7/22/2018 Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1) - Blog Posts - The BioLogos Forum Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1) Blog Posts system (system) 2017-11-03 07:09:53 UTC #1 It's impossible to prove that we didn't descend from just two individuals. But the genetic evidence makes that scenario extremely unlikely. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/adam-eve-and- population-genetics-a-reply-to-dr-richard-buggs-part-1 Adam and Eve had Perfect Genomes (The Genetic Entropy Argument) What about embodied cognition? TedDavis (Dr. Ted Davis) 2017-11-03 13:52:59 UTC #2 Dennis, I appreciate the great clarity of your reply to Dr. Buggs–not that an absence of clarity has ever been something I would associate with your work. I hope that Discovery also tweets your reply to Dr. Buggs. They owe it to fair discourse to do exactly that much, since they are responsible for bringing Buggs’ concerns out of the academic tent and into their own, much larger tent. Otherwise, they might be skirting with the same danger that Buggs is worried about: that “of alienating Christians from science on the basis of a wrong interpretation of the current literature.” I resonate with that concern. That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to devote my professional life to helping Christians (and others too) understand the history better. Thank you for helping us understand the science better. DennisVenema (Dennis Venema) 2017-11-08 23:09:37 UTC #5 Thanks for your kind words, Ted. I’ve learned a lot from you over the past several years - I’m glad that I’ve been able to return the favour. John_Rood (John Rood) 2017-11-10 06:24:00 UTC #6 Thanks for this Dennis! The work you’re doing here is timely and invaluable. I’m glad to see you thoroughly engaging Dr. Buggs’ points, and I also appreciate the distinction between the matter of Adam’s existence and of being sole- progenitor. Many of us have, at one time or another, believed and/or put forward the idea that scripture says Adam is the sole-progenitor. I have the impression that scripture does not actually make that claim. (although, I think the meaning of Eve being the “mother of all the living” deserves some explanation…maybe that’s been addressed somewhere else on this site.) Maybe we would have double-checked our exegesis sooner if we had thought sooner about the sort of science being highlighted in this article. These implications from population genetics might not be obvious to many in my generation, but I imagine they might be obvious to many in the next generation…a generation that grows up in a world of CRISPR innovations and consumer genetic analysis like 23andMe. I really would hate to set them up for an unnecessary science vs faith crisis. For that reason, I’m especially thankful for your work. https://discourse.biologos.org/t/adam-eve-and-population-genetics-a-reply-to-dr-richard-buggs-part-1/37039/print 1/514 7/22/2018 Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1) - Blog Posts - The BioLogos Forum I’m currently still leaning toward affirming, not only that Adam was a real person, but more specifically the “de novo” creation of him. That seems like it’s compatible with what you’ve said, assuming Adam and Eve’s children intermarried into the existing hominid population. Daniel_Justesen (Daniel Lamdahl Justesen) 2017-11-10 08:53:17 UTC #7 Awesome response I was wondering myself why heterozygosity even mattered in this discussion since reducing the human species to just two people would restrict the max. of alleles pr. gene to 4. Knowing how YECs have responded to the decay rates of radioactive isotopes (used for radiometric dating) and how light could have reached us from stars millions of light years away, I imagine their response to the data put forward by Venema would be something like this:" well what if the mutation rate were a lot higher in the past?". But wouldn’t it require a highly hazardous(if not life-prohibiting) environment to produce mutation rates high enough to account for our current genetic diversity if we only descended from two people a few thousand years ago (or even several thousands)? I imagine it would. tallen_1 (Tim) 2017-11-10 14:39:51 UTC #8 Dennis, Quick question. There’s something I’m trying to wrap my head around and I’m not quite succeeding. Richard Buggs is a biologist who seems very well steeped in genetics. He has a number of publications in plant genetics in respected journals, including one in Nature (albeit not as a lead researcher). Yet he seems to make a rookie mistake in confusing heterozygosity with genetic diversity. Which, having read your response seems exactly the case. How does this happen? How does one progress through years of study and research only to fundamentally misunderstand a basic scientific tenet in their specialized field? I’m at a loss, so hoping you can connect some dots for me here. Thanks! RichardBuggs (Richard Buggs) 2017-11-10 15:46:06 UTC #10 Hi Dennis, Thank you for beginning to reply to my concerns. I very much look forward to continuing this discussion now that you have so graciously replied to my email. As you know, I blogged about this issue, reviewing chapter three of your book on 28th October at the Nature Ecology and Evolution Community. This allowed me to tackle the issue in more depth than I did in my email to you in May. This blog has already dealt with some of the issues you mention above. I have also responded to some comments on my blog at the Skeptical Zone here which provides further information. When I have more time I will post a longer response to your blog here on Biologos, but meanwhile, would refer you and your readers to the two links above. Best wishes, Richard DennisVenema (Dennis Venema) 2017-11-10 20:55:19 UTC #11 Thanks, Richard - and welcome to BioLogos! I very much appreciate your patience in waiting for this reply. RichardBuggs (Richard Buggs) 2017-11-12 21:38:43 UTC #12 Note: I have also published this text here in order to provide a stable and easily findable record: http://richardbuggs.com/response_to_Dennis_Venema_Biologos_PartI_Adam_Eve.html Dear Dennis, I am glad that we are now establishing a dialogue about the scientific credibility of a bottleneck of two at some point in the history of the human lineage. I am hoping that during the course of this discussion we will be able to examine in https://discourse.biologos.org/t/adam-eve-and-population-genetics-a-reply-to-dr-richard-buggs-part-1/37039/print 2/514 7/22/2018 Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1) - Blog Posts - The BioLogos Forum detail the claims that you make in chapter three of Adam and the Genome, and that you will respond to all the critiques and questions that I have raised in my email to you and my blog at Nature Ecology and Evolution Community. This Part I of your response is helpful in that it clears up some areas of potential misunderstanding between us, and points me to two arguments that are not made explicitly in your book chapter. I trust I can look forward to the subsequent Parts for your responses to the majority of the issues I have raised. I will work through your blog in this comment, seeking to be as constructive as possible in my reading of it. Scientific Confidence vs. Scientific Certainty I am happy to take your point that you do not believe that science has DISPROVEN that a bottleneck of two individuals could have happened in the human lineage. Your position is that you are as certain that it has not happened as you are certain that the earth rotates around the sun. I am sorry if I mischaracterised your position as being more certain than it actually is. 10,000 individuals? In your blog you say: “I do not claim this [heliocentric level of] certainty for the oft-cited ~10,000 figure, as Buggs seems to imply”. I am happy to take this point, but I should explain why I got the impression from your book chapter that you hold pretty strongly to the 10,000 figure. In your book chapter you argue that multiple independent methods converge on a figure of 10,000, and even predict that one method that gives a lower figure is likely to be revised upwards. Here are the relevant quotations from your chapter: it is worth at least sketching out a few of the methods geneticists use that support the conclusion that we descend from a population that has never dipped below about 10,000 individuals. Then you mention evidence from allelic diversity, and state: these methods indicate an ancestral population size for humans right around that 10,000 figure. Then you present an argument from linkage disequilibrium, and state: The results indicate that we come from an ancestral population of about 10,000 individuals— the same result we obtained when using allele diversity alone. Then you say more about linkage disequilibrium and state: The researchers found that, during this period, humans living in sub-Saharan Africa maintained a minimum population of about 7,000 individuals, and that the ancestors of all other humans maintained a minimum population of about 3,000—once again, adding up to the same value other methods arrive at.