Teaching Adam to Speak

Teaching Adam to Speak
by Glenn R. Morton


But humans are extremely special in one regard that I think relates to the events in Eden (which so many reject). Human communication comes from our neocortex. All other animal vocalization comes from the emotional centers of the animal’s brain. People who study the origin of language can’t completely explain how we jumped to that area in an evolutionary sequence. Their best effort, in my opinion is the idea that we once communicated via sign language. But that isn’t vocalization!

“Language is obviously as different from other animals’ communication systems as the elephant’s trunk is different from other animals’ nostrils. Nonhuman communication systems are based on one of three designs: a finite repertory of calls (one for warnings of predators, one for claims to territory, and so on), a continuous analog signal that registers the magnitude of some state (the livelier the dance of the bee, the richer the food source that it is telling its hivemates about), or a series of random variations on a theme (a birdsong repeated with a new twist each time: Charlie Parker with feathers). As we have seen, human language has a very different design. The discrete combinatorial system called ‘grammar’ makes human language infinite (there is no limit to the number of complex words or sentences in a language), digital (this infinity is achieved by rearranging discrete elements in particular orders and combinations, not by varying some signal along a continuum like the mercury in a thermometer), and compositional (each of the infinite combinations has a different meaning predictable from the meanings of its parts and the rules and principles arranging them).
"Even the seat of human language in the brain is special. The vocal calls of primates are controlled not by their cerebral cortex but by phylogenetically older neural structures in the brain stem and limbic system, structures that are heavily involved in emotion. Human vocalizations other than language, like sobbing, laughing, moaning, and shouting in pain, are also controlled subcortically. Subcortical structures even control the swearing that follows the arrival of a hammer on a thumb, that emerges as an involuntary tic in Tourette’s syndrome, and that can survive as Broca’s aphasics’ only speech. Genuine language, as we saw in the preceding chapter, is seated in the cerebral cortex, primarily the left perisylvian region.” ~ Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p. 334

I think God showing the animals was God jump starting language. We can’t have language without a time of programing. Language in one sense is a program handed down from generation to generation. Consider a man who had no programming:

The fascinating picture shown in Genesis has God teaching man this most wondrous of skills.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof Ge 2:19


Naming is absolutely essential to this ability. Speech requires names for objects, otherwise there can be no subject or object in a sentence. This scene is reminiscent of some cases of people learning languages late in life. This is a very rare phenomenon because normally language must be learned quite early or the opportunity is lost. Stephen Pinker related the following interesting account of a languageless man finally grasping the concept of names and naming. He says,

"In her recent book A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the sign for ‘cat.’ A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the signs for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities. He led Schaller to other languageless adults in forgotten corners of society. Despite their isolation from the verbal world, they displayed many abstract forms of thinking, like rebuilding broken locks, handling money, playing card games, and entertaining each other with long pantomimed narratives."1

As in the biblical account, Schaller taught this man the names of objects, just as God taught Adam the names of the animals. However, one must concede the point that even language is not a prerequisite for inclusion in humanity. Ildefonso was fully human even without language. But, while not all humans speak, all who speak are human."Glenn R. Morton, Adam, Apes and Anthropology, DMD publishers, 1997, p. 49

Language requires several brain structures, and a program to run on those structures, a set of symbols.

“As we find language in man today, it is not fully inborn, but the capacity for speech and conceptual thought is certainly innate; only the symbols themselves must be learned.” ~ Bernard Campbell, Human Evolution, (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1974), p. 336

And chimps are so way and away different from us in this regard that it is hard to see how we made the jump without something unique happening to us.

“Indeed, Jane Goodall believes that vocalizations are so closely tied to emotional states that ‘the production of a sound in the absence of the appropriate emotional state seems to be an almost impossible task for a chimpanzee.’ Even among chimpanzees, the sound production appears to be controlled in the brain by the ancient structures of the limbic system and the brain stem, which we’ll read about shortly and which are involved in emotional response. The ‘higher’ centers of the brain do not appear to be much involved. This is a far cry (sorry!) from language as we humans know it, which is initiated in those higher centers the cerebral cortex) and is dependent on production and interpretation of sounds in isolation from the emotional states of the speaker and hearer. It is also dependent upon rules of grammar, syntax and so forth that are totally absent from the sound combinations chimpanzees make. So, no. Not only do chimpanzees not have language; they don’t even have an incipient form of it.” ~ Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998), p. 60-61

God programmed Adams new brain with the symbols for the first language

What is the earliest evidence of brain structures associated with language--Broca's area?  

"Moreover, the configuration of the brain's lobes took on a distinctly human aspect in earliest Homo, with prominent frontal lobes and relatively small occipital lobes (at the back of the brain), as compared with a more apelike aspect that is found in australopithecines, where the occipital lobe is relatively bigger than in humans and the frontal lobes relatively smaller. This is not necessarily indicative of an incipient language capacity, but it is at least suggestive. The left hemisphere of the brain of early Homo was slightly larger than the right, as is the case in most modern people (right-handers), at least partly because the left brain is where important language functions are located. Most language-associated mental machinery is buried within different parts of the brain and is invisible to paleoanthropologists, who can see only the overall shape of fossil brains. However, a lump on the side of the brain and toward the front, known as Broca's area, is associated with some aspects of language function. It is not the clear signal of language abilities that anatomists once thought it was, but again it is suggestive. Broca's area  is visible in 1470, that is, Homo habilis, and in subsequent Homo erectus skulls that are complete enough that the hump can be looked for." Carl C. Swisher III, Garniss H. Curtis and Roger Lewin, Java Man, (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 177-178

The earliest habilis is  2.4-2.8 myr old.

The Rivers of Eden: Blind Chance or Divine Inspiration?

by Glenn R. Morton, March 14, 2020

The rivers of Eden describes the Eastern Mediterranean area as it was 5.3 myr ago. It points to Eden being located in the only place on earth that was flooded with a flood that matches the Biblical description of Noah's flood.  How did that happen? How is that possible? Below, I show how the Bible does match that time frame. It is up to you to decide how this occurred.

Eden is not popular with our theologians anymore. To me, this is a problem in need of solution because I believe Christian theology requires Eden and the events there to be real historical events. Most modern Christians don't think Eden's geography is real. And they do so for good reason, today's geography makes Eden impossible. Eden is reserved for a special castigation and unbelief by our scholars. John Monday writes:

"Some have gone further and claimed the geographical allusion is to a fantasy. For Cassuto, 'The Garden of Eden according to the Torah was not situated in our world.' Skinner claimed: 'it is obvious that a real locality answering the description of Eden exists and has existed nowhere on the face of the earth...(T)he whole representation (is) outside the sphere of real geographic knowledge. In (Genesis 2) 10-14, in short, we have...a semi-mythical geography.' For Ryle, 'The account...is irreconcilable with scientific geography.' Radday believed that Eden is nowhere because of its deliberately tongue-in-cheek fantastic geography. McKenzie asserted that 'the geography of Eden is altogether unreal; it is a Never-never land.' Amit held the garden story to be literary utopiansim, that the Garden was 'never-known,' with no real location. Burns' similar view is that the rivers were the entryway into the numinous world. An unusual mixture of views was maintained by Wallace, who held that the inclusion of the Tigris and Euphrates indicated an 'earthly geographic situation,' but saw the Eden narrative as constructed from a garden dwelling-of-God motif (with rivers nourishing the earth) combined with a creation motif, both drawing richly from those motifs as found in Ancient Near East mythological literature." John C. Munday, Jr., "Eden's Geography Erodes Flood Geology,"Westminster Theological Journal, 58(1996), pp. 123-154,p.128-130

 John Worrall, professor of the philosophy of science at the London School of Economics, said:
"There is an enormous difference between myths like the Garden of Eden -- so crazy even bishops don't believe it -- and those myths which, as yet, have no evidence to back them up. Camelot falls into this category." http://detnews.com/1998/accent/9808/20/08200043.htm Link no longer works but quote can be found on Newspapers.com

 So, is the geography of Eden real? I hope to show that it was real, and that geography has changed, and the description of Eden no longer fits today. But it is going to stretch the comfort of many.

 I remember as a teen hearing a preacher ask his audience of teens, how many wanted to know God's will? Nearly all the hands went up. Then he asked, How many of you are willing to do whatever it is he asks? Most hands went down and a few remained up. The preacher then said, "You are the ones who will find his will for your lives.?".

 I think this story also goes for apologetics. Are we willing to go where the data says to go? I think most are not, some go part way and a few might be willing to go all the way. When I was a new christian and was just getting into the creation/evolution area, and sadly becoming a YEC, I knew YEC had problems but felt the theology required a true history from Genesis. I told my best friend of the time,, my roommate and eventual best man, that I was going to solve the CE issue. That was a brash brag on the part of a 19 year old. The flood was what intrigued me most because floods leave evidence of themselves. And there is zero evidence of a big flood in Mesopotamia and the YEC global flood wouldn't work for so many reasons. My search led me eventually to the infilling of the Mediterranean Sea. Such an infilling perfectly fits the description of the flood in the Bible, but few are willing to call it Noah's flood. Doing so raises questions about farming that far back? And questions about can a primitive hominid really be capable of speech and communion with God? I will address these questions at the bottom of this post. I found a solution that no one likes.

The question I have come to is "How on earth did Genesis 2:8-13 come to describe the geography of the eastern Mediterranean sea bottom, which at the time was dry land during the Messinian Salinity Crisis?" And that location for Eden lies in the only flood in geologic history that is local, and matches precisely the description provided by Genesis 7 and 8.

 8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. 11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. 13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. 14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates." The Holy Bible: King James Version. (2009). (Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version., Ge 2:8–14). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.  (Note, all Bible quotations come from this source)

Six million years ago the strait at Gibraltar closed, cutting the Mediterranean off from its main source of water. In the Mediterranean basin, more water evaporates from it than rivers can supply. Because of this, the entire Mediterranean sea dried up, leaving a few big brinish lakes and the rest was desert or grasslands where the rivers flowed in. Things were very different back then. Let's take a look.

The first river is the river Pison and it is said to compass the land of Havilah. Genesis 25: says: And they dwelt from Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria.

This places Havilah in Arabia or the Sinai. In 2019 Matt and Ryan presented a paper on this question at an AAPG sponsored geological conference.

 Yossi Mart and William B.F. Ryan Abstract

"The offshore extension of Afiq Canyon is a deep valley, buried under thick Plio-Quaternary sediments beneath the continental slope off the southern coastal plain of Israel. ... Additional valleys of similar dimensions and characteristics to the marine extension of Afiq Canyon occur elsewhere along the continental slope of the entire Levant, suggesting that several rivers of the fluvial system of the Levant, which drained northwestern Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea during the Oligo-Miocene, still prevailed in the Messinian. The Afiq Canyon and its offshore apron as well as equivalents such as the Nahr Menashe fluvial system off Lebanon, imply that the geography of the Levant during late Miocene differed from the present. The Levant Rift could not have been a continuous tectonic depression as it is in the present, but rather a sufficiently disconnected series of grabens that allowed large rivers to still flow in between. The presence of the Afiq apron of substantial volume and with a thickness approaching 200 m along its apex confirms active fluvial systems feeding their bedloads into the Mediterranean as recent as 5 million years ago." 1

This is the Pison river system and when the Mediterranean was a dry mostly arid land, this river flowed over the present continental shelf and ended up on the former Mediterranean sea bed.

The second river is easy to identify because the only river that encompasses the land of Cush/Ethiopia between the White and Blue Nile tributaries, is the Nile river. During the Messinian Salinity Crisis, the Nile river cut the biggest Grand Canyon that ever existed. It cut over 4000 m into the African granite during this period.

"During the MSC the Nile created an enormous canyon, measured at a depth of more than 4000m below sea level in the offshore area of the delta."2

The sands it transported into the Mediterranean are shown on the picture below. The sharp linear cutoff of the yellow Nile sands is due to where the seismic survey stopped:

The southernmost red arrow in the picture above marks where the Pison entered the Mediterranean Sea. That is crooked lines it points to is the Afiq canyon mentioned above. Below is a picture of Afiq canyon from another paper, it is an enlargement and a bit fuzzy but can be read.



 We now have two of the Biblical rivers coming together on the floor of the dry Mediterranean basin.

The third river is the Tigris. It is called Hiddekel in Daniel 10:4

 "as I was by the side of the great river, which is Hiddekel"

Since the other river is always referred to as the Euphrates, Daniel had to be in the Tigris.

The precise location of this river's entry into the system is not completely clear. It might have joined the Euphrates onshore. We know that because Arabia was then draining its water into the Mediterranean, the Tigris couldn't flow south because of topography. It was updip that direction at that time., So, the Tigris is boxed in by the Euphrates draining to the Mediterranean and the Pison draining to the Mediterranean. Logic dictate that this river entered the Mediterranean basin. The green sands, the Nahr Menache are from the Tigris. This is just north of the Lebanese/Syrian border where  a big river entered into the dry Mediterranean sea at that time. Below is the surface slice from 3d seismic showing there is a big river channel entering the Med which I have marked on the picture. The channel is about 3 km wide which means it was a major river. The green sediment fan shown in the first picture has to be the Tigris, because it is closest to Turkey where that river is sourced. The Tigris river is sourced further east in Turkey.

The fourth river is the Euphrates, as it is named. It entered the Mediterranean through the province of Hatay, Turkey. The blue sands shown in the picture below are mostly from the Euphrates river, which even today gets about 62 miles from  the Mediterranean coast at just this location.  Today uplift along the coast turns the Euphrates away from its closest sea and heads it to the Persian Gulf.

This is because the crash of Africa into Eurasia has changed the tilt of the land since then. But during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean was dry, the Great Euphrates dumped its sand in the same place we find the Pison and Nile(Gihon) dumping their sands. The waters of these 3 rivers would have intermingled.

Putting this all together, this is a schematic of what I think the preflood rivers looked like and how they related to each other.  Let's start with what Scripture says:

“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” Gen 2:10

That description can be matched precisely so long as one treats the word translated as ‘heads’ as meaning “primary or chief or main”.Ro'sh can mean this. Under this word choice,it reads,

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four main [rivers].

Doing that, and placing Eden in he midst of the main rivers,and making the area west of Eden into something that resembles the Okovango Delta of the Kalahari desert, or the Sudd or South Sudan, then one gets the following picture.

The area west of Eden in this scenario would look something like the Sudd swamp of southern Sudan. From Google maps, you can see channels going every which way::

Eden's geography can be quite real and quite historical. The question is, are you willing to go where the data of geology and the data of the Bible lead?

Now, I have shown that at one time, 5-6 myr ago, the rivers of Eden met on the bottom of the dry Mediterranean basin. I think that is where Eden was. The geography is real, but it isn't applicable to our time. Geography changes.

So, here is the question, How is it that the Bible mentions these 4 rivers which are impossible to be together today, but which were together 5 myr ago in a basin that experienced the most massive flood every known. That flood would have matched Noah's flood as described.

1. Noah's flood lasted a year. Geological cores from the flood layer show that the filling was extremely rapid--within an inch of sedimentation. Calculations show that it would have taken about a year to refill the Mediterranean 8.4 months to 2 years are recent estimates.

2.That flood would have covered many high mountains within the basin, but whose tops were below sea level. Noah's flood says the same thing. "Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered" Gen 7:20

3. If you read the word 'eretz' as land rather than as planet earth, then Genesis 7:21 is absolutely true:

And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the land, and every man: 22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

4. Constant rain would occur because the flood waters filling the  basin would push moist air up which would cool, condense to clouds and cause long periods of constant rain.

5. Furthermore, in Gen 6:11, God says he will destroy the 'eretz' (land). And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. This can't happen with a global flood; we still have land. It doesn't happen with a Mesopotamian flood--Mesopotamia is still there. But with a big local flood, like the infilling of the Mediterranean, that land has actually been destroyed. It no longer exists.

To top this off, this time period was when Hominids first appear on earth. This is the only time we could have had a primal pair of Adam and Eve.  And this makes people nervous about having Adam be a small brained person. I have a series of posts here which discuss this and other issues.

If you are worried about a small brain being stupid, see my post discussing a normal modern human with a brain the size of an australopithecus.

If you don't think Adam could have lived that far back, consider the series When Did Adam Live. Since humanity's oldest genes are 5.3 myr of age, genealogically, this is the only time a primal pair of parents could have existed, see here. Religion goes way back, meaning religion is not a new thing. The curses given to Adam and Eve both involve their brains growing bigger, which implies strongly that Adam and Eve were early hominids. Why would God curse big-brained Neolithic farmers with what they already had?

Objection: Farming The choice of 'tiller' for the translation of what Cain did might be unfortunate. The word could be "served" the ground, or 'worked' the ground which would not have that connotation of farming. Strong's says: "AV translates as “serve” 227 times, “do” 15 times, “till” nine times, “servant” five times, “work” five times, “worshippers” five times, “service” four times, “dress” twice, “labour” twice, “ear” twice, "3 Early hominids used stick to dig up tubors. They were 'workers' of the ground, but not 'tillers' of the ground. Translators always think in terms of their scenario for the events they are translating. If they are wrong, well, they change what people think. I don't feel necessarily that this does mean tilling rather than working the ground.

What of Abel keeper of flocks?  There are two ways of looking at this. The word keeper can be translated as 'companion', so Abel could be a 'companion of flocks'.  Did he consider he owned them? Maybe. Did flock consider itself owned? Maybe not--like my cat does not consider himself owned. Many primitive people follow 'their' herds, but their herds are wild. But lets say he did have some captive animals.  This might be no more different than the Neanderthals of the Southern Caucasus who clearly had sheep in a  closed off box canyon and used them as a food source.  The sheep were wild but couldn't escape.

Now, the word translated as sheep is tson and may mean sheep, goats or cattle. (it also could mean possessions). Now, herders get most of their calories from the flocks and herds they keep. That is why they keep them. But what are we to do when Neanderthals did the same thing in the Caucasus mountains where they obtained 85% of their calories from sheep!4

At another cave they obtained 60% from sheep and goats.

"Outside the Caucasus, high frequencies of mountain goat in Middle Palaeolithic contexts have been observed in Uzbekistan at Teshik-Tash (Capra sibirica: 1 80% NISP [Gromova 1949]) and Obi-Rakhmat (Capra sibirica: 47.4-66.7% [Wrinn n.d.]), at the Spanish sites of Gabasa 1 (Capra pyrenaica: 33.7-52.2% NISP per layer [Blasco Sancho 1995]) and Axlor (Capra ibex: 25.6% combined ungulate sample [Altuna 1989, 1992]), and at Hortus in southern France (Capra ibex: 75.4% NISP combined sample [de Lumley 1972])."5

It seems that Neanderthals had some system which had a similar effect calorically as herders, but they were unlikely herders. Maybe this is something like what Abel had.

Speech I do not believe that it was necessary for Adam to have the same ability in language that we have. There has always been a question in anthropology about whether language areas like Broca's area developed as speech improved or where they required first. If they were required first the question then becomes what caused them to grow, as useless things until suddenly, they got big enough for language. That seems backward. Broca's area should have evolved as a response to speech getting better.

I also don't think it is necessary for the vocal tract to be like ours in order to have a primitive language. Meer cats have vocalizations for aerial attacks by eagles or a terrestrial attack. They don't have our vocal tract but communicate these things very well. Early humans would have had a slower communication, but it still could have been communication.

When I was a young-earth creationist, I believed that the Bible was historically true and that grounded my faith. When I left it and had no historical anchor for early Genesis, I cursed the day I became a geoscientist. I envied the YEC's for the certitude they had and I didn't have certitude. Now that I have found a way to match the Bible historically from Genesis 1 through the Exodus, I have that certitude in Scripture again that I had so long ago. Certitude that they were correct is what powered the disciples. Without that certitude today, the church is weak and adrift.

Now, once again, is it blind chance or divine inspiration that the Bible describes a geography that actually existed 5.3 myr ago? Will you follow the evidence or not?

References

1.http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/2019/51612mart/ndx_mart.pdf

2.Angelos Mousouliotis et al, " Siliciclastic Deposits of the Messinian Nile Canyon, Herodotus Basin, Eastern Mediterranean", Geoscience Technology Workshop, Exploration and Development of Siliciclastic and Carbonate Reservoirs in the Eastern Mediterranean, Tel Aviv, Israel, February 26-27, 2019http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/abstracts/html/2019/telaviv-90341/abstracts/2019.TelAviv.12.html

3.Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.

4.Daniel S. Adler, Guy Bar-Oz, Anna Belfer-Cohen, and Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ahead of the Game : Middle and Upper Palaeolithic Hunting Behaviors in the Southern Caucasus ,"" Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 1, February 2006, p. 91

5.L.V. Golovanova, et al, ""Mezmaiskaya Cave: A Neanderthal Occupation in the Northern Caucasus,"" Current Anthropology, 40(1999):1:77-86, p. 85

The Creation of Man: How Man Can Be Evolved and Specially Created at the Same Time

Creation of Man

by Glenn R. Morton 2019

This is part of a series on how to interpret early Genesis as historical fact, matching both what the Scripture says and what science say. The series starts with my Days of Proclamation post and continues in the When did Adam Live? series, followed by Eden and the Flood. If you don't understand why Adam has to be so early in time, please at least understand the arguments in the When did Adam live posts because you won't understand why what I suggest below is necessary. This article shows how we can be both evolved and specially created.

 Creation of Adam

 Back when I wrote my book, I was one of the rare advocates for human-Neanderthal interbreeding. The consensus of the time was that modern H. sapiens came out of Africa and replaced all of the fossil species, essentially a Paleolithic genocide, as one anthropologist dubbed it. I had based my views on the abundant skeletal information that Neanderthal traits were found in abundance in early European skeletons and these traits slowly left the population over time, although, we H. sapiens of European extraction still carry the Neanderthal hoizontal-oval form of the Mandibular foramen, the hole with the nerve the dentist tries to numb when he works on your mouth. That trait was a Neanderthal trait and still occurs in human populations but at about a 1% level. It was also clear from genetics at the time of the writing of my book, that Modern humans had obtained the blonde hair blue eyes from Neanderthals and still most anthropologists were saying my views of the time were wrong.

Since the writing of the book, we have learned a lot about the behavior of our Paleolithic ancestors breeding. Things such as:

 "Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred."1

Since that quote was written, we now know that Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred;2 it is now also known that there were multiple Denisovans who themselves had been isolated from each other for as long as 350,000 years, both of whom interbred with the ancestors of Papua New Guineans. Jacobs et al, say:

"Instead, modern Papuans carry hundreds of gene variants from two deeply divergent Denisovan lineages that separated over 350 thousand years ago."3

 All of this means that Adam can't be a Neolithic creature, if he is to be the first man, and the first sinner.

For those of a young-earth perspective, think about this. The dates above are based upon the observed rates of mutation we see today in humanity. It would take 350,000 years at those rates for the mutations seen in the Papua New Guineans to accumulate. Thus both radioactive decay and genetic dating say the world is older than a few thousand years.

 Another item relevant to our origin is that of the genetic mistakes we share with apes. If you copy a Google map and act like it is yours, it isn't the correct information that will get you convicted of copyright theft, it is the mistakes in  your map and Google's map share. For instance, if you copied my neighborhood as part of your map, you would share the mistaken location of a particular street, which irritates me much, that Googles map has. Google has the same street in two different locations about 400 feet apart. If your map showed that same mistake, we would know your copied them. Similarly, if we set 5 people out to copy the text of the Bible by hand, and then compared the copies, if two or more of the copies shared all the same errors, we would know who the individuals were who copied their work. This is no different than a teacher who realizes that a student submitted a paper with a word for word copy of an online paper for hire, including the grammatical mistakes. So, what are we to make of the mistakes and dead genes we share with the apes? Intellectual honesty should require that we address them in our apologetics rather than just claim they don't exist.

 Our body's evolution from the apes involved a chromosomal fusion event in which two chromosomes fused into one, which is now our chromosome 2. Chromosome fusion is rare in humans but it has been known to occur. One man was born with all of his chromosomes fused into one gigantic chromosome.

 "For instance, we have observed an extreme variation in the number of chromosomes (from 1 to 46) in a patient. This variation was due to an end-to-end fusion of the chromosomes, and although the karyotypes appeared to be drastically modified, it was possible to find all the chromosomes and to show that they were complete"4

 Such an event can have devastating consequences for the individual involved.

 "Cytological studies have been presented from a 15-year-old girl with short stature and failure of puberty. Buccal mucosa preparations revealed X-chromatin mass approximately double in size of that of a normal female. Leukocyte metaphases suggested a two cell line composition of the patient. One population of cells conformed with 45,X chromosome distribution. The chromosome complement of her other cell line had a modal number of 46. In this cell line a “C” chromosome was replaced by an exceptionally large submetacentric chromosome. This abnormal element exhibited late DNA replicating pattern. G-banding study revealed that the abnormal chromosome was produced as a result of fusion involving telomeric ends of long arms of 2 intact X chromosomes."5

 With that as background, I will cite a long passage from my book, which is probably the best explanation I can write, for how we both evolved and were specially created by God.

      "If it is true that we, and the archaic forms of man, were able to interbreed, that is, that we are one species, then how do we fit fossil man into the biblical account? I have argued that the fossil and archeological evidence strongly supports the concept that mankind has been on this earth for many millions of years. They behaved as we would if we had the technology that they had. There is only one way to fit all of these facts into a biblical perspective."      "As outlined in a previous book,6 God created man about 5.3 million years ago. This is the time of the first occurrence of hominids on earth. Adam was both an evolutionary product of the apes and a special creation of God. There are three facts whose understanding are absolutely essential before one can unite Scripture and modern science. The first is that the African apes have 48 chromosomes and Homo sapiens have only 46. If mankind is a product of evolution, then there must have been a chromosomal fusion at some time during the past. The place I propose for this to occur was at the split between the apes and men. This is because none of the apes have 46 chromosomes, only humans do." 
     "The second fact is that the genes of humans and chimpanzees are 98% identical. This amazing similarity means that only modest changes in the genetics of a chimpanzee would produce a human. Creationists have often used this similarity as evidence for similar design. According to this view, God used similar genetics to construct similar animals. But this view is disproven by the third fact." 
       "The third fact is the existence of pseudogenes which strongly support the genetic relationship between man and ape. A pseudogene is a broken gene; it is a gene with no functionality. A gene which codes for a protein is constructed as is shown in Figure 34. In the nuclear DNA (location 1 in the figure) the working gene consists of a control section, followed by some DNA that codes for part of the protein, called an exon. Then there is a region called an intron which is also known as junk DNA. This region does not provide any information for the manufacture of the protein. Following this, there is another exon, (part B) that contains the information for the rest of the protein. When the nuclear DNA is copied prior to the manufacture of the protein, parts A and B are united, the control portion is removed, and a tail is added to the united parts A and B. This processed gene is then used in the ribosome to manufacture a copy of the protein."
      "Occasionally, a mistake is made and the processed gene is reinserted back into the nuclear DNA at a second location. But the processed gene lacks the control portion and lacks the intron. In this form, it cannot manufacture a protein any longer. It is absolutely useless. This lack of utility is what demonstrates that evolution has occurred and that man is related genetically to the great apes."
     "Recently, Edward Max has brought forth some information which contradicts the common design argument of the creationists.7 Max cites two court cases, Colonial Book Co, Inc. v. Amsco School Publications, Inc., District Court, S.D. New York, Sept 9, 1941 and Subcontractors Register, Inc. v McGovern's Contractors & Builders Manual, Inc. et al. District Court, S.D. New York, August 2, 1946. In these cases, the plaintiff claimed that their books had been plagiarized. But since in both of these cases, the two products were designed to serve a similar function and to convey similar information, it was difficult to say that the correct information had been acquired in an illicit fashion. After all, anyone can get a business address and if it is correct, there is no way to know if they got it out of a copyrighted book or from the tax office. But, if the first published book contains an error that is not in the records of the tax office, then the existence of the identical error, in the identical place in the second book would be proof of copyright infringement. This is exactly what the courts decided. The two defendants had transmitted errors made in the plaintiff's books. This transmission proved to the jury that the source of the information was illicitly acquired."
      "A processed pseudogene plays exactly the same function in the biological court of law. A common pseudogene has been found at the identical location in four species: humans, chimpanzees, gorilla, orangutan and Old World monkeys. Common design simply does not explain this data."
      "Consider the following situation. You ask five of your friends to copy the Encyclopedia Britannica, all thirty volumes. You ask them to go to five different cities, with instructions that at some randomly chosen point in the typing of the encyclopedia, they are to stop, randomly select a paragraph, and insert that paragraph into the Britannica. Then they are to continue the rest of the copying job. When they come back together and show you their copies, you find that all five people had copied the identical paragraph into the identical spot of the Britannica. You would think that they had conspired to achieve this effect. There is no way that you would think that this was simply the result of chance. Similarly, to find the same error in the genes of five different species, but not in all species, is evidence of common descent."
      "There are other examples of useless DNA embedded in the DNA of humans and chimpanzees. Occasionally, retroviruses are able to insert their DNA code into the nuclear DNA of an animal. There are cases where identical retroviral DNA is found at the same location in both chimpanzees and humans. This means that some common ancestor caught a retroviral disease, the retrovirus inserted itself into the genes of that individual and it was passed on to all the descendants. These nonuseful genes prove that we arose from the apes."
      "Because of these three facts, there is only one explanation which allows for the incorporation of the data into a biblical perspective. Five and a half million years ago, an ape-like creature gave birth to a child that had a grievous genetic defect. This child had 46 chromosomes rather than the normal 48 of her species. The child was born dead. God took pity on this creature, fixed the defect and breathed life into it. This was Adam."
      "Adam did not know how to talk. His biological mother didn't either. Thus, God brought all the animals to Adam and let him name them. Whatever Adam named the creatures was what they were called. But among all the animals, no mate was found for him. He had 46 chromosomes and all of his relatives had 48. Because of this, he was a lone creature on this earth with no ability to reproduce. While a chromosomal fusion is not necessarily a barrier to reproduction, it often is. Following Adam's recognition that there was no mate for him, God caused a deep sleep to come on Adam and removed a rib. From this rib, God fashioned a woman for Adam. God told them not to eat from the fruit of a particular tree, which they did. God cursed them and ejected them from the place where they were living. Humanity descended from this primeval pair who were both the product of evolution and special creation."
      "Was Adam an australopithecine? There is no answer to this question. Ernst Mayr, the great taxonomist, preferred to classify them in the genus Homo. But there are so many differences between them and us, it seems unlikely. What I would prefer is that Adam's descendants were able to live for millions of years in an isolated pocket, maybe in a forest where bones are unlikely to be preserved. Acidic soils found in tropical forests destroy bones in less than a year. Eventually, they reproduced and became widespread enough that they left fossil evidence of themselves around the world."
      "If Adam were a Homo erectus, then one can probably place the origin of man long prior to 2.0 million years. Homo erectus was so widespread around the world when he first appears on earth that a long time is required for the population to spread out that far. While anthropologists have not been looking for early Homo erectus in places other than Africa, it is likely that he had been on earth for millions of years prior to his first fossil example. In this fashion, all of the data of anthropology can be placed in a biblical framework, leaving no contradictions."8

 Thus was Adam made.

 Note to critics, I said EARY Homo erectus in that last paragraph. That was true back in the late 1990s. Since then early sites have been received a bit better. There are tools that look of H. erectus manufacture found all over Asia rather early. We have fossil skulls of H. erectus in Dmanisi, Georgia at 1.6-1.77 my years ago. There are stone tools from Pakistan dated two million years old--who made them?9 Tools found in Longgupo China date to 1.4-1.8 myr ago.10. Tools found in Israel in the Erk-el-Ahmar are dated from 1.7 million to 2.0 million years old, and in Spain sites with tools are dated between 2 million and 1.1 myr ago.11 The question is how did he get that widespread so rapidly?

Of the Fall, there is nothing that can be said about it of an empirical nature. I do believe it happened as outlined, but there never will be evidence of it other than human behavior.

Original Sin:This was added a couple of days after I originally posted this note and I think this is the proper place for it.  Last year, after I learned of the scientific evidence for the existence of the immaterial soul, it set me thinking about original sin. We set out the evidence for the soul in Quantum Soul. If you haven't read it, it isn't easy, but it is understandable and very rewarding for the effort.  Augustine thought it came down the human germ line, but today few agree with him. Since we have souls that are immaterial l have come to think that when we procreate, our souls also create the new souls of our children, that is, there is both physical and spiritual procreation.  I have come to believe that original sin appears to come down the germline because it actually transmits down the spiritual germline, affecting each soul created.  The best analogy I can think of is the withered soul of Voldemort at the end of the Harry Potter series.  Sin did that to our souls, and our procreation just keeps producing spiritually damaged children.  I can't prove any of this, but it is consistent with what we know of original sin, and explains why abortion is so bad. We are killing another soul.   

References

1.ALANNA MITCHELL "DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All" January 12, 2012, https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/2012_Denisova_NewYorkTimes_Mitchell.pdf
2.Viviane Slon et al, "The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father," Nature, 561, pages113–116 (2018), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0455-x
3. Guy S. Jacobs et al, "Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans," Cell (2019) 17, 1-12, May 2, 2019, p.1
4. B. Dutrillaux, "Chromosomal Evolution in Primates: Tentative Phylogeny from Microcebus murinus (Prosimian) to Man," Human Genetics, 48(1979): 251 314, p. 292 294
5.Anil K. Sinha, Sen Pathak, James J. Nora, "Fusion of two apparently intact human X chromosomes, Human Genet January 1976, Volume 32, Issue 3, pp 295–300 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00295819
6. Glenn R. Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, DMD publishers, 1998
7 This can be found on the Internet at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/
8.Glenn R. Morton, Adam, Apes and Anthropology, DMD Publishers, Dallas, 1997, p. 186-187
9. R.W. Dennell, H. M. Rendell and E. Hailwood, "Late Pliocene Artefacts from Northern Pakistan," Current Anthropology, 29:3, June 1988, p. 498
10. FeiHan et al, "Preliminary results of combined ESR/U-series dating of fossil teeth from Longgupo cave, China" Quaternary Geochronology Volume 10, July 2012, Pages 436-442
11. H. Ron, S. Levi, "When did Hominids First Leave Africa? New High-resolution magnetostratigraphy from the Erk-el-Ahmar Formation, Israel, Geology, 29, p. 887-890

When did Adam Live? Part 3- Genetics

When did Adam Live? Part 3- Genetics

by Glenn R. Morton

This post is mostly for my young-earth-believing brothers and sisters in Christ.  Theistic evolutionists already accept much, but not all of what lies below.  This is the third in a series on my view of how to concord Scripture with science.  This, like the two posts below is preface to putting it all together, showing that if one is to have truth in the creation accounts, one must move Adam and Eve way back in time. The next and last preface will be a look at the fossil record and what it says about when early man arose. For now we will look at the vast evidence that requires Adam and Eve to have lived in the age of the small brained hominids. If you haven't read my post on ancient religion and on brain size, they can be found at the links in this sentence.

The area of genetics is one place where I think everyone misuses the results to get the answer they want.  Anthropologists act as if mitochondrial Eve, the oldest common mother of our mitochondria, defines the date of the origin of the H. sapiens.  They say H. sapiens speciated  about 200,000 years, and this is wrong. Some Christians use this number to say when God made mankind.  Although most would place Adam within the past 20,000 years.  mtDNA Eve's age is technically the Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA)   Remember TMRCA cause I will use that acronym a lot.  Mitochondrial Eve isn't the age of our species because mitochondrial are a small part of our DNA. The TMRCA for the vast majority of our genes is much, much older; and each gene has it's own age!

The y chromosome Adam which is the correlate of mitochondrial Eve lived about 338,000 years ago, yet he is not claimed to be the origin time of H. sapiens. Nor should he be.  This age too, is just the TMRCA for this piece of DNA.  But again, small pieces of DNA don't define a species.

So what is the problem? The mtDNA Eve was not the only female on the planet, she was one of a whole lot of females, each of whom had their own mtDNA. But all these other women's lineages died out leaving only descendants of mtDNA Eve. This is no different than the process  whereby family names die off because of a failure to have sons who had offspring.

"In 1790, six mutineers from H.M.S Bounty  arrived on the tiny island, bringing thirteen Tahitian women with them.  Few others have ever gone there to live.  Recently, a population of fifty people on the island shared only four surnames, and one of these was that of a whaler who had later settled on Pitcairn.  Thus in only six or seven generations, 50 percent of the six original surnames had already disappeared.  After a few more generations, only one will remain."1

Barry Starr explains:

"Mitochondrial Eve is simply the last woman we can trace our maternal lines back to.  In other words, she is our mother’s mother’s, etc. all the way back a few hundred thousand years.     "All the other women alive at the time eventually had their maternal lines end.  Either there was a generation with all sons or the daughters had no surviving daughters or whatever.  The descendants of most of these women still walk among us; they are just invisible to the type of testing we can do to look back so far in time.  Again, this all goes for men and Y-Adam too." 2.

 What the mtDNA time represents is the time it took for the descendant copies of this woman's mtDNA to conquer the genetic world of modern humans. It is the TMRCA!  This makes mtDNA time the age of the ancestor for  THIS TINY PIECE OF THE DNA.  It says nothing, about the origin of the  human species, no matter how often this is repeated.  If the only DNA we had in our bodies was mitochondria, then in that case, mtDNA's TMRCA would be the age of our species.  But of course, we have much more DNA than the tiny amount of mitochondria DNA.

Templeton criticizes the hype about mtDNA:

“Because mtDNA is inherited as a maternal haploid, this ancestral mtDNA must have been present in a female. Some scientists and much of the popular media have dubbed this bearer of our ancestral mtDNA “mitochondrial Eve," and have treated this as a startling discovery about human evolution. However, the existence of a mitochondrial Eve is trivial under coalescent theory. Finite population size (and all real populations are finite) ensures that all copies of any homologous piece of DNA present in any species have been derived from a single common ancestral DNA molecule in the past; indeed, this is the very definition of genetic homology. To say that humans have a mitochondrial Eve is to say only that all human mtDNA is homologous. When "Eve" is called the ancestor of us all, it only means that our mtDNA is descended from her mtDNA, and not necessarily any other piece of the human genome.”3

Alan Templeton has a chart that illustrates what happens to make one person the parent of everyone's mitochondria or other piece of DNA.:  

As I noted, the y-chromosome Adam or TMRCA yields at date of 338,000 years. Here is the amazing report,

"We report the discovery of an African American Y chromosome that carries the ancestral state of all SNPs that defined the basal portion of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. We sequenced ∼240 kb of this chromosome to identify private, derived mutations on this lineage, which we named A00. We then estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree as 338 thousand years ago (kya) (95% confidence interval = 237–581 kya)."4

The same kind of math is used on y-chromosome Adam as was used on mtDNA Eve, yet the hullabaloo is only about Eve, because some people are trying to link her with the Out of Africa Replacement theory.  Again, both of these dates are just the age of the last common ancestor OF THAT PIECE OF DNA.  Each piece of DNA has its own age as we shall see in a picture below for a small piece of DNA.

Once we realize this, then the view of what happened in the past changes.  First I need to point out that the mtDNA is haploid and the parts of the y-chromosome they use in y-chromosome Adam's calculation can't cross over (mix with the X chromosome).  This means that when we examine the age of genes in nuclear DNA, the time to the most recent ancestor is quite a lot older than these these two much ballyhooed pieces of DNA, because of crossover. The reason for the hype about the mitochondrial DNA is that it appears to be an attempt to 'prove' the Out of Africa replacement with sleight of hand.

"For example, much of the current debate focuses on whether or not there is an African root, with many participants in this debate still behaving as if the resolution of an African mtDNA root would 'prove' the Out of Africa replacement hypothesis.  As pointed out in the introduction to this chapter and in Templeton(...), only the inference of a non-African root is informative and in this case and all alternatives are consistent with an African mtDNA root.  There is even less potential discriminatory power for nuclear DNA.  Expected coalescence time (that is, the time from the present back to the common ancestral sequence) is a function of the inbreeding effective size for the genetic element under consideration, and this size is innately fourfold larger for nuclear DNA than for mtDNA (because of diploidy vs. haploidy, and bisexual inheritance vs. unisexual inheritance). Moreover, as will be discussed shortly, molecules that do not recombine (such as mtDNA but not  nuclear DNA) show a strong bias towards even shorter coalescence times.  If the coalescence time of mtDNA is truly about 200,000 years ago, then the expected coalescence time of almost all nuclear genes are going to be commonly greater than one or two million years.  This places the expected coalescence times of much nuclear DNA into a period in which all humans probably lived in Africa.  Hence, studies on nuclear DNA are expected to have an African root under all hypotheses of modern human evolution."5

Note he said that molecules that don't recombine (y-chromosome, mtDNA) give anomalously short coalescence times.  Focusing only on these two pieces of DNA misleads us into thinking that our species arose late, about 200,000 years ago, when in fact our genes are much older, 800,000 to 5 million years old.

Using the appropriate mathematics for nuclear DNA to see the age of various alleles does indeed show that much of our genome is over a million years old.  That is, it took over a million years for mutations to create the diversity we see in the  human population.  This is what few want to talk about.  Having everyone focused on a tiny piece of DNA and proclaiming that this tiny piece of mtDNA proves when humanity evolved is indeed silly. What about the rest of the genome? Does it have nothing at all to contribute to the debate? It would be like finding one new species in the ocean and ignoring all other species.

One thing one needs to know is that all the results of genetic estimates come from models and models have assumptions which limit the solutions.  One such set of assumption is, "it the allele evolving in a neutral fashion or being selected for by evolution?"  It makes a difference to the answer. Cagliani, et al note:

"In fact, while neutrally evolving autosomal loci have TMRCAs ranging from 0.8 to 1.5 million years (MY), gene regions under balancing selection may show coalescence times dating back more than 4 MY."6

As Templeton said, the TMRCA majority of nuclear DNA  has a TMRCA of over a million years.  Below is a chart showing the TMRCA of some genes. They chose 27 autosomal genes; the TMRCA is more than 2 million years old in 11 out of 27 of them. Only 2 of the 27 are under a million years in TMRCA. Click on picture to enlarge. 

So we are supposed to ignore these old genes and say that the 16,000 base pairs of  mitochondria outweighs the three billion base pairs of the nuclear DNA and just say nuclear DNA doesn't count?  That is one of the most ridiculous ideas I have seen, yet that is what is happening.  The 16,000 base pairs of the mitochondria  is somehow considered the end all of knowledge about when our species arose. And it represents 0.0000053 or .00053%  of our DNA.  I don't know how many ways I can say it, but we are not a walking piece of mitochondrial DNA. This small piece of our genome (and not even part of our nuclear genome), is NOT what defines our species! Further, other genes have much to say about when they arose, and it differs from mtDNA.

 Below is a chart of the TMRCA for many individual genes. Some is taken from an old web page and others are from my research  this week. Or these are the times it takes for each of these genes to accumulate the mutations we see All of these parts of our DNA are older than mtDNA Eve. These show that our genome was gradually shaped over the past 5 million years.

gene       age of the gene   reference 

Tap2                 5.36 myr        7
ERAP2                5.08 myr        8
green opsin          >5.5 myr     9

HERVs                 5.0 myr        10

TRIM5                 4-7 myr        11

Patr-DRB1*03          4.6 myr        12

DEFB1                 4.5 myr        13

CDSN/PSORS1C1        4.18 myr        7

ERAP1                4.12 myr        8

CD151        3.83 or 2.14 myr        14

CD55         3.19 or 2.61 myr        14

SIGLEC16          3.1-3.8 myr        15

FUT2 coding region    3   myr        14

SLC14A1              2.28 myr        14

Lipoprotein           2.0 myr        9

FUT2 promoter 1.99 or 1.7 myr        14

PDHA1                1.86 myr        16

BSG gene     1.76 or 1.53 myr        14

Beta-globin          1.36 myr        17

dys44                1.35 myr        17

Plp                  1.28 myr        17

Ace                  1.11 myr        17

Pdha1                1.05 myr        17

Melanocortin-1        1.0 myr        18

Zfx                  0,93 myr        17

Lpl                  0.91 myr        17

ß-globin             0.8  myr        18

ms205 minisat.  0.72-1.04 myr        19

Mclr                 0.71 myr        17

non-coding area  X  0.675 myr        20

Xq13.3               0.56 myr        17

Hprt                 0.53 myr        17

Chromosome 22  .504-2.112 myr        21

Gk                   0.41 myr        17

ZDF                 0.306 myr        22

I would like to show a picture from work done by Heng Li and Richard Durbin23 where they took DNA from a Chinese, a Korean, 3 Europeans 2 Yoruba males, and calculated along a strand of DNA how many generations each part of the DNA would take to coalesce to the most recent common ancestor. As you can see, the age varies continuously along the DNA.. The picture is  also fascinating because the spot at 60,000 base pairs takes a little less than200,000 generations.  At 25 years per generation average, we have this region would take a little less than 5 million years for all the observed diversity to arise.  

What does all this mean?  Well, it means we have been one breeding population for 5 or more million years.

Wolpoff wrote:

"There is no distinct boundary between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in time or space, and cladogenesis does not seem to mark the origin of Homo sapiens.  Instead, the characteristics of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are found to be mixed in seemingly transitional  samples from the later Middle Pleistocene of every region where there are human remains.  The regional ancestry of Homo sapiens populations makes monophyly impossible for the species if the earlier populations are in a different species.  We interpret this to mean that there is no speciation involved in the emergence of Homo sapiens from Homo erectus. These reasons combine to require that the lineage be regarded as a single evolutionary species."24

The above will surprise many, that a minority anthropologists(but a group of well known ones) think the only speciation event was at the formation of H. erectus; that there was no speciation between erectus and sapiens.

This is not the first time someone tried to push the idea that humans formed one continuous breeding population and only phyletic speciation occurred.  Phyletic speciation is gradual change from one species to another, as Wolpoff above describes, features gradually change, and the fossil record just shows a mixture of traits slowly being more of the new species rather than the old.

From the 1860s until 1950, almost every new fossil find was given a new genus and species name.  It was good for getting newspapers to spread the word about your discovery.  Finding another Pithecanthropus, say, would be placed on page 12 at the bottom.  In 1950 anthropologists held a conference in Cold Springs Harbor, Maine to thrash out the multitudinous names of all the fossil men. They invited Ernst Mayr, a world renown taxonomist to examine the fossils and make suggestion about how to consolidate and make sense of the human fossil record.  Boaz relates the events.

      "The biggest bombshell dropped on the Old Guard, however, came from Ernst Mayr, a German-trained ornithologist and specialist in the naming (taxonomy) of species in nature.  Using the new yardstick of variability within populations, he stated that 'after due  consideration of the many differences between Modern man, Java man, and the South African ape-man, I did not find any morphological characters that would necessitate separating them into several genera.'  He suggested that all the fossil human-like specimens that anthropologists had discovered after so much laborious effort over the preceding century be simply ascribed to one genus, our own--Homo. In other words, the entire 'Age of Description,' from before Darwin to Cold Spring Harbor, was a waste of time.  His opinion was that the differences were not as great as between genera of other animals.  This assertion meant that the wonderfully diverse lexicon of human paleontology, a virtual liguistic playground for the classically educated, with melliferous names such as Plesianthropus transvaalensis, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Africanthropus njarensis, Sinanthropus pekinensis, Pithecanthropus erectus, and so on, were to be replaced.  Everything was now to be simply Homo, with three species: Homo transvaalensis, Homo erectus,  and Homo sapiens."       "Mayr's proposal went so far that even Washburn argued that at least the South African Australopithecus be retained (instead of Homo transvaalensis) because it showed such significantly more primitive anatomy than members of the genus Homo. Mayr simply countered that the population is what the species designates.  How one determines a genus is arbitrary.  The definition is gauged by the relative amount  of difference that one sees between the genera of other animals and, in Mayr's opinion, hominid fossils don't show very much difference.  To anthropologists, this statement was a bit like telling a new mother that her baby looks like every other baby.  It did not go over well."25

Below is a quotation of what Mayr said in 1950 at Cold Spring Harbor.

       “Being left with one species of gorilla and one species of chimpanzees, we are confronted by the question whether or not they are sufficiently different to justify placing them in different genera. A specialist of anthropoids impressed by the many differences between these species may want to do so. 0ther zoologists will conclude that the differences between the two species are not indicative of a generic level of difference when measured in the standards customary in most branches of zoology. To place these two anthropoids into two separate genera defeats the function of generic nomenclature and conceals the close relationship of gorilla and chimpanzee  as compared with much more different orang and the gibbons. Recognizing  a separate genus for the gorilla would necessitate raising the orang and the gibbon to subfamily or family rank as has indeed been done or suggested. This only worsens the inequality of the higher categories among the primates. 
           “The same is true for the fossil hominids. After due consideration of the many differences between Modern man, Java man, and the South African ape-man, I did not find any morphological characters that would necessitate separating them into several genera. Not even Australopithecus has unequivocal claims for separation. This form appears to possess what might be considered the principal generic character of Homo, namely, upright posture with its shift to a terrestrial mode of living and the freeing of the anterior extremity for new functions which, in turn, have stimulated brain evolution. Within this type there has been phyletic speciation resulting in Homo sapiens. “26

Yes, indeed, telling anthropologists that their babies look like most other babies, didn't go over well. But, they did take part of Mayr's suggestion and group the erectines in with Homo but left Dart's africanus out in the cold, in another genus.

I emphasized phyletic speciation above. Mayr was saying we have been one breeding population from the pithecines through the erectines and on to the sapiens.   That is exactly  what the TMRCA data is saying. Most of our nuclear genome arose while man was still in Africa, 1.5 Myr ago and a large percentage of our nuclear genome dates back more than 3 million years. So the Out of Africa theory is one of those "Duh! ya think?" ideas.  Of course mankind came out of Africa. It is just that the late, 200,000 years ago Out of Africa theory, when, it is claimed, that our mitochondria walked out of Africa,  isn't all that important. Oh gee, did I say our mitochondria walked out of Africa?  I'm sorry, I meant to say modern man walked out of Africa. Given the hullabaloo about such a small piece of our anatomy, that it is the one thing that defines us as modern humans, you must forgive me for my mistake.

Since we are back to talking about the origin of modern man,  There is no definition in anthropological literature of what is a modern H. sapiens.  No proposed set of traits fully encompass modern men and exclude H. erectus. Wolpoff and Caspari discuss the attempts to define anatomically modern H. sapiens:

    "Modernity is not a 'thing,' a set of features that linked together because they were spread by a single population.  But it's not that modern humans have many sources, rather that modern features  do.  What links modern features together is how they contribute to successful adaptations, and this, with the differing genetic histories of populations from place to place, explains why modernity is not the same everywhere.
     "This is why it has proved impossible to provide an acceptable definition of modernity.  Repeated attempts at a definition based on skeletal variation have failed because when they were applied to skeletal samples, it was found they did not include all recent or living people.  How could this happen?:  It comes back to the importance of Neandertals because these anatomical definitions of modernity cast them in the role of 'other.'  These definitions are based on the assumption Neandertals were not modern humans.  Indeed, they were constructed to exclude Neandertals.  However, when the definitions were applied to populations around the world, it was quickly discovered that significant numbers of Holocene and recently living Aboriginal Indigenous Australians were not 'modern.'  This problem, of course, is not with the Aboriginal Indigenous Australians who are each and every bit as modern as the authors of the definitions, but with the definitions themselves and their focus on Neandertals."27

This just re-enforces the concept that humanity just gradually grew out of being H. erectus, all the while carrying the image of God as shown in the previous post in this blog.  There was no big speciation event for us, just gradual change in this case.  Punctuated equilibria is not a law of physics that must be applied everywhere; it works where it works and fails where it fails.

What about the Major Histocompatibility Complex?

This is supposedly the big bugaboo for anyone who believes in a single pair.  Francis Ayala, years ago, wrote this:

"The coalescence theory of population genetics leads to the conclusion that the DRB1 polymorphism requires that the population ancestral to modern humans has maintained a mean effective size of 100,000 individuals over the 30-million-year persistence of this polymorphism.  We explore the possibility of occasional population bottlenecks and conclude that the ancestral population could not have at any time consisted of fewer than several thousand individuals.  The MHC polymorphisms excluded the theory claiming, on the basis of mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms, that a constriction down to one or few women occurred in Africa, at the transition from archaic to anatomically modern humans, some 200,000 years ago."28

George Murphy noting this difficulty wrote:

"As one example of the difficulty this idea faces, development of the present diversity of alleles of human histocompatibility genes from such a pair would require between five and ten million years.  Unless we want to consider “Adam and Eve” the biological ancestors of all hominids, and perhaps even pongids, we must rule this out."29

If this is true, that there was a big population for 30 million years, then the story of Adam and Eve can't be true, at least not as we currently understand it as a single pair.

It is true that the DRB1 gene has 11,757 alleles in the US population.30  If there were single pair anywhere in the past 200,000 years, the claim is that the human race could not have evolved that much diversity in that time.  After all, Adam and Eve each would have had 2, so at most they could have given their kids 4 of the 11,757 alleles.  But, all is not lost.

Both Ayala and Murphy were using the wrong assumption to model the past. George, who is a friend of mine, didn't look deep enough into the literature. Both he and Ayala are theologically comfortable with a population evolving into Adams and Eves. Thus, like all of us, when we think we have an answer that fits our world view, we cease looking for problems or solutions to problems that might take our world view in different directions.  We all need to guard against that. 

Above, I mentioned how all these results are based upon models, and then the model is treated as metaphysical reality.  Models depend on the assumptions. Change the assumptions and different answers come out. Bergstrom et al, changed the assumptions. Bergstrom et al, argue that almost all of these alleles average around 250,000 years old, solving the vast majority of these problems, if they are right. They pointed out that sequence exchange meant that the alleles didn't evolve mutation by mutation, but the DNA was scrambled by exchanging one base with another base on another allele.  This means the alleles don't make an evolutionary tree, and using the model for an evolutionary tree yields false results.  Bergstrom et al, note,

 "The HLA class I and class II loci are the most highly polymorphic coding regions in the human genome. Based on the similarity of the coding sequences of alleles between species, it has been claimed that the HLA polymorphism is ancient and predates the separation of human (Homo) and chimpanzee (Pan), 4–7.4 Myr ago. Analysis of intron sequences, however, provides support for a more recent origin and for rapid generation of alleles at the HLA class II DRB1 locus. The human DRB1 alleles can be divided into groups (allelic lineages); most of these lineages have diverged from each other before the separation of Homo and Pan. Alleles within such a lineage, however, appear to be, on average, 250,000 years old, implying that the vast majority (greater than 90%) of the more than 135 contemporary human DRB1 alleles have been generated after the separation of Homo and Pan."31

In the article, they point out that these DRB1 alleles, which are so incredibly diverse might not have arisen via mutation but have arisen via sequence exchanges  This has been demonstrated with the mouse.

 "Exchange of sequences between different loci, which has been demonstrated conclusively in mouse class I sequences, most likely involves gene conversion." 32

Bergstrom et al. note,

"Furthermore, the polymorphism at several class II loci, such as DRBI, is characterized by a 'patchwork' pattern of amino-acid motifs, indicating that the alleles may have been generated through sequence exchanges(that is, gene conversion-like events). This implies that adjacent coding sequences may not share the same evolutionary history and are therefore not suited to reconstructing evolutionary relationships among alleles."33

The 2015 article by Rajalingam et al, agrees,

"MHC genes evolve through duplication, followed by diversification, co‐evolution, and sequence exchange." 34

The Bergstrom et al. article is cited for the authors saying that the coalescence time for the introns is 40 Myr, which clearly would rule out a single pair, like Adam and Eve. Below, Ne is the effective population size--originally the number of breeding individuals but defined slightly differently today. They say,

"Assuming that the intron sequences evolve in a neutral manner and with a generation time of 15 years, this coalescence time translates into a long-term (the last 40 Myr) Ne of 700,000 individuals."35

What people don't know, and I want you to understand this, 700,000 individuals is a monstrously large effective population for anything related to hominids in the human line. One also needs to know that the bigger Ne is , the older is the coalescence time (TMRCA).  The following chart will show that. 

The above is an example of what the math produces. One needs to know how much interbreeding there is and what the effective population is, to find TRMCA.  The contour lines on this chart are the times to most recent common ancestor. The horizontal axis is the breeding size, Ne.  As you can see, as Ne gets larger, the time  to TMRCA gets more ancient. The chart above stops at Ne of 24,000. Bergstrom's 40 million year calculation used many times that Ne, 700,000.  One would expect a very ancient TMRCA under that assumption.

But because humans had a genetic bottleneck about 100,000 years ago, giving us an effective population size of about 10,000, Bergstrom et al did an alternative calculation and found. (The first bolding below is again to show you how useless mtDNA coalescence times are for dating our species; the second bolding shows what happens to that 40 myr if the population is reduced to what we think happened)

"...the coalescence time for the haploid and maternally transmitted mtDNA is expected to be one quarter of that for an autosomal locus. The coalescence time for the alleles within DRB1 Allelic lineages based on the intron sequences correspond to about 700,000 years (Ne=10^4 using the intron substitution rate of Li et al and is similar to estimates from other nuclear markers and mtDNA. Thus, when alleles within allelic lineages are compared there appears to be no difference between the effective population size estimates from HLA loci, such as DRB1, and those estimates based on the genetic diversity at other nuclear loci or mitochondrial DNA." 36

Change the assumption of effective population size and voila, instead of 40 million for the TMRCA for the Histocompatibility Complex, we have 700,000 years.  I spent the last 8 years of my career as part of a team making subsurface reservoir models.  I saw over and over that one could get just about what one wanted out of a model if you chose the correct assumptions.  Science by modeling is a risky affair. I saw the same thing with something called synthetic seismograms,which were supposed to show us if the well data matched the seismic.  Appropriate choice of wavelet, could match any well with almost any seismic.  I began to wonder about the usefulness of modeling.

As you can see, the assumptions are crucial to the answer. But it is clear that the Major Histocompantibility Complex might not be as hard a problem as has been claimed.  The problem is that when one believes that there is no Adam and Eve, as Ayala did, (he wrote a paper, The Myth of Eve), then he won't challenge his assumptions to see if alternatives would work. This is a human nature problem we all have to worry about.

Conclusion

It is clear from genetics, that if there is to be an Adam and Eve, a single pair, as the Bible describes, they must have lived before 5 million years ago. It is for this reason that the previous post on small brained hominids is so crucial.  One of them was our ancestor  It is also clear that the DRB1 location might not eliminate the  idea of a single pair as is often claimed.

Next I will explain some of the implications of these TMRCA's to the paleontological record.When Did Adam Live pt 4 Curse of the Big Head

References

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