Paper: Genetics Confirms the Recent, Supernatural Creation of Adam and Eve

Shared Genetic “Mistakes”?

To make the point from a different angle, the members of BioLogos have made a host of claims on their website about shared “pseudogenes” and other types of purported shared biological “mistakes” in apes and humans. In fact, two of the three main “facts” that the website lists as genetic evidence for human evolution involve an implicit statement about function.³⁰ In reality, hardly any actual experiments have been performed on the billions of DNA letters in humans and chimpanzees. “Pseudogene” actually represents a premature label for a particular segment of DNA that resembles a broken gene but which had never been experimentally tested for function. Thus, virtually all claims that BioLogos and other evolutionists have made about genetic “mistakes” are not arguments for evolution but bald assertions without a basis in experimental fact. Technically, this would make these arguments pseudoscience. However, for the sake of discussion, we’re willing to entertain these claims as predictions stemming from the assumption thatevolution is true.

Conversely, from the assumptions about human ancestry inherent to the YEC model, creationists have published a testable, predictive model of genetic function³¹ (see references for details). For the particular DNA differences that we examined, we expect them to function in each organism’s respective biology, whereas the evolutionary model claims that these particular DNA sequences are functionally neutral and are a reflection, therefore, of ancestry alone. Since precious few experiments have actually been done on genetic function, we now have a basis for doing a type-1 experiment in the future. By experimentally changing these sequences, we can evaluate whether or not these differences are functional — and confirm or reject the predictions of each origins model.

For other DNA sequences, a few experiments have been performed, and the trajectory is not looking good for evolution. For example, after the human DNA sequence was elucidated in 2001, it was widely proclaimed that the vast majority of our billions of DNA letters were useless, non-functional leftovers of our evolutionary heritage and therefore called “junk” DNA.³² However, scientists didn’t actually do any experimental tests on the billions of letters until the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project was initiated in 2003. The first tier of ENCODE only examined about 1% of the human genome as an initial test, and they found preliminary evidence for pervasive function for the vast majority of those billions of letters.³³ Then after extending this type of research to the entire human genome, using mostly human cell lines (not fresh tissues from living humans) they reported in 2012 that at least 80% of the genome had significant levels of biochemical function.³⁴ It wasn’t useless junk after all.

Many new discoveries in recent years are now pushing this level of functionality even higher. The leader of the ENCODE project, Ewan Birney, is predicting that the human genome will soon prove to be 100% functional.³⁵ Needless to say, the traditional neo-Darwinian evolutionists outside the practical biomedical genetics community of ENCODE are outraged that the data is not supporting their dogmatic evolutionary claims.³⁶

In addition to these genome-wide results, other studies focusing on specific examples of “poster child” evolutionary pseudogenes regularly damage the credibility of the evolutionary claims. For example, the beta-globin pseudogene has obvious evidence for function,³⁷ and one of the favorite pseudogene examples (e.g., vitellogenin) of the BioLogos geneticist, Dennis Venema, can also no longer be labeled a non-functional relic.

Specifically, Venema claimed, “Humans have the remains of a gene devoted to egg yolk production in our DNA in exactly the place that evolution would predict.”³⁸ But recent research has exposed this as nearly impossible to reconcile with the facts.³⁹ The supposed evidence for this “egg yolk” gene is so pitiful that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have seriously entertained this hypothesis in the first place. It’s like identifying the letter “e” in the Bible, finding the same letter in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and then claiming that the books were modified from a common ancestor — you really have to stretch your imagination to accept this claim. Conversely, there is so little DNA remnant of the egg yolk gene that it requires a real strain of the imagination to see why some evolutionists pursued this line of reasoning in the first place. Current data suggest that they mistook a functional DNA sequence (enhancer element) inside a genomic address messenger gene involved with brain tissue function, for a non-functional egg yolk gene “remnant.”⁴⁰ Not surprisingly, the BioLogos community has downplayed the significance of these accumulating discoveries and tried to turn the tables on creationists with clever rhetorical games. Rather than admit the obvious damaging implications for evolution,⁴¹ the BioLogos staff has turned the argument around and challenged creationists to explain the remaining data that BioLogos claimed demonstrated non-function.⁴¹ In fact, Dennis Venema recently went so far as to claim, “Having the complete genome sequences for a variety of great apes makes looking for additional shared mutations a trivial exercise, and it is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of examples that could be used.”⁴²

But the BioLogos rejoinder misses the big picture and the point. First, preliminary biochemical evidence for function does not exist merely for the two examples of pseudogenes that we discussed. It exists for at least ~80% of all the pseudogenes in humans.⁴³ And the other 20% may still yet be found to be functional in some human tissue or under some physiological condition yet to be studied . . . and there are many. That’s the catch: many noncoding RNA genes (like pseudogenes) are only expressed under certain conditions.

Second, challenging creationists to explain the remaining examples of “non-function” assumes that actual experiments have been performed that demonstrate non-function. They have not. The reality is that we have only just begun to uncover the functionality of the human genome. Consider just how many experiments would need to be performed to conclude with any sort of confidence that a particular set of DNA sequences has zero function. The number of possible scenarios in which a DNA sequence might plausibly function is now proving to be enormous. For example, in the short nine-month window of time that represents human embryonic development, a single cell turns into a fully formed baby that contains hundreds of cell types that must execute an unimaginable number of cellular tasks. Surely the developing baby calls upon enormous swaths of DNA code to execute this developmental program — and then silences or repurposes them for the remainder of its life via another type of code (a code which is being studied by investigators in a scientific field termed “epigenetics”).⁴⁴ The dynamic use of DNA sequence during development is very different than the vast majority of DNA sequence use in the adult. Experimentally testing a DNA sequence during each of these unique windows of time in which sections of DNA are used and then silenced would be an enormous (and morally questionable) experiment. However, expressed RNA sequences have been analyzed in organ donors, aborted fetal tissue, and embryonic stem cells, with the latter two involving the murder of innocent babies. Nevertheless, these morbid data have only served to increase the known functionality and complexity of the human genome. In addition, until experiments are performed in living humans, which is also unethical, it is both inappropriate and scientifically uninformed to claim “non-function” for human DNA. In short, the recent decade of experimental results on human DNA sequences that demonstrate biochemical evidence for function are just the beginning of our understanding as to the complexity and function of the genome. Perhaps the most important point that can be taken from all this is the trajectory of these results — we watched the scientific community go from claiming high levels of non-function in the early 2000s to claiming evidence for nearly pervasive function just a decade later. This suggests that more experiments will only increase the percentage of human DNA sequence that performs a biological function just as the current leader of the ENCODE project is predicting. This upward trajectory does not bode well for evolution, a fact that the BioLogos community is very reticent to admit.

Neanderthal Ancestry?

On a side note, related to the question of human-ape ancestry is the question of the relationships between Neanderthals and modern humans. Interestingly, most people would be surprised to know that evolutionists consider Neanderthals to be fully human, hence they are given the technical name “archaic humans” as opposed to modern contemporary humans. An increasing number of publications claim to have recovered DNA from ancient human or human-like samples, and the comparison of these DNA samples with those of modern humans could inform the ancestry question.

Though YEC advocates and evolutionists both agree that modern humans and Neanderthals had a common ancestor (YE creationists would say that Neanderthals are post-Flood descendants of Adam and Eve), these two positions disagree on when the Neanderthals lived — tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago (evolutionary model) versus about 4,500 years or less (YEC model). Evidence for a prehistoric⁴⁵ human population could add credence to the evolutionary claim that human ancestry stretches far back in time — so far back that it touches on the boundaries of an alleged divergence from an ape lineage. Time is the magical key to the evolutionary equation, despite the fact that no viable human-ape transitional forms exist in the fossil record, as discussed in a separate chapter.

Without going into great technical detail, the short answer to the question of what Neanderthal DNA implies regarding the origins issue is that Neanderthal and ancient DNA samples appear to be too degraded and often untrustworthy for use in rigorous genetic analyses. In addition, analyses are perpetually plagued with DNA contamination from microorganisms and modern human DNA from lab workers.⁴⁶ Finally, no one knows the rate at which Neanderthal DNA changes from generation to generation — and it might change at a rate much faster than that reported for modern human individuals.⁴⁷

As things stand now, the most credible research comparing Neanderthals to modern humans merely shows that their DNA is human. The dating of the bones from the sites in which Neanderthals are found are not based on DNA, but other types of spurious data, and the evolutionists are constantly changing the dates of the material found in these locations — a fact in and of itself that shows how subjective the whole process really is.

Summary

To summarize, on the question of human-ape common ancestry, all of the claimed evolutionary evidences are type-2 or type-3 experiments that fail to eliminate the main competing hypothesis, YEC (Table 2). Instead of being a minor side issue in the bigger human ancestry debate, this very poor scientific track record for evolution represents a systematic failure across the board. In nearly every type of genetic comparison that can be performed between humans and chimpanzees, the evolutionary model has made erroneous predictions (Table 3).

In an attempt to move the discussion forward and into the realm of type-1 experiments, creationists have published a testable, predictive model of DNA function from a YEC perspective on one of the few remaining areas of DNA function that has not yet been thoroughly investigated⁴⁸ (see reference for technical details). If the evolutionists are as confident in their ideas as they claim, then we invite them to publish similar predictions of genetic function, and then to do a head-to-head experiment to test both of the ideas in the laboratory. If evolutionists are unwilling to engage in the experiment that we have proposed, at a minimum, they need to propose a different type-1 experiment.

In short, on the question of human ancestry, evolutionists have a history of making erroneous scientific predictions; they have yet to articulate a genuine genetic test by which to eliminate YEC from the discussion; and their model does not look promising in light of the trajectory of experimental results in areas where evolution and YEC could theoretically be compared head-to-head.

II. How Many: A Population or a Pair?

For many years, the discussion of the number of individuals that spawned the modern human race was not accessible to science. Fossils don’t record population sizes, and the antiquity and geography of our ancestors offer little in the way of direct data on the number of individuals alive on the planet at the dawn of Homo sapiens. Only with the advent of modern genetics have scientists been able to more directly explore this question.

However, the raw genetic data say nothing about ancestral population sizes. The evolutionary conclusion that humanity arose from a large population⁴⁹ rather than a pair of individuals is a consequence of the arbitrary constraints that evolutionists bring to bear on the question. Implicit in the evolutionary claims is the assumption that DNA differences can arise only via the process of copying errors (mutations) that we discussed in the previous section. In other words, under the evolutionary model, the immediate reason why you are genetically different from your parents is that you inherited DNA from each parent. However, according to evolutionary reasoning, the ultimate reason why genetic differences exist at all in the human population is mutations in the distant past.

If you insist on this evolutionary assumption and forbid the consideration of any other hypotheses on the origin of genetic differences, then you are almost forced to conclude that humanity could not have arisen from two people in the last few thousand years. Millions of DNA letter differences exist among humans (about 3–5 million per person on average, which is about 0.1% of the total human DNA sequence),⁵⁰ and the measured 60 mutations per generation can’t produce this much diversity among humans in just 6,000 years, assuming that mutation rates have always been constant.

However, it doesn’t take much reflection to see that this assumption is shortsighted. Let’s apply it to the YEC model and see how well it works. If we assume, for sake of argument, that mankind did indeed arise from two supernaturally created people (regardless of how long ago it was), and if we further stipulate that genetic differences can arise only via mutations, then we would be forced to conclude that Adam and Eve did not have any genetic differences between them (aside from the X and Y chromosomes, since these are involved in specifying gender).

But this hypothetical scenario leads to some bizarre conclusions. If Adam and Eve decided to fulfill God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, they would have passed on two identical DNA sequences to their offspring. Aside from the few mutations that may have arisen (representing 0.00000001% of the billions of DNA⁵¹ letters in our cells — a negligible fraction), Adam and Eve would have basically produced copies of themselves — not slightly modified versions of themselves as we are used to observing in our own children, but identical copies of themselves. Offspring that are completely identical to parents receive a particular label in genetics: clones. Cloning as a means to fulfill the dominion mandate is a strange position to maintain. With all the debate that currently exists over the ethics of human cloning, it is somewhat disturbing to think that God instructed the first man and woman to fill the earth by this process.

A very simple alternative hypothesis resolves the conundrum and also makes straightforward scientific sense: God could have created Adam and Eve with genetic differences from the start (Figure 1). In fact, all of us possess not just 3 billion letters of DNA in our cells. With few exceptions such as red blood cells, the cells of our body possess two versions of our 3 billion letters, which means that each of our cells has 6 billion letters. Each parent passes on only 3 billion in sperm or egg, keeping the total of 6 billion letters constant across generations. Going back in time, Adam would likely have had the same cellular arrangement — two versions of his 3 billion letters — and the same would have been true of Eve.

This arrangement makes sense of the DNA differences that exist in the world today. Before the Fall and after the Fall, the two different copies of Adam and Eve’s DNA would have been reshuffled via at least two processes termed recombination and gene conversion, making each offspring unique and leading to diversity within the human race. After the Fall, mutations (perhaps at a rate of 60 mutations per generation) would have occurred and added to the genetic diversity in their children,⁵² and leading to the production of diverse offspring (in contrast to cloning). Calculations within the parameters of this model match the worldwide DNA diversity that we observe today.⁵³ Thus, to claim that the millions of DNA differences that separate each person from another somehow invalidates the clear teaching of Scripture about the origin of mankind from two people about 6,000 years ago is scientifically unsupportable. In fact, this type of creation model is considerably more supportive of the genetic paradigm of human diversity than the evolutionary model, as we will show.

The BioLogos website lists at least two other lines of evidence⁵⁴ in support of their population-not-pair contention, but each of these falls prey to poor logic or unsound science, just like the argument above. One of the claims deals with a subsection of DNA that is repetitive in nature.⁵⁵ But in attempting to explain the origin and arrangement of these sequences, the BioLogos writers assume human-ape common ancestry. Thus, as an argument against the biblical position that humans were created as a pair and distinct from the apes, it is nothing more than circular reasoning.

The second claim⁵⁶ deals with the rate at which sections of DNA are swapped during sperm and egg cell production (the technical terms of two swapping processes are genetic recombination and gene conversion), but the conclusions that the BioLogos writers reach is based on erroneous assumptions and outdated science. With respect to the latter, in making their claim, the evolutionists assume only a single process of reshuffling DNA sequences (e.g., recombination) when, in fact, there are at least two (the second and, apparently, much faster process of reshuffling is gene conversion).⁵⁷ Had they included this faster process in their calculations, they would have discovered that mankind’s genetic history is much shorter than they claimed.⁵⁸

In summary, just like the evolutionary arguments for human-ape common ancestry, the evolutionary arguments for mankind’s origin from a large population (rather than an original pair) are nothing more than type-3 experiments, which are useless in adjudicating between creation and evolution. There is no scientific evidence that we arose from a group of individuals rather than from Adam and Eve. If evolutionists wish to continue making their claims and be taken seriously, they need to propose a type-1 experiment.

Conversely, by starting with the assumption that God created Adam and Eve with genetic diversity from the start, the YEC model can easily explain the existing genetic diversity among living humans. In fact, the explanatory power of these human DNA findings is so strong that they have led to testable predictions for other species.⁵⁹

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