Human Genomics: Vestiges of Eden or Skeletons in the Closet?

[Dorkins]

Dennis Venema, biologist at Trinity Western university, gives a lecture on genomics and how it relates to human evolution, as well as assessing population genetics data and its implications for a historical Adam and Eve.

Human Genomics: Vestiges of Eden or Skeletons in the Closet?

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

[kmr]

Very interesting. This is perhaps the best evidence as of yet I have heard in support of Darwinism.

[kmr]

However, I do believe that this man was perhaps a bit biased towards evolution... the arguments for anti-evolution that he gave were obviously not very good and I do not think he was looking at the whole picture. Obviously, the Earth is very small. Insignificant, relatively, it would seem, when compared to the universe. I think that there was a reason for this. Our bodies, being temporary "tents", are meant to be imperfect and incomplete, and extremely small. Yet, God said that we were extremely important and loved in his eyes. Therefore, I think that this small, temporary body is merely a four-dimensional representation of the holding place for our spirits (or souls) which are indeed very important when looking at the universe in concept, yet our bodies seem small. Anyways, God, when creating our temporary bodies would make us like the other animals in our bodies. The Bible says that the real difference is our spirits, with which we could accept or deny God.

Anyways, if our bodies were like other animals', we would (clearly) have very similar genomes the only differences being that which changes our apparent shape slightly to distinguish between species. Other than this, essentially we could be almost identical to other animals disregarding the spirit. This man's arguments of homology and redundancy are thusly expected. As for synteny, of course this would be closely linked to redundancy, because to be genetically similar means that you must have a great deal of synteny. Now, what I believe to be his best argument (which was the pseudogenes) I think this would be expected as well. A common anti-evolutionist argument is that mutation creates these non-functional "pseudogenes" due to the Fall of Man, and that destroys our genome. It is highly possible that we started out with all these genes being similar to other mammals (and other animals as well), and that over time we lost a few due to mutation that would look like we shared a common ancestor.

As for having a non-functional "egg gene", of course the process of making an egg requires a lot of genetic information, so looking in just one area doesn't do much. And, I'm sure that this is all very controversial, very theoretical, and unproven and that a lot of people will disagree with what I'm writing, but oh well. Such is life!

Oh, and about his genetic variation argument, if Adam and Eve started with good genomes as opposed to corrupted ones, then it doesn't matter if two humans start or two thousand, because genetic variation will occur regardless... in a world with billions of people, I do not think we will find much difference between a thousand or ten people starting out! Besides, the genetic variation is actually an argument against evolution. We have LESS genetic variation than should be expected if evolution were true. Scientists have made up an excuse for this be saying that there was a terrible volcanic eruption thousands (or millions) of years ago. But (of course) that may kill lots of people, but it won't kill of all but one tribe, so there still would have been lots of genetic variation after this eruption (which suggests instead that mankind either began a lot later than scientists think, or that mankind started very small as opposed to changing from a previously large group).