Why "Y-haplogroup Adam" and "mtDNA Eve" Calculations Don't Matter for Origins Questions

The "Most Recent Common Ancestor" (MRCA) is an estimate of how long ago a group of organisms could have had a single ancestor, whether measuring on the male or female side (or both). It is calculated through a measure of how diverse (through acquired mutations) a gene group is in a species versus how often mutations in a given area of the genome occur. Studies between species, such as chimpanzee and human, assume macro-evolution but other studies use measured mutation rates in the studied group, such as from grandfather to grandson.

In the case of humans, there is a wide range of dates, but the MRCA for Y-haplogroups (passed from father to son only) are at least 100,000 years in the past and may be double that. That is because there is an outlier, Y-haplogroup A00, which is different enough from the others so that it could have taken much more time for the mutations to arise between it and it's closest Y-Haplogroup kin (the other "A"s). Only a very few people from west Africa have this Y-Haplogroup. On the other hand, almost everyone in Eurasia is from a haplogroup of much more recent origin. Maybe 50,000 years or so.

Mothers pass mtDNA on to their daughters only. Thus it is a measure of female diversity sometimes called "mtDNA Eve." This measure is also at least 100,000 years old, with 150,000 years being the more recent estimate. 

These calculations are not just being made with humans. Here is a study which calculated the "Y-chromosome Adam" and "mtDNA Eve" for the great apes. It concluded that the "Y-chromosome Adam" for Chimps was over a million years ago- there is a lot of variety in Chimp Y-chromosomes. Not so gorillas, who had a coalescence time of 100,000 years. Less than humans unless you throw out the divergent A00 samples. 

These studies are deceptive for a number of reasons. In overall genetics I understand that humans are far less diverse than apes. Yet except for chimps, that study produced comparable numbers for MRCA for apes and humans. Yet comparing humans and apes in population genetics is comparing apples and oranges. We don't share the same recent history. Historical and near-historical times have been a period of massive expansion of humans. Except for one period of Y-chromosome loss around seven thousand years ago it is likely that few rare genetic variants have been lost in humans. The last 35,000 years have been prosperous ones for our species overall, and besides that on blip the last 10-12 thousand years have been spectacular.

With apes the record is the exact opposite. They have been driven to endangerment of extinction while humanity has been growing. Many minor Y-haplogroup types and mtDNA types which existed in these apes just a few thousand years ago are now probably extinct. Humans have lost some too, but overall humans have prospered so much that almost all Y-haplogroups around three thousand years ago are probably still around today and in greater numbers. Suppose Orangutans are driven to extinction (ignore those in captivity for this thought-experiment). When the last few families are left on a single island, the MRCA will be the great-grandpa of that small group of families. This explains why the graphic in the study (which I linked to above) shows that the Y-haplogroup "Adam" for Orangutans was only 200,000 years ago even if the species itself has been around longer. 

So the MRCA does not tell us anything about when a specific species came to exist. It could have come to exist long long before its measured MRCA. There could have been gorillas around long before 100,000 years ago even though the Y-chromosome MRCA , gorilla "Adam", was only 100,000 years ago.

The reverse is also true. A type of creature could also be much younger than its Y-haplogroup or mtDNA MRCA ("Adam" and "Eve). This is true under naturalistic evolutionary assumptions and it is also true under the most creationist assumptions of the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in the book.

The reason for this is that new types do not have to originate (with or without Divine help) from a single founding pair. A new type could begin from a population rather than a pair. And that population could start with more diversity than any one male and female founder. Thus calculations back to the time when there was only a single couple would be calculations back to the time of a fictional event. 

For example, suppose someone took a handful of Shih-tzus and bred them with a handful of Corgis. These are dog breeds developed in the recent past, perhaps the last 500-800 years. But each breed was developed from opposite ends of the dog family which goes back over 10,000 years. If this population crossed and produced a new hybrid breed, the hybrid would have greater diversity than either founding population (Shih-tzus or Corgis). It may have features identical to neither. It would be its own thing. The breed may not exist until this year. But if we ran DNA tests it would show the MRCA to be even further back in the past than the date that either parent breed was developed. That's because it would go back to the time when Corgis and Shih-tzus had a common ancestor, maybe 10,000 years ago. It would just look like the population spent most of its existence in an "extreme bottleneck". 

That's just what the human population looks like. The human mtDNA and Y-DNA seem to have a MRCA which goes at least 100,000 years in the past and 200,000 years might be a closer estimate. At the same time, we are all very similar in our nuclear DNA. It looks like our species had a long, long bottleneck. So the current belief is that Homo Sapiens spent most of its existence with a very small effective breeding population size of only 10,000 or less (note that if all individuals in this group are genetically super-alike the actual population size could be much larger than this). 

It isn't reasonable to think that we descend from a population that barely hung on for such vast stretches of time and then suddenly found a way to become the most common and dominant large animal on the planet. The simpler explanation is that, however we got here whether creation or evolution, we are a relatively recent arrival. Younger even than our Y-haplogroup and mtDNA MCRA date would indicate. 

The evidence indicates that whatever was walking around on two legs that looked something like us 150,000 years ago was still very different from us in how they acted, spoke, and perhaps in other ways. Whether this is because we are the evolutionary product of small segments of two hominid populations subsequently mixing and producing something new, or God creating something new in a small population of existing hominids, or even creating them anew with the barest of genetic information as a template, the bottom line is that there is no reason to think "humans" (in the sense of beings like us) go back to these calculated MRCA dates. Those dates can give a false picture. Beings like us were formed, by whatever means, when the evidence indicates that there were beings around who acted and thought like us. And that is much closer to 40K ago than 150K ago.

In conclusion, unless a species originated from a pair, MRCA for mtDNA and Y-haplogroups don't tell us anything about the origin of a species. They are just a measurement of time back to an event that never existed. This is because they could represent a time long after that species was formed (as with gorillas) or a time long before one was formed, as well may be the case with humans.

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(note: the Christ-centered model for early Genesis has humanity starting as a population and not just a single pair as it has people inside the Garden- Adam and Eve- and people outside the garden- whoever Cain was afraid of)

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Creation-Evolution Wars. To Some Extent a False Dichotomy?

Why the Christ-Centered Model Destroys Skeptic's Arguments on Christ

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Genesis 1:1 and Creation Ex Nihilo Under Attack

For the last two-thousand years, Christians have held that scripture teaches that God created the universe out of nothing, or at the least "things which are seen are made from that which is not seen" (Heb. 11:3). The great majority of Jewish rabbis have agreed with this view. One of the main verses of scripture to support this position is the first verse in the Bible. It is almost universally translated as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Christian apologetics has gotten some mileage out of this ever since the Big Bang (with or without hyperinflation) has been revealed to be the most consistent scientific explanation for how the cosmos appeared. The universe had a beginning. Other creation accounts in other faiths consistently have the gods fashioning the cosmos out of some pre-existing material. Some Christians once considered the "Big-Bang" to be an anti-Christian idea, but over time most have realized that since it is confirming "Creation Ex-Nihilo" that it actually harmonizes with scripture. Atheists and naturalists realized this much more quickly, and spent decades trying to find a way to shoe-horn an eternal universe or at least eternal multiverse, into the data.

That being so, forgive me if I am skeptical of recent claims that Genesis 1:1-2 has been mistranslated over the centuries and should actually be translated in a way which suggests that the God of the Bible fashioned the universe out of a pre-existing, though chaotic, material just like in those other creation myths. Here are the new alternative translations from the Wiki article on Genesis 1:1-2a, and the classic translation of verse one.

1. As a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning (In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth). ED: THIS IS THE CLASSIC TRANSLATION

2. As a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless).

3. Taking all of Genesis 1:2 as background information (When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth being untamed and shapeless, God said, Let there be light!).[4]

I find it just too convenient that after twenty centuries with hardly any dispute, only in the last few decades has there been any serious challenge to the idea that Gen. 1:1 teaches creation ex nihilo. I'm not saying that no one else ever proposed these alternative translations, once every few centuries someone might suggest so, but the view never got traction. The text just doesn't support it, and it is doubtful that it even allows for it. Only after it gets embarrassing for the skeptics that the Bible stands out from other creation stories in a way which is confirmed by modern scientific observation do the faux-sophisticates dust off these hypotheses.

Look, I have no loyalty to modern translations when they obviously don't fit the underlying Hebrew or Greek, my book is evidence of that. But this effort seems very forced and an attempt to make the Genesis account just like other Ancient Near East Creation stories where uncreated matter existed but was in a chaotic and primordial state before the gods brought order.

These Hebrew scholars are now claiming that they have learned that in certain circumstances the text can be translated so that it is describing an already existing condition. OK, so the matter existed in a sorry state before God spoke His word. But that doesn't mean that the already existing condition wasn't also created by God, as the traditional translation indicates. God created the universe Before the First Day. The creation week is describing His work ON a universe which He had previously created. That's all the verse is saying and attempts to make it more than that torture the text.

For example, the latter two translations above start with the English word "When". Well, there is a Hebrew word translated "when" (as well as "for" and a couple of other things) (more than one really) and this word is not in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1. They stuck in an English word where there was no Hebrew word there. Then, to start verse two, they leave off the "and" which joins the condition of the earth to God creating it. In the Hebrew of this verse there is a "waw" character there which means "conjunction" (and). In other words- the "and" is in the Hebrew text, but the new translations leave it out, while also starting the verse with a word which is not in the text.

Do you see the first word to the right (Hebrew is read right to left) which is translated "in the beginning"? The exact same form of that word is used several times in Jeremiah (and nowhere else in the bible). Each time it is also translated "In the beginning" or rarely "at the beginning". It is never translated "When in the beginning" and if you read it like that in these other places it is awkward grammatically. Unbelievably, some have tried to use the fact that "when" can legitimately be translated from verse 2:4 to argue that it should be in verse 1:1 as well, even though they are not the same word! I've also heard it argued that it fits better with the pagan Enuma Elish to translate it that way! Talk about reaches! What does this text actually say?

See that character to the far left that looks like a colon at the end of the word for earth? That is the sof passuk, equivalent of a period in Hebrew. So if "When" starts that verse, and again the characters indicating "when" do not appear, it must be "When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (PERIOD). " These alternate translations don't account for that!

Grammar in other languages can be tricky, but that is an awkward fit in any language. It isn't a proper sentence. At most it could be a sentence fragment in answer to a previous question (obviously not) or a title. In English of course, titles don't need periods. But if it is a title, that doesn't explain why the next sentence begins with a conjunction. "And the earth was formless and void...". What is it conjuncting with if not the previous sentence? These alternate translations have to twist the text and ignore how the same word form is used elsewhere.

Up to this point I would imagine that all creationists are cheering me on. But all of this raises another issue, because if the traditional translation is correct, it means that initial conditions of creation, before God spoke His word into it, were far from perfect. Regardless of which way the verse is translated, it poses a problem for Young Earth Creationism. They think God created the universe as a place of sinless and deathless perfection. In their theology, there was no physical death before the fall of Adam. Either way you look at it though, the text doesn't say that. Creation started off a bad place to be that was increasingly made better by His Word entering that creation. At the sixth day He appointed man as His representative to finish His work of subduing the earth and exercising dominion over it.....confirmation that despite all the ordering He had done it was still a somewhat unruly place, save for the garden.

It will be interesting to see if YEC even give up on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to preserve a theological framework which is inconsistent with the initial state of the universe in Genesis 1:2. They either have to give up the idea that God created the universe, demoting Him into a fashioner of what already existed apart from Him as the Gnostics and other ANE cultures thought, or they have to jettison their ideas about the universe being perfect before the fall of Adam. What I pray they give up is theology which isn't really in the bible concerning early Genesis and instead adopt the Christ-centered model, which gloriously demonstrates that Genesis isn't just another ANE myth, but the inspired word of God.

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Post Script-

Dr. Henry Sun was on a YouTube video from the "What Your Pastor Didn't Tell You" channel and he was defending the re-translation based on the idea that it was a construct. The young host asked him if that mattered. Here is my response which I put in the thread. Dr. Sun did not reply even though he replied to others in the thread.....

You asked the right question at 23:26. I question whether Dr. Sun has the right answer. More likely it DOES NOT MATTER whether it is construct or not because Hebrew has these groups of characters and words meant to be taken as a single thought and put with those in the next section. I don't say this as an expert in Hebrew, but it is something elementary. So using what the bible Hub interlinear shows.... "In the beginning of Created God - the heavens and the earth". You have two thoughts there. The first is taken and applied to the second. Even if the "of" is there, it still means "of the heavens and the earth: IMHO. 'The beginning of the heavens and the earth was God creating them' is still the thought that is being expressed. "And the earth was formless and void" starts with a conjunctive "AND". It is connected to the first part. "“When God began to create the heavens and the earth,” doesn't match with the conjunctive "and" which starts verse 2. Not sure it would even need one if what it is trying to say is that the earth was formless and void when God began to "create" it. Verse three is where the actual work, but not BARA, creating work, begins. That starts with a consecutive and, showing that it is referring to something happening AFTER verses 1 and 2. Verse two has His spirit brooding or hovering. He isn't doing any creating there. Even if it means He "began creating" then He "began creating" sometime before the start of verse 3, because v 3 starts off with the consectuive "and". Therefore this translation is nonsensical. It is describing Him as beginning the creating and then in v 2 describes Him as NOT creating but just brooding or hovering. Then there is a time movement, and the subsequent event (which isn't even "creating", that verb is only used on days five and six) which is shaping an already existing world, begins. The use of bara only on days five and six is another reason why this new translation does not add up. He didn't "create" the heavens OR the earth on any of the six days. Rather, other words are used to describe His action. The only things created during that week were animals of the sea and sky and humans on days five and six respectively. This supports the idea that the "creating" of the heavens and the earth came before the first "day". After that He 'worked on' or fashioned the heavens and the earth which He had previously created. His examples of "when the sentence structure was the same and it is translated "when"" are I am sorry to say, misleading. For example Numbers 3:1 was his first cite and his translation says "When the Lord spoke to Moses". But the actual word used is a combination of the Hebrew "Be" and a form of "Yom". So that a more precise translation would be "in the day the Lord spoke with Moses" or "in the year" or "in the time" the Lord spoke with Moses. So the Hebrew "Be" combined with some time refferent is "In the ___________". Well, if the time referrent is "beginning" then the translation should be "in the beginning".

************************ Update: this article shows the details of the issue and why the best solution is a tweaking of the translation in a way that retains the intent of the traditional translation rather than one of the convoluted new translations that have their own problems "Originally, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.... The same prefix also means "at, so it could also be "At commencement, God created the heavens and the earth....." or "In A beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"....implying there could be mulitple universes each with an indpendent supernatural realm. That's even if there is a problem with the original translation. As I have said, Numbers 3:1 literally means "in the day" and it has the same "be" prefix as is found in be-reshith in Gen. 1:1. It seems like it doesn't have to say "ba" to be translated "in THE (time period)".

Get the book.

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What Does this Failure to Develop Resistance Say About Unaided Macro-Evolution?

So it turns out that this tuberculosis bacteria has been trying for seven decades to develop resistance to a particular anti-biotic that will still permit it to be viable- without success. This is equal to many millions of generations of bacteria in a population of many billions which were under stress due to the anti-biotic.

Does this say anything about the limits of purely natural evolution? I think so. Even if other bacteria species have made the jump and developed resistance to an anti-biotic (at the cost of reduced fitness otherwise) this one seems to have hit on a hard biological limit which unguided evolution cannot move it past. Surely this is not the only such hard limit in earth's living things. If this organism can't make this jump, how likely is it that the same mechanisms can cause a deer-like animal to develop into various types of whales in probably much fewer generations and far less tries?

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The Gene Changes Needed to Give Humans Big Brains Points to Design

There is a board I once frequented where I asked to quit getting notifications when I no longer wished to be associated with the board. In so doing, all my comments there got deleted, which I have no objection to and said so at the time. Still, I am glad a preserved some choice comments from a couple of threads. One thread concerned a study which reported on some amazing findings about the genetic differences between us and apes. On the thread I tried to point out that these differences aren't likely to be the product of mere chance with these comments about things said in the study. Quotes from the study in a white background and my comments on it shaded tan background below...

" they also didn’t see it in orangutans and found only truncated, inactive versions in our closest relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees." 

This is not a mere duplication. This is a crucial gene which does not exist except in chimps and gorillas, and then only in a truncated and inactive form. They said it somehow got “repaired” somewhere in the hominid line. You would think an inactive gene that was already truncated would collect more and more mutations until it was a real mess. But in this case when it gets turned back on it increases brain size? 

And check this quote out: 

"“What’s amazing is that there are many signaling pathways that control the development of the embryo and are completely conserved between species. The Notch signaling pathway is the oldest one. You can find it in every animal you look at. It has been used by developing embryos for as long as animals have existed. And yet, there is a very recent innovation in this pathway specifically in the human lineage, through NOTCH2NL,”

So the pathway is conserved in every animal species for hundreds of millions of years yet this quantum leap forward happened so far as we know just this once 3 million years ago? Is it not astounding that a path can be stable and essential for so long and then a game-changing improvement comes about via a repair to a long-deactivated and truncated gene? 

And that happening once is astounding enough, but did you catch this one?.. 

“The Vanderhaeghen team developed a tailored RNA sequencing analysis for specific and sensitive detection of human-specific genes in human fetal cerebral cortex. This allowed them to identify a repertoire of 35 genes unique to humans that are active during development of the cerebral cortex in humans, including NOTCH2NL genes.” 

THIRTY-FIVE functional genes unique to human linneage just on the development of our cerebral cortex. That they know of....

And it goes on like that. For those who will allow themselves the capacity to question whether humans are strictly the result of what we call "natural" evolutionary processes I think the results of the research point toward the answer being a resounding "no".

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The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event Another Problem for Naturalists

The Cambrian Explosion refers to a geologically short period of time in which every type of basic body plan (phylum) of all animals alive today - and quite a few others which are now extinct- show up in the fossil record. Many scientists say that this happened within a 30 million year time period- a long time to us but shockingly fast if we are counting on naturalistic evolutionary forces to produce dozens of new body plans. But it gets worse because other research suggests that the real innovation occurred in only 20 million years.

Even that number probably over-estimates the time it took for all these new phyla to show up. This is because it is only a calculation based on the fossils we have found in the fossil record. What if the new phylum which shows twenty million years after the Cambrian begins is really of a creature who was around much earlier, we just haven't found an earlier fossil of it yet? So the short length of time is liable to get shorter as we learn more.

Of course naturalists don't like what this implies, so they have been hard at work producing speculation about how the life forms of the previous era were not so different after all and basically dreaming up everything they can to make the case that the Cambrian Explosion wasn't such a big deal after all.

But it turns out they have another problem almost as big as the Cambrian Explosion and this one might be even harder to explain away. While all these new phyla show up in the Cambrian, they don't diversify for 40 million years. Each body plan has very few species with that plan. Then, all phyla start dramatically diversifying at once into new families. Its called "The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event" and it happened in an even shorter period of time than the Cambrian Explosion.

Now it turns out that this event too happened in a much narrower window of time than one might expect with known naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms. Here is how the link described it....

The early evolution of animal life on Earth is a complex and fascinating subject. The Cambrian Explosion (between about 540 to 510 million years ago) produced a stunning array of body plans, but very few separate species of each, notes Stigall. But nearly 40 million years later, during the Ordovician Period, this situation changed, with a rapid radiation of species and genera during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.

I think what they are trying not to say is that naturalists have two problems, not one, when it comes to explaining the diversification of life in the seas. The earth can bring forth living things after their kinds- there is a background sort of "evolution" going on, but the record also shows changes too big and too fast to reasonably explained by any known evolutionary method. It looks like at certain points, nature had help. Help to do things greater and faster than she can do on her own without it- we don't see that magnitude of rapid change now.

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