The "common creator" myth

Loud, thanks for your informed comments. I'll read up more and try to understand the topic better. Any references you can suggest would be greatly appreciated. I'll dig into my copy of Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al and some other material in the meantime. I thought the random sequence would require the most number of bits to convey (since a random sequence is generally incompressible and has high entropy).If it isn't giving away any proprietary info, can I get the accession number on that bacterial system you mentioned? Maybe I can play around with the sequence data and convince myself on the details of the information content based on Shannon entropy. That way, hopefully I can give Hangdawg and others a better example of information change when faced with the question again.Thanks, too, for getting us back to the topic. While it is interesting to address Hangdawg's questions (and learning from other posters), the thread is meant to have creationists to defend their views, and to otherwise account for all the data which conclusively substantiates evolution.

Hangdawg13 responds to me:

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No, they ate meat. Abel was a shepherd, after all.

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Gen 1:29 God said, "I have given you every plant with seeds on the face of the earth and every tree that has fruit with seeds. This will be your food.

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What does that have to do with anything?Abel was a shepherd. What do you think he was doing? Woolgathering?

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They only worked the ground and ate meat after the fall.

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At least you didn't bring up the flood. Noah was told to bring different numbers of "clean" and "unclean" animals...where the distinction between "clean" and "unclean" is whether or not you are allowed to eat them thus establishing that meat-eating was approved of by god before the flood.But since there is no mention of god telling anybody that they could eat meat between the creation and the flood, why do you arbitrarily put the distinction at the fall? What on earth makes you think that the dietary restrictions changed just because they were no longer in Eden?If Adam and Eve were vegetarians, why on earth would they switch to eating meat after being vegetarians for so long? Why would it even occur to them to do so? Where on earth did Abel get this idea that raising sheep to eat them would be a good idea given that he was raised by vegetarians?And since purely vegan diets run the danger of pernicious anemia, how did Adam and Eve survive without cobalt-enriched soil in which to grow crops so the bacteria in their gut could make vitamin B12 for them?

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This really, hasn't much to do with the debate though.

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It goes to credulity and, in the end, actually is quite appropriate.You see, the fundamental question is whether or not we are confident that our ability to examine the present can help us come to conclusions about the past. Are you seriously saying that the humans of the past were so absolutely, radically different from the humans of today that we can ascribe to the ancients pretty much any traits we care to name? That they are complete blank slates?This leads to the question of if you seriously propose the idea that Adam and Eve were the first and only humans and that all humans are direct descendants of them. Given the great number of genetic traits that have more than two alleles, where on earth did they come from? Adam could only carry two and Eve, being genetically derived from Adam, can't have any new ones. So since, for example, major blood type has three alleles, where did that third one come from? And other traits have even more! Where did they come from if not through evolution?And if you can evolve a little, why can't you evolve a lot? If 1 + 1 = 2, why can't 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 10?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Nowhere in genesis did it say that god created Eve completely identical to Adam. Therefore, I propose that Adam was heterozygous A and Eve was heterozygous B or vice versa.

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The Laminator

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Therefore, I propose that Adam was heterozygous A and Eve was heterozygous B or vice versa.

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Two people can only have 4 alleles. Adam = AB Eve = CD. The problem arises when the there are 5 or more alleles, too many for any two people to have. For instance, take HLA's (the proteins that determine tissue type). There are over 40 HLA alleles (around 50 IIRC), and each human has two alleles, one from their mother and one from their father. If there was just Adam and Eve, one out of every sixteen people would be an organ donor match (if I did my permutations right).This message has been edited by Loudmouth, 07-23-2004 01:14 PM

I know, I know. I was trying to help them out.I was refering strictly to blood type.Say that Adam has Ai and Eve has Bi. One fourth of their children would be AB, one fourth would be Ai, one fourth would be Bi, and one fourth would be ii (which is blood type 0). Since they didn't have anybody else around, they started to have sex with each other when it came to horny time. That way, we now have 4 different blood types out there."Hey sis, wanna see my pee pee?"

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The Laminator

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Hangdawg,One or two things,Firstly:I know I'm not the first to say this but thanks for debating sensibly, and for asking pertinent questions. Open warfare might be fun for a couple of posts, but its' much more fun to have a long discussion (IMO).Having said that, once you have had some answers and understood (at least partly) the evidence, it might be a good idea to take stock - to assess what the evidence is saying. Can I be a little cheeky and ask you to sum up, in your own words how the DNA evidence is used to support the existance of common ancestors and the problems you still have with it all? That would be great if you could I'd also like to tackle a couple of points you've already raised: Well, judging by the article that Loudmouth posted, not an awful lot of difference would be seen. You'd get an individual with lots of identical copies of cytochrome C and other housekeeping genes like the ribosomal proteins. Doesn't really fit with Adam before the fall does it? And then of course you've got to come up with a reason to explain why we share pseudogenes with mice.You've also mentioned in a post to someone else about mitochondria showing that humans have only been around for 6000 odd years. Its this that originally made me point you in the direction of this topic, so I hope you don't mind if I jump in:1)Although you can trace all human mitochondria back to a single individual(which may or may not have been 6,000 years ago - I don't know the exact figures), it doesn't mean that she was the only woman alive at the time. It just means that she's the only woman we inherit our mitochondria from. Similar studies using non-mitochondrial genes have been traced back to different individuals, at different times in human history.2)If you accept that people did inherit their mitochondria from this 'mitochondrial eve', then you have to accept that she inherited hers from a common ancestor of humans and chimps - because the exact same method is used. Mitochondrial DNA is used quite commonly to draw up cladograms. Infact, it can be used to draw up a family tree that includes all eukaryotes (and as I've mentioned before, a select few mitochondrial relatives in the bacterial domain).Thanks in advance for your reply

Lama dama ding dong responds to me:

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Nowhere in genesis did it say that god created Eve completely identical to Adam.

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I never said she was. Obviously, she differed in at least one chromosome: Human males are XY while human females are XX.But since Eve was created from Adam, that necessarily means that all of her genes are derived from Adam's. You can get XX from a set of XYs.

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Therefore, I propose that Adam was heterozygous A and Eve was heterozygous B or vice versa.

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And for those traits that have five alleles? Where did that fifth one come from?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Ooook! writes:

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Although you can trace all human mitochondria back to a single individual(which may or may not have been 6,000 years ago - I don't know the exact figures)

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Mitochondiral Eve is about 120,000 years old.Y-Chromosomal Adam is about 60,000 years old.The two never met, thus showing that "most recent ancestor in common" does not mean "sole progenitor."

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Well, kinda-sorta-maybe.In Genesis 1 God simply creates Adam and Eve at the same time from the dirt, just as he makes everything else.It's only in Genesis 2 that Eve is a clone of Adam.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

This is exactly why I gave up on creationism a long time ago.I have a very good answer for you, but it will drive you crazy: Goddunit!

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The Laminator
For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

jar responds to me:

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In Genesis 1 God simply creates Adam and Eve at the same time from the dirt, just as he makes everything else.

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No, in Genesis 1, god simply creates humans:Genesis 1:26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Given the plurality of the statement, there is no reason to believe he only created two. Given the great fecundity of the previous days, there's no reason to think that humans were a single pair.Thus, we have to stick to the argument being presented to us: Those claiming "Adam and Eve" are necessarily referring to Genesis 2, not Genesis 1.

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It's only in Genesis 2 that Eve is a clone of Adam.

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Well, not exatly a clone...a genetic derivative (being picky, I know.)

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Y-chromosome Noah, creationists will claim. If they'll believe creationist Carl Baugh actually has a PhD in science and that Hovind, Sarfati, and Milton are credible, that camel will sail right through the eye of their needle.

Ediacaran responds to me:

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Y-Chromosomal Adam....

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Y-chromosome Noah, creationists will claim.

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Which only goes to show that scientists are all evil, Christian-bashing atheists. If they had any knowledge of god at all, they would have known that the male lineage was reduced to a single progenitor in Noah and named the Y-chromosome ancestor accordingly rather than simply going along with the "Eve" metaphor of "first human" and taking her complement to be "Adam."Proof positive that science has an agenda to disprove god. for those who don't get it.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Thanks fo the info. This was kinda what I was trying to get at: mitochondrial eve was not alone. I didn't want to comment on the date that she was around though (the 6,000 year mark was one the Hangdawg had dug up from a Creo website), because I didn't have the data to hand. From the point of view of the mitochondria, 'eve' is the source of all our mitochondria. The point I was trying to get across was that we can show that 'eve' also inherited her mitochondria from somebody who could trace their lineage back to a 'mitochondrial ape' (if you like)

Thank you for your reply. I've seen this a few places, most recently here:
How Old is Humanity? I think this has even been done on some animals that give similar dates. So the problem for your theory is that when you look at the differences every kind (actually not every as this is still being researched) of organism appears to have had a single common set of parents a few millinea ago. Why would all populations be whittled down to one family line a few millinea ago? The problem for my theory is that when you look at the similarities it seems everything evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago. Why, if everything has only been evolving for a few millinea would two different organisms have the same mutations?And since I still haven't learned enough I can't answer either of these questions to anyone's satisfaction. I'll just have to keep reading about the subject. For now it seems like mine is the bigger problem to overcome.