Geneticist Richard Buggs, Reader in Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London, has just written an intriguing article in Nature: Ecology and Evolution (28 October 2017), titled, Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis? Comments on a recent book chapter. It appears that Buggs is unpersuaded that science has ruled out Adam and Eve. He thinks it’s still theoretically possible that the human race once passed through a short, sharp population bottleneck of just two individuals, followed by exponential population growth. Buggs disagrees with the assessment of Christian biologist Dennis Venema, professor of biology at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, who forthrightly declared in chapter 3 of his 2017 book Adam and the Genome that it is scientifically impossible that the human lineage ever passed through a bottleneck of two, and we can be as certain about this fact as we are about the truth of heliocentrism.
Here’s Buggs’ take-down of the three methods employed by Venema to discredit the possibility of a single primal couple. As a layperson, I have to say it looks as if Buggs has done his homework:
Linkage disequilibrium within populations
…The methods assume that the populations at any given time point are at equilibrium and not expanding exponentially (the authors deliberately exclude the last 10,000 years from this analysis as they know that exponential population growth has occurred in this timeframe). It is hard to see how they could pick up on a short, sharp bottleneck even if one had happened. It would be nice to see this modelled, just to check.
PSMC method
…More recently, some simulations by a graduate student have shown that the PSMC method does not detect short, sharp bottlenecks, such as those caused by a pandemic or natural disaster. Thus I cannot see that PSMC analyses (many more of which have been done on human genomes since the original paper by Li and Durbin) can be cited as rigorously disproving a short, sharp bottleneck.
Incomplete lineage sorting
Venema makes an argument based on incomplete lineage sorting among humans, apes and gorillas, which gives a large estimated effective population size. This argument is not relevant if we are only interested in the human lineage (the occurrence of ILS does not require maintenance of large populations sizes in every lineage after speciation and so does not exclude a bottleneck in the exclusively human lineage).
Buggs adds:
We need to bear in mind that explosive population growth in humans has allowed many new mutations to rapidly accumulate in human populations (A. Keinan and A. G. Clark (2012) Science 336: 740-743). Hyper-variable loci like MHC genes or microsatellites have so many alleles that they seem to defy the idea of a single couple bottleneck until we consider that they have very rapid rates of evolution, and could have evolved very many alleles since a bottleneck.
In his conclusion, Buggs modestly refrains from claiming to have rebutted Venema’s arguments:
The question asked by my religious friends is different to the questions being asked in the studies discussed above. My religions (sic) friends are not asking me if it is probable that humans have ever passed through a bottleneck of two; they are asking me if it is possible. None of the studies above set out to explicitly test the hypothesis that humans could have passed through a single-couple bottleneck. This is what we need to nail this issue down…
If I am missing something, then I would very much like to know. Whilst this issue may seem trivial to many readers, for large numbers of religious believers in the world, this is a critical issue. Do they really face a binary choice between accepting mainstream science and believing that humans have, at some point in their history, all descended from a single couple? I am open to the possibility that they do face this dilemma, but I need more evidence before I am persuaded.
I would be interested to know what biologists think of Richard Buggs’ article. Is he right? Does science still leave open the possibility of Adam and Eve? Over to you.
Hi everyone,
I’ve just received a reply from Dr. Joshua Swamidass, in response to my invitation to him to comment on this thread. He writes that he is unfortunately unable to do so, as he has his hands full right now. I would like to thank Dr. Swamidass for his reply.
Awh shucks, bless your heart too John Harshman! Hugs. 🙂
Jeanson mentions Hardy Weinberg, heck I mention it in discussing Joe Felsenstein’s book here:
but to your question:
Don’t know, but if we are talking about a literalist Biblical Adam who lived 930 years, if even he had a son every 9 years on average, that would be around 100 kids. Before the flood, the patriarchs lived to long ages.
So in two generations you’d have 10,000 descendants, in 3 generations 1 million. As the Lord said, “be fruitful and multiply”.
But you obviously don’t believe that, but that is a problem then for Christian Darwinists for subtle reasons.
So the Bible teaches that Jacob said his ancestors lived longer than he did. That is an obvious allusion to the long life of Adam and others even after the flood.
But if you want to do the simulation with non-biblical non-literalist parameters, that would be interesting as well. I think however the domesticated horse breeds and their heterozygosity are interesting case studies. There are even more recent records that several thousand years ago regarding definable clades in the horse breeding industry to observe the change in heterozygosity experimentally.
The point is, back to the OP regarding Richard Buggs:
Depending on the parameters of the expanding population, that would be correct, so on those grounds there is still the possibility of Adam and Eve. Buggs has a point, he has indeed done his homework.
About the fairness of original sin.
The root of Adam’s sin was in thinking that God was being somehow unfair in his dealings with Adam and Eve.
Adam and Eve decided it was wrong for God to forbid them to eat something (the fruit) that they thought was good.
When we complain that God is being unfair in holding all humanity responsible for Adam’s sin we are doing just what Adam did thus demonstrating we are just like Adam in this regard……….. and thereby proving God was correct and fair in his response to Adam’s sin after all .
funny how that works
peace
I see that the World’s Worst Apologist™ — fifthmonarchyman — is back.
Let’s apply Fifth Logic™ to the civil rights struggle:
Excellent work, fifth. Keep it up and you just might get elected — in Alabama.
not for very long, I’m just on another short break today, and was interested in the argument that science has made A&E impossible
But you did not come close to doing that.
No one said that the root of Adams sin was “getting uppity and not accepting their proper place in society”
The root of Adam’s sin was claiming that for some reason he knew better than God what was right and what was wrong.
your comment bears almost no relationship to what i said,
typical,
must be the noetic effects of the fall 😉
peace
You have now changed the meaning of “generation” from 15-30 years to 900 years. Sorry, but if Adam had 100 children in 900 years, there’s only a little over one generation before the Flood, not 3 generations.
Clarity again, Sal. If you want to make a case for something, make that case clearly and completely rather than just vaguely alluding to its existence.
As for the claims about Adam and Eve, let’s see the simulation and the parameters that make them plausible.
stcordova,
I don’t. That’s a silly misinterpretation.
Loss is obviously stochastic. Work out how many offspring you need to ensure you have a reasonable chance – let’s say 99% – of losing no alleles from any locus. Then work out how big the population is going to be after 6000 years at that rate of expansion. Either your population won’t be the size it is now – it’ll be massively bigger – or it won’t have the variation it has now. You can’t just vary 1 thing and affect nothing else.
I mean, I dunno why God can’t just go ‘shazam’ or whatever the Hebrew for it is, and get any amount of variation by any desired means. Appeal to naturalistic explanations always seems a bit odd, for people who have a miracle-weaving deity on tap.
He should just put you on ignore. That wouldn’t be flouncing. lol.
keiths has fallen and can’t get up.
Adam’s thinking was the root of his sin.
If the tree was the knowledge of good and bad, how could they even know what was wrong before they ate?
Why did God allow the tempting of a liar to two people who did not know what a lie was?
Wasn’t that a bit of a stacking the deck?
Just asking a question is a sin?
If we don’t believe God was unfair,like you, does that make God’s response incorrect and unfair ?
funny how that works
LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL …
If I may, that would be: “שזם”
… that said, I have it on highest authority that G-d in fact speaks German as a first language!
Imagine my surprise at this turn of events!?
🙂
That was obviously a simplification, the claim is:
So there was overlap and more than 3 generations. I’m sure a smart guy like you could figure out a reproductive schedule in consideration of these claims.
But the point remains, there would be lots of residual heterozygosity in a rapidly expanding population, much more than the pathetic scenario of 2 individuals for many generations bottlenecked that Allan Miller was trying to impose on me. Eesh.
Where did you get the 99% figure from? You don’t need preserve 99% of the alleles to have 50% (or whatever number) of them remaining after several generations. Sheesh! Unless you know the starting figure of alleles, and no one does, you can’t just pull the figure of 99% out of rats rear end to make your case against a possible founding couple.
fifth:
Right over fifth’s head.
Funny how that works.
Sal:
Speaking of asses…
Sal, read what Allan actually wrote. He didn’t say anything about “preserving 99% of the alleles”. He said:
You are confused about what he said, and I would like to point out that you are still confused about what counts as a generation. Based on Genesis, the average person reproduced for the first time around age 100, Adam apparently at an interval of around 100 years. Now what counts here is the age of a parent at the birth of a child, averaged over all children. That’s an average generation time, and it would seem to be several hundred years at least. Another parameter is the the average total number of children per parent. The “evidence” of genesis would seem to claim that there were long intervals between events. Since Adam had 3 sons over 100 years, let’s assume that those were half his output and give him 3 daughters too. So 6 kids per 100 years, total of 50 or so kids in 900 years (25 counting his 50% contribution to them), with an average generation of 450 years or so. Counting liberally, 3 generations before the flood. Overlapping of generations helps this a bit, but not all that much. We still expect only in the neighborhood of 25^3 = 15,625 total population. He who lives by the begats dies by the begats. Now I haven’t run a heterozygosity simulation but I’m pretty sure that there would be considerable loss in that scenario.
newton, to fifth:
Actually, God was the liar:
Adam and Eve didn’t die that day. (At this point some Christians will argue, in desperation, that God was referring to spiritual death, not physical death, despite having no evidence for that claim.)
The serpent told the truth:
The serpent was right. God lied.
The fairness of God is not dependent on your belief rather your belief demonstrates the fairness of God.
funny how that works
No I never said it was,
But this particular sort of mistrustful questioning is however evidence you are just like Adam.
Where else does sin come from but evil thoughts?
LOL
Keiths tries to poison the well by conflating proper moral discernment with racism and then when called on his egregiousness pretends his point was too subtle for me.
typical
Peace
Are you actually suggesting that moral knowledge comes from eating a fruit? Do you think you need to actually experience deceit to know it’s not right?
Talk about wooden literalism, The YECs I know would never go that far.
peace
keiths:
Vincent:
So? What evidence do you have that every single personal characteristic of Adam and Eve was mandatory in God’s plan? None, I would suggest.
Consider the implications of what you’re saying. Imagine God is evaluating all of the potential couples he could create. Each possible pair is being compared to all the other pairs. At some point, God is comparing two possible pairs, Adam and Eve versus Bob and Brenda. Bob and Brenda are just like Adam and Eve except that they, of their own free will, will never choose to sin. (They are perfect in sense (iii), in other words.) The only other differences are those that necessarily follow from that basic difference.
According to you, God chooses the sinful couple — Adam and Eve — over the sinless couple, Bob and Brenda. Why? Is he so fond of sin that he wants to make sure it occurs in his world? Or is one of the ancillary differences so important that it outweighs the possibility of sin? And if so, how do you know that?
The answer is: you don’t.
This is all just an evidence-free excuse you’ve invented to get God off the hook.
Vincent,
Then you are arguing, with a straight face, that a world full of people cheating, beating, raping, and killing each other is no worse than one in which everyone loves and cares for each other.
And that a world with Jesus in it is no better than one without him. Individuals are incommensurable, after all.
For heaven’s sake (so to speak), Vincent. You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with some of these arguments you’ve been making.
keiths:
Vincent:
Think about it, Vincent. If sin were merely a possible result of their natures, then that means that the actual decision to sin was contingent on something outside of their natures. If that “something” was a created “something” (or a necessary consequence of a created “something”), then God is responsible. He created everything, after all.
If that “something” was not a created “something”, then it must have existed alongside God before the creation, or else it popped into existence on its own. Not only is that theologically problematic, but it also absolves Adam and Eve of guilt. They’re certainly not responsible for this unspecified “something” that is outside of their natures, after all.
So either God is responsible for the Fall, or some unspecified, uncreated “something” is. Either way, Adam and Eve are not responsible.
John Harshman,
Harshman is studying the bible genealogy…
First Trump, now Harshman…the world must be coming to its end…
I’m running to the corner store to buy a candle…
fifth:
The part that went over your head was that the logic of the two arguments was the same, not their propositional content. I wasn’t saying that God’s treatment of Adam and Eve was racist. Obviously.
I think you need to accept that your role in God’s plan is to be the World’s Worst Apologist™, losing debates to atheists and making your beliefs look silly in the process. Why has God chosen that humiliating role for you? Who knows? His ways are mysterious.
Really????
Here is my “logic”. I’ll type slowly so that maybe you will catch it this time,
premise one: Adam thought God was unfair
premise two : Keiths thinks God is unfair
conclusion: Keiths is like Adam in this particular regard
That is beyond simple and has absolutely nothing to do with what you wrote.
Instead of recognizing the obvious point I was making you used a silly and inflammatory analogy to try and show that you are correct in your opinion that God is unfair.
Thus proving yet again that you are indeed just like Adam and that God was not unfair to assume you would be.
Your cluelessness cracks me up.
I fully expect you to now obliviously get right back to your crusade to show that God is unfair. Maybe with another colorful analogy.
😉
LOL
peace
Vjtorley: “Original sin is not “inherited” in a genetic sense of the word. Rather, we should speak of a privilege forfeited by our first parents, to which their descendants can no longer lay claim. Of course, if God chooses to bestow that privilege on some individual at a subsequent stage in history, that is His choice.”
That “privilege” we can no longer claim is not knowing right from wrong:
Genesis 3:4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
After they eat, God confirms this:
Genesis 3:22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever -”
And he drives them out of Eden. So it looks like we were originally intended to be amoral animals who didn’t know right from wrong and who were doomed to die to boot.
Original Sin was learning right from wrong, yet we continue to teach it to our children with the church’s blessing. Perhaps if we start teaching our children to be more like Hitler, we can get back in God’s good graces.
Allan,
You’re forgetting the PMM:
fifth:
No, fifth. Here is your actual conclusion (bolded):
Your logic was atrocious, which I illustrated by applying it to the civil rights struggle:
You made a dumb argument, fifth. Don’t sweat it — God is sovereign, and your humiliation must be a part of his plan. Who knows why? We only see through a glass, darkly.
Vincent, to John:
The doctrine of original sin is entirely relevant here because it’s what motivates otherwise intelligent people, including some who were educated as philosophers or as scientists, to go looking for scientific evidence that an original Adam and Eve pair are a genuine possibility.
The ridiculousness of the original sin doctrine should disqualify it long before anyone even bothers to consider the possible historicity of Adam and Eve.
And of course Christianity is in trouble once the doctrine of original sin is questioned.
davemullenix, to vjtorley:
Dave,
Vincent has unwisely sworn off the topic of original sin in this thread (see above), so you may not get a response from him, but I’m pretty sure he would say that in the A&E story, the knowledge of good and evil is a consequence of the sin and not equivalent to it.
stcordova,
I pulled it out of the air, but you need some kind of threshold. Because this is probabilistic, there is a possibility that any number other than infinity will lead to some alleles not being copied to any offspring.
You are kind of agreeing with my point that, because of loss, you don’t just need all modern variation in the first couple (we are of course ignoring mutation here); you need ‘modern variation plus’. To get 50% (or whatever) remaining, you need an excess of variation in that first couple, because without infinite offspring (and hence an infinite rate of expansion), you lose variants. And that couple, somehow, needs to be more different than any two individuals in real populations tend to be. These 2 function as ‘allele arks’ – not just a sample.
Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with the comcept of effective population size, Ne. You seem to think a population of 2, of however short a duration, can behave like an ‘ideal’ population of 10,000 (qv). I’d like to see you try, in a simulation, witha little more rigour than pulling things out of your own rat’s ass.
Of course
So does the belief in the fairness of God demonstrate anything?
I assumed God named the tree that for a reason
I am not Adam before the Fall who had never been lied to before. Sorry
peace
Hi keiths,
I deny the assumptions which underlie your thought experiment. You’re assuming that for all possible pairs of humans, God knows what choices they would make, if tempted. I don’t think God knows what choices any possible pair of humans would make, because I consider the very question meaningless. Your thought experiment might constitute a “poser” for a Molinist, but I’m not a Molinist. I’m a Boethian: I believe God’s knowledge of our choices is determined by those choices. God is a spectator. And with possible beings, there’s nothing to watch, because they don’t even exist, let alone act, let alone choose freely. So God has no idea what Bob and Brenda would do.
keiths,
If by “better world” you mean one which contains a greater amount of value, the yes. Each individual is of infinite value, and two infinities of the same kind are no bigger than one. The Jews understood this point very well: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a.)
But if by “better world” you mean a more harmonious world, then obviously, a world filled with virtuous people is better than a world filled with vicious people.
So why might God choose to make a less harmonious world? The answer is that such a world might allow God to display more of His personal characteristics than a world that was guaranteed to be perfect from the get-go: characteristics like loving-kindness, forgiveness and self-giving. I won’t belabor the point; I’m sure you can see where I’m heading with this one.
Recognizing that God is indeed righteous and fair in his actions after all might demonstrate that you are one of his sheep…………. it at least demonstrates that you are not far from the kingdom.
keiths,
If you want to better understand the doctrine of original sin, then I’ll give you some advice which I forgot to give John Harshman (though he is welcome to take it): read C. S. Lewis’s cosmic trilogy. These three books are by far his best fiction writing. They’re much better than the Narnia chronicles.
I first encountered C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet when I was twelve, and I was hooked. Then I read Perelandra (also known as Voyage to Venus) the following year, and finally, That Hideous Strength. I don’t know if you’ve read these works of Lewis’s or not: sadly, few people talk about them nowadays. But to me, they helped make the doctrine of the Fall plausible. Reading the book, I could see how it might have happened. Of course, we’ll never know how it really happened, this side of eternity.
I’ll say one more thing. Following the pagan philosopher Epictetus, I would suggest that we need to cultivate gratitude. Every moment of joy we experience in life is a gift, and it is an utterly astounding fact that we are able to experience even a moment’s happiness, let alone a lifetime (as many people do). Harshman was shocked when I asserted that none of us is born with the right to live in a world free of death, injury and pain, but it’s true nonetheless. We aren’t born with such a right. If any atheist thinks we are, they should be prepared to say why.
If the thought of the Fall still troubles you, then think of it this way. In the universe we live in, a life of suffering and ultimately, death, is the default option. That’s the way things are in our world. Now along comes God and offers our first parents a way to rise out of the mess they’re in: a test of character, with the added bonus that if they pass the test, they and all their descendants will avoid suffering and mortality. Sadly, our first parents fail the test. No surprise there: there was a strong possibility that they would. When they fail, they are not subject to any additional penalties: they simply return to the condition they were in. Thus the Fall might be better described as a failure to rise.
We don’t have to worry here about how original sin could be “transmitted” to each successive generation. All we need to understand is that suffering and death are the default options, for this world.
I hope the explanation I’ve proposed makes some sense to you.
Well you got 6 kids per hundred years from me. Your analysis showed I may have understated the birth rate, thank you very much.
It was named that for a reason.
It was a symbol Like a wedding ring
it was a symbol of Adams trust of God when it came to knowing Good and evil.
God promised to give Adam a life of eternal fulfillment and joy if he only trusted him and as long as the uneaten fruit was there Adams trust was evident.
When Adam ate the fruit he proclaimed that he did not trust God when it came to moral choices.
It was a symbolic act of divorce
Again we don’t need to experience deceit to know that it’s wrong any more than we need to experience rape to know it’s wrong.
We know what is right and wrong because we are humans created in the image of God.
peace
Well, if Adam had 100 kids over 900 years, let’s look at the profile within 2 standard deviation. Each allele has a 50% chance of being gone per kid, but the law of large numbers helps recover that.
p = 0.50
1-p = 0.50
n = 100
sigma = sqrt( np (1-p) = 5
2 sigma = 10
So for 95% of the cases, worst case change in allele frequency from a parent is:
mu = mean
(mu – 2sigma) = (50- 10) = 40
So with respect to a single parent, the proportion of allele changes at 1 locus, worst case for a 2-sigma event:
So % allele G1_A ~= 40%
So % allele G1_B ~= 60%
But that has to be modeled as it matriculates over generations, so then the question is how bad will it be after that. But this shows that at least for the first generation, the allele pool isn’t exactly wiped out!
You have no evidence for your claim that God was speaking of physical death. In fact, if you look at the actual evidence, it supports the position that God was not speaking of physical death.
Think, keiths
keiths and his wooden literalism is spreading?
Now all one needs to do is determine which God that is
I guess I took the whole literal Adam and Eve too literally.
Have you considered that Eve being formed from Adam’s rib might be essentially maternal twins?
Don’t be like keiths.
People who think you can eat a piece of fruit off a tree and live forever need to have their head examined.
…says Mung, offering no such evidence.