Creation 101 vs. Evolution 101 (Part 2)

Nice introduction. I will again make my normal offer that we move this off to the Science forum if the discussion is deemed to be devisive.

"Let us continue. UTEOTW, I certainly do not think that tails or feet that absorb as an embryo proves anything. No more than a tadpole that turns into a frog."

The key here is the shared developmental traits between the species. There are alot of shared steps in the development of animals but for many it is hard to articulate the importance.

But for some steps it becomes easier because you can show that there is a left over developmental step for things that the animal no loger has or uses.

In the case of humans, most mammals (all mammals?) go through an embryonic stage with a tail. In most, this turns into an actual tail. But in the apes, it is mostly reabsorbed. Now this is not some tiny protrusion either. In the stage with the tail, the tail takes up something like 1/3 of the embryo. In humans this mostly gets reabsorbed and you are left with a little stub of bone that does not even protrude through the skin. But occasionally a human will be form with a full atavistic tail. All these things show is that though we have lost the tail, the genes for these parts are still in us and cause use to have developmental stages like we were still trying to make one. As far as design goes, it is very wasteful to make somethng and then have to destroy it before birth.

The same thing applies to legs on whale and snake embryoes. They show a connection to the past where this was a part of development. Now they no longer use these parts so their development has been modified to destroy these parts before birth. But the earlier stage shows the connection to the other mammals for whales and other reptiles for snakes. A good design would not go through these steps. Common descent explains why they do go through these stages.

And please do not confuse this with Haekel. I am not saying that the embryo goes through all of its evolutionary stages during development. I am saying that animals share developmental stages with related animals even when those stages make parts that are not needed and have to be destroyed.

"...but it does not do any more than vestigal organs, many of which have been shown to have a function. At one time the thyroid was one of these organs; now we know the major function the thyroid does."

Again, vestigal only means that it does not have its original role. Some parts are thought to be vestigal because they no longer have function. But some vestigal parts still have function, just not their original function.

Let's use the pelvis of the whales as an example. The pelvis does have some minor uses in the whales. Howeer, the pelvis is also a very complex body part that has obvious uses that are much more important in related animals. Namely walking around. For the minor role that it plays in the whale it is a much too complex design. Its design stems from its previous use and not because it is optomized for its current use.

 

"Oh yeah, that's allegory."

I am not sure if allegory is the best word to use, but no need to quibble over the details when just the fact that one of us is literal and one not literal puts a wide enough gap in our thoughts.

"Just exactly WHEN do you think man obtained a soul?

Was there an Adam and Eve..."

I don't know the answer to either.

For the first question, I would think of two leading possibilities. The first would be that there was an actual Adam and Eve. God gave two anatomically modern humans souls making them "in God's image." They could have been separated out and then you do not see so much deviation from the literal interpretation of Genesis. Especially if you start at chapter two. This would have placed the time as fairly recently.

The other possibility is that when you see humans begin to do abstract things like art and burying their dead, this could be a sign that they had been given sentience. In this case, the time would be moved back to maybe a few tens of thousands of years. This makes Adam and Eve more symbolic than real.

As for me, I am not sure. I lean towards the former. Mainly because I would rather not view any more than necessary as not literal.

"...even though genetics have shown all human beings came from the same female? "

Well, this turns out to be more a quirk of math. You would get the same basic result whether there was a real Eve or not, so it is not much use. Let me see if I can say why.

This was traced through mitochondrial DNA. This is only passed through mothers. Now, imagine you have a population. Since heredity is only through females for mDNA, consider just the females. If your generation has X females then the previous generation (only the parents of this generation since any others did not pass on any genes) could have at most X females. That would be if every female only had one daughter. For every female that had more than one daughter, your population in the previous generation was less than X.

Now, you should se that each previous generation of females must be smaller than the set of daughters it produces. Once you recognize that it gets smaller each time you take a step back, you can see that it is inevitable that you eventually get to a point where there was only one female in a generation.

Now, this does not necessarily mean she was the only female at all. Just that if there were others, that their lines of decendants eventually were dead ends.

 

What about the character/attributes of the God revealed in scripture makes you think that He it is "necessary" to take any of the Genesis account as "not literal"?

And again, I am not looking for the "if scientific interpretations are wrong then God is a liar" argument. That has been refuted over and over. My ditch analogy is a good example.

A man I trust tells me the ravine behind my house resulted from a ditch he dug. It washed out in an unusually rainy spring and continues to erode fairly consistently now each year.

A geologists happens by and tells me that the ravine is the result of years of natural erosion. Basing his arguments on the soil content, average rain fall, sediment deposits, etc., he comes up with a theory that an unknown event caused the beginning of the process some 300 years ago.

Both have explained the phenomenon. Both answers come from credible sources. But the geologist makes the critical mistake of assuming that only natural forces can account for the ravine. That conclusion is neither necessary nor even reasonable. I would believe the man who was an eyewitness over the one who speculated based on the assumption of pure naturalism.... especially if there were still evidences of "design" to be seen in and around the ravine.

 

That really isn't what evolution would predict though is it?

Wouldn't evolutionary processes be better served by the convergence of several lines, each having mutations and adaptations that would build on each other to produce the mechanism to accomplish macroevolution? A single ancestor seems to be far too precarious to support evolution especially since this single point would have to be repeated over and over.

 

It is not a prediction of anything other than math.

If you are tracing ancestry only through one gender, then the number of individuals in a generation as you go back must go down. That does not mean that the members of each group were the only ones alive at the time, only that they were the only ones with an unbroken string of descendants of that gender from that time until the present.

You must end up with a single ancestor of a given gender. That was not the only individual of that gender alive at that time. But for the others, somewhere along the line they failedto produce an offspring of that gender and the line died out.

We are only talking about mDNA here. The rest of the genome was being swapped around through sexual reproduction and could take advantage of the contribution from a wider variety of the population.

If you do different segments of the population or if you do the whole population at different points in time, you will get different answers.

 

That isn't necessarily true under your proposition though and probably isn't true if evolution is actually valid.

Two or more mothers could have coexisted and been subject to mutations that were later combined through interbreeding. So the later offspring would have inherited the distinct changes from two lines- not one.

It just seems to make alot more sense that a population would produce the mutations necessary to result in evolution rather than a single individual at any given time.

Of course you know I am just playing along with you since I don't believe that body of conjecture anyway.

But it wouldn't be the DNA of that individual alone that gave rise to the next species. It would have been the convergence of that individual's line with many others that had complimentary mutations or even totally different mutations.

I am having difficulty communicating this point. Let me try this: Say female A develops a mutation. Several generations later female B that is not a descendent of A develops a mutation. This process is repeated for C, D, and E. At some point, descendents of these females mate producing offspring that have inherited mutations from 5 different lines.

This to me seems like the most likely process for every animal after the first levels of speciation if evolution is the best framework for explaining this evidence.

You know that I don't think it is. This mDNA points back to Eve... directly created by God from a DNA sample taken from Adam.

 

It is not OE or YE or evolution or anything else but math.

It may need to be more explicitly stated that we are only talking about mitochondrial DNA. mDNA is completely separate from the rest of the genome. It comes only through the mothers. It would be impossible for the mDNA of two individuals to merge.

Since it can only come through the mothers, each generation when counting back a given line must be smaller. It mathematically must go back to one individual. Not the only female alive at the time, just the one who happened to supply the mDNA line we all share.

But we can venture into a germane discussion here.

The question is why does the mitochondria have its own DNA?

Some of the structures in cells are know as organelles. These are things like mitochondria and chloroplasts. They have their own DNA. In fact, organelles are very similar to bacteria. The most likely explanation seems to be that these organelles are actually the result of endosymbiosis. Bacteria began living in the cells of early eukaryotes. The situation was mutually beneficial and eventually the orgalles became integrated as a vital part of the cells. Wit the rest of the cell to provide for the symbiant bacteria, their DNA mutated until it becale specialized for just its purpose in the cell.

Once again, evolution is shown to act by making a hodgepodge of existing pieces.