Biblical Genetics

The opponents of biblical creation have made some glaring errors in their criticisms of prior work on human-chimpanzee genetic differences. Specifically, several of their claims are in conflict with both theory and experiment. I document these here in detail. They have also shown a rudimentary understanding of how scientific data needs to be ‘weighted’ and they completely misunderstand how BLAST is supposed to work. Despite the high level of vitriol I have received so far, I submit this detailed analysis of their work for your review.

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This is the second installment in a now multi-part series on human and chimpanzee genetic differences. I had a lot of pushback from my last episode, including negative reviews posted by Gutsick Gibbon, Creation Myths, and Dapper Dinosaur. Unperturbed, I push on. Here, I lay out some of the arguments in more detail and discuss many of the problems people are having when using one particular program, BLAST, to assess similarity between the two species. I will address the results of Gutsick Gibbon specifically in Part 3, but this was filmed before I got most of my experimental results back.

Links (many of these are for Part 3 also):

Background:

My first installment:

The three attempted rebuttal videos:

Several anti-creationists have made a hobby out of attacking creationists. Their best efforts, however, have generally failed. For example, see:

Unperturbed, “Gutsick Gibbon” has recently tried to discredit Dr Jeffrey Tomkins and his work on human-chimp genetic similarities:

In my analysis of her analysis, I note several flaws in her logic. Note, however, that I deliberately ignored several of her main objections. This was not because I do not have answers, mind you, but because I wanted to focus on the most salient questions. Ignored were questions about why God would have included all the chimp-like non-coding DNA when he made humans and questions about properly weighting samples.

The most recent comparison I am aware of claimed 96.6% similarity between humans and chimps:

This comes from the laboratory of Richard Buggs. This is much higher than Tomkins’ estimates, that, with one exception, are generally in the 80s. However, I know the first author on that paper, so I called him up to discuss his methods. Sure enough, he used entirely different methodology than earlier work from that same laboratory (which arrived at an estimate of ~85%). To reach the higher percentage similarity, they cut out everything humans and chimps do not share, including the centromeres, telomeres, copy number variations of many annotated genes, and hundreds of thousands of small insertions and deletions that must be included to align the two genomes. This “apples to apples” comparison is fine, as long as everybody acknowledges that the true similarity is necessarily less than 96.6%. Yet, if the percent similarity is much less than 99%, there is no way, mathematically, to explain how so many millions of difference arose in the (imagined) 6.5 million years since our last common ancestor.

Additional links:

Dr Rob outlines three aspects of genetics that tell us that, scientifically, the human species is doomed to eventual extinction. These include the rate of mutation accumulation in our population over time, the inability of natural selection to remove most of those mutations, and the sheer number of children that would be required to remove the mutations, given perfect selection. These all argue that there is no hope, collectively, in any evolutionary process. Thus, biblically, the only hope for us individually is through belief in Jesus.

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Dr Rob discusses a fundamental aspect of neo-Darwinism (Fisher’s Theorem of Natural Selection) and how it fails mathematically. First postulated in 1930, Fisher’s idea was promoted as something as firm and settled as the 2nd Law. Problem is, he made several incorrect assumptions that invalidate the whole thing. When you add realistic mutations to the scenario (e.g., Basener and Sanford’s ‘Fisher’s Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations’), you see that the net trajectory of evolution is downward. Why did it take 90 years to figure this out?

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Dr Rob waxes eloquent about some amazing new revelations involving DNA damage repair systems. Researchers recently turned AI onto the human genome, probing the genes and gene systems that are involved in maintaining and repairing DNA. The results shocked everyone. Many more genes that anyone thought are required, and entire new repair systems were discovered. So what came first, DNA or the amazing repair systems required to maintain DNA that are, in turn, coded into DNA? The point is that these systems are absolutely necessary for living things, yet they are also incredibly complicated. They would never be expected to arise without help, but without them the entire DNA system (not just the code, but the DNA itself) could never exist. Evolution, in this case, simply fails to explain much of anything.

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Everybody loves genealogy, but we are severely limited in what we can know about our family histories. There are two main reasons for this. First, family records only go back so far. Even the longest family trees can’t go back thousands of years. Second, personal genetics testing can only tell you who your closest relatives are. Yes, genetics can tell you what population you came from, but that is a matter of statistics, not documentation. This is not a problem for belief in the Bible. Adam and Eve are still the (sole) ancestors of everyone who has ever lived, it’s just that you cannot prove it with what we have available to us today.

Notes and links:

Science advances in fits and starts, and it sometimes takes a detour onto a dead-end road. Bacteria represent one of those roads. Studying bacteria gave us a sense that we could easily figure out biology, that there was a direct connection between genes and behavior, and that life was simple. Granted, there was no other way to get started, but the study of bacteria slowed down our understanding of higher organisms in many ways. From the ‘one gene, one enzyme’ hypothesis to the thought that living systems can be reduced to a binary decision tree, many things about bacteria misled us and prevented science from seeing that the majority of the information in the genomes of higher organisms is in the non-coding DNA.

Genetic engineering is a controversial topic. From vaccines to fetal cells to transhumanism, the debate rages. Yet, there are certain aspects to genetic engineering that are demonstrably good. How are we supposed to make heads or tails of this new technology, especially since it is impacting every aspect of our lives? I thought that a simple explanation (at least, as simple as I could make it!) of the things I did while earning my PhD could help increase our understanding. I, as a conservative Christian, made the ‘frankenfish’. I stole the genes for the bright green and red fluorescent proteins in corals, engineered them into bacteria, then into fish. There is nothing inherently difficult in what I did, but there were a LOT of steps. Perhaps, after this explanation, we can have a more civil discussion on the pros and cons.

Links and notes: