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The mystery of the spare rib October 22, 2009
‘Early man was late for first date’, ran the headline in the London Times newspaper: ‘Women were the complete article long before men, a new study has shown … The result overturns the biblical description of women being created from a spare rib left over from a man’.
The reporter has got his Chinese take-away mixed up with his book of Genesis, but I will pass over that. What is important is that the Bible’s account of man’s origin is again under fire.
Why? If science has established so convincingly that man evolved from ape-like ancestors, and Adam and Eve have been consigned to the trash-can of mythology, why should anyone bother to attack the Bible’s version of events?
The answer, surprisingly, is that man’s evolution is far from proven. The whole theory of evolution is, in fact, under attack. From creationists? No, from serious scientific thinkers.
Implausible
One problem for evolution is that its ‘proofs’ are often implausible. Let us return to the study in The Times.
Differences in mitochondrial DNA from various parts of the world allow an age to be worked out for the single female from whom all women appear to have descended. The geneticists’ Eve turns out to be 143,000 years old, 84,000 years older than Adam!
The researchers infer that during the 84,000 years between ‘Eve’ and ‘Adam’, females were fully human but males were not. Or, to put it differently, a race of sub-human males lived for 84,000 years who left no trace of their existence in the human genome, at the same time as their females did leave such a trace! (The genome is the total pool of genetic information in a species.)
Assumptions
This conclusion is contrary to common sense. In scientific jargon, it is intrinsically implausible. Normally, when this sort of problem arises, scientists re-examine their methods and assumptions. But with this kind of research it is impossible to check the assumptions.
The first assumption is that human DNA undergoes genetic mutations at a particular rate. Once a mutation frequency has been assumed, the mutational differences observed can be ‘translated’ into a number of generations since our first parent(s) were alive.
But the mutation rate in human DNA has seldom been measured. What measurements there are, suggest a much larger mutation rate than is normally assumed.
Mutation rates can be measured in species, like the fruit-fly, where large numbers of generations can be bred over a short period of time. But scientists know that the rates can vary greatly between species (and even between different chromosomal sites within a species).
More usually, the supposed evolutionary time-scale itself is used to estimate mutation rates, creating a completely circular argument. The fact is that the ‘ages’ calculated for our first parents are wholly speculative.
More assumptions
What if the researchers have guessed their mutation rates correctly? They next assume that these rates have not changed over tens of thousands of years. This is almost certainly wrong.
No one really knows why mutations occur in a natural population. Artificially, mutations can be induced by chemicals and radiation. Natural mutations can, therefore, be caused by background radiation from cosmic rays or natural radioactivity.
Some genetic mutations occur spontaneously, without any external cause, when ‘mistakes’ are made during DNA replication. But the fact that mutations are rare shows that living cells possess efficient repair mechanisms.
Perhaps, therefore, the problem lies in a failure of these mechanisms. Furthermore, many mutations are ‘weeded out’ because they reduce viability. No one really knows the mutation rates that would apply to humans over vast periods of time.
A final unjustified assumption is that mutation rates are the same for nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA. There is evidence that this is not the case. It might be true if mutations are caused by external agencies like background radiation, and if repair mechanisms are identical in the two types of DNA. But these are big ‘ifs’.
Biblical account
The unlikely conclusion reached by the study stands in stark contrast to the straightforward and rational claim made in Genesis. According to the Bible’s account, the whole human race arose from a single pair, Adam and Eve, the first humans.
Ironically, before studies like the one discussed were possible, the idea of a first man and woman was ridiculed by evolutionists. They thought that mankind evolved as a large population and that there were no unique parents of the human race.
Now, at least, they must accept that the existence of a ‘first man’ and a ‘first woman’ is consistent with their own research. But they still maintain that their ‘Adam and Eve’ were preceded by a race of sub-human creatures which evolved into modern man. What evidence do they have? Precious little, is the answer....
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