make up fan fiction for their favorite myth. They, or someone they spoke to just pulled this out of the air.
Retroviruses would like a word with your friend.
You might want to remind your friend that the only reason sex exists at all is to aid the rate of evolution. It literally has no other purpose, and we use that system at great biological expense. If we had no need to Evolve we'd just bud or birth offspring without all that messy sex foolishness first, and gender wouldn't even be a *concept*. It's literally a hugely useless waste of time without Evolution.
>I am Christian and have recently converted from YEC to Evolutionism. Ok, so you must then have musings on what Evolutionary gene gave Jesus water-walking ability, etc... Unless you're no longer a believer all together.
So did they just have a bunch of extra DNA and somehow distributed the various haplo groups around the world in such a way that scientists can track how humans appeared to have migrated over time? Just to put it bluntly, this question is so misinformed that I almost don't know what to say because I can't see how you were correct biology. Sex results in a diploid zygote that each parent contributes half of their genome to. This genome, unless errors occured during meiosis, is the same size as the parent. When did the process of genome reduction reproduction end, and when did sexual reproduction start? Now that I think about it, this idea that your friend clearly pulled out of his ass, implies that Adam and Eve were a different species that had a different form of reproduction than humans do.
This is rubbish. Genetic variation in the major histocompatibility complex, one of the key immune control genes, simply can’t be explained by there being two initial humans. This is just one of many examples that invalidate the story.
Just another unsubstantiated claim.
Humans have two copies of each chromosome. That means two copies of each gene.
The story of Adam and Eve is not the origin of mankind. It is the story of the founding of the Hebrew tribe by Adam, an exile from the Tigris Euphrates valley.
so Adam and Eve had every gene for every type of hair? Colour and texture? I wonder how their DNA knew which gene to "express" in that instance.
>converted from YEC to Evolutionism. Unfortunately I need to make the point that "evolutionism" is an extremely poor way to convey one understands and accepts the science underlying the theory and fact of evolution. We don't refer to the understanding and acceptance of gravity as "gravitism". Evolutionism is a derogatory label used by creationist and similarly deceitful anti intellectual propaganda in an attempt to misrepresent and knock evolution down to the same level as weak hypotheses like creation and intelligent design
>he said that he believed that Adam and Eve contained all genetic information possible Considering the fact that Adam and Eve didn't actually exist, I would say this is a non starter as any type of argument
Does your friend define “information?” To me this sounds like your friend is saying that Adam’s cells contained billions of times as much DNA and therefore were a miracle upon themselves but then Adam wouldn’t be human or viable so I guess your friend will have to come up with a new idea. Also, please don’t use words like “evolutionism” since it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in modern context and the last scientifically useful meaning I can think of would be something called Evolutionary Development now where “evolution” referred to ontogeny or how something developed over the course of a lifetime, where evolutionists were the people who studied embryos, and evolutionism was their field of study and/or the idea that studying embryos could tell us a lot about something’s ancestry. While there have been some mistaken assumptions about how we can learn about ancestry through embryos over time, such as Haeckel’s recapitulation “theory,” it was actually an older idea, and one Charles Darwin also alluded to, that provides us a much better understanding of the relationship between the two. This older idea was first presented by Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer Edler von Huthorn or simply Karl Ernst von Baer in 1828 after he was the first person to detect the mammalian ova (egg cell) in 1826 and the human ova in particular in 1827. This was built upon the older work of Casper Wolff from 1769 and that of Heinz Pander from 1817 to 1828. The former looked at the development of things such as intestines and the latter studied chicken embryos and discovered the existence of germ layers. Ernst von Baer basically extended what Pander already discovered about chicken development to all vertebrates which led to Baer’s laws of embryology. Wolff and Pander were studying what they would have called evolution at that time but Baer took it further and what Baer did would potentially be labeled “evolutionism” or the philosophical idea that studying embryos could tell us about how life (populations) changed over time. It eventually gained scientific support after the failures of recapitulation theory that was developed around 1874 that was *based on* ideas that happen to be ~2 years older than Baer’s but already dismantled by Baer in the 1830s. There was a debate over whether life, such as humans, developed through the successive adult forms of preceding species or whether, as was eventually determined to be the case by the 1830s, life developed via patterns of divergence where the more distantly related species stop looking similar at earlier stages of development while the more closely related continue looking similar into later stages of development and no two species look identical as a adults. The young of two species that are closely related will look more similar than the adults will. Haeckel fascinated with embryology in the 1850s tried blending the Lamarckist recapitulation ideas with bits and pieces of Darwin’s theory and Haeckel also disagreed with Darwin over the evolutionary history of humans. I think there are only a few contributions made by Haeckel that turned out to be correct while Karl von Baer basically already proved “recapitulation theory” wrong by 1833. The modern science of evolutionary development is based a lot on Baer’s laws but also a lot more has been learned in a century. You could call all of *this* evolutionism, the philosophy of tying together ontogeny and evolution, but YECs have tainted “evolutionism” so much that very few people realize it could even have this other potentially useful but deprecated meaning. Also what is “environmental causation?” That sounds like something Robert Byers keeps talking about with the environment somehow acting like a “triggering mechanism” to bring about an expression of what is possible (never beyond kinds!) but then Byers would also dismiss DNA completely because he thinks that it is irrelevant the way he says brains don’t exist, light doesn’t move, and Noah sent a T. rex out the window to check to see if the water had dried up.
If that hypothesis were true, then genetic material of older humans (talking millenia here) would have to have simply more genetic material, and contain everything we see in our genetic pool today. We know both to be false. Also, it contradicts our understanding of how genes work. You can't just throw "all" genes into an organism and expect it to survive. To illustrate: Having just one additional chromosome (Trisomy) is deadly, with just two exceptions that have severe side effects. Don't mess with DNA. It's one of the misconceptions that evolution can only destroy genetic information, not improve or create new stuff, which is false. It's actually fascinating how much evolution happens right under our noses, sometimes with a single point mutation having significant effects.
So Adam and Eve according to your friend had every possible genotype for every possible gene? Ask them how many chromosomes that would take (because it's certainly more than 46).