Discussion on the how it all started

[Larniavc]

we know that gears and motors are the product of design even if they are made from organic components or have the abillity to reproduce.

Actually the fact that they do appear in nature shows that a designer is not required.

Way to self own.

 

[Hans Blaster]

His academic specialties are (1) Philosophy of Science, particularly space-time theory and transcendent implications of contemporary big bang cosmology, (2) metaphysics, particularly the theory of time and philosophy of God,

Oh great, another philosopher abusing physics (in this case relativity) to create new "philosophy.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Oh great, another philosopher abusing physics (in this case relativity) to create new "philosophy.

When he posted the "evidence" it was a so called book in the form of a PDF and I was on my tablet that does not handle PDF's rather well. It takes me out of the browser which drives me nuts. Now I have been scanning it and all that I see are abuses of science. And even terminology that tells us that even if the writer has studied the philosophy of science for some odd reason he does not understand the concept of science when his religion is involved. For example one of arguments is titled "The e Borde-Vilenkin-Guth Proof". He should have said "Evidence" but his argument is so weak that he appeared to need to bolster it with a false title. He tries to use that the universe as we know it had a beginning as some sort of "proof" of an intelligent creator. He does not realize that all that that theorem does is to show that the universe as we know it had a beginning. He also misapplies quotes of Einstein and other false appeals to authority. The whole book appears to be as bad as what one would expect from a college freshman that had a smattering of physics and logic and a heavy Christian bias. Nothing very impressive there. It is pretty much just hand waving and special pleading throughout the whole book as far as I can see.

If you want a laugh or two here is a link to the PDF:

https://www.crediblecatholic.com/pdf/7E-P2/7E-LB1.pdf

 

[Hans Blaster]

When he posted the "evidence" it was a so called book in the form of a PDF and I was on my tablet that does not handle PDF's rather well. It takes me out of the browser which drives me nuts. Now I have been scanning it and all that I see are abuses of science. And even terminology that tells us that even if the writer has studied the philosophy of science for some odd reason he does not understand the concept of science when his religion is involved. For example one of arguments is titled "The e Borde-Vilenkin-Guth Proof". He should have said "Evidence" but his argument is so weak that he appeared to need to bolster it with a false title. He tries to use that the universe as we know it had a beginning as some sort of "proof" of an intelligent creator. He does not realize that all that that theorem does is to show that the universe as we know it had a beginning. He also misapplies quotes of Einstein and other false appeals to authority. The whole book appears to be as bad as what one would expect from a college freshman that had a smattering of physics and logic and a heavy Christian bias. Nothing very impressive there. It is pretty much just hand waving and special pleading throughout the whole book as far as I can see.

If you want a laugh or two here is a link to the PDF:

https://www.crediblecatholic.com/pdf/7E-P2/7E-LB1.pdf

I scanned it real quickly, and found this gem (

"Christianity charts a path to find positive meaning in suffering" (Ch. 4, Sec. III.1, p. 33) so basically divine sadism. [The whole of Sec III is a real beauty, but completely off topic to this board.]

 

[renniks]

It’s obvious to me that you’ve never had a real scientific class, and all your arguments are regurgitated creation PRATTs, and you’re impressed with arguments from incredulity.

Another condescending atheist. How boringly predictable.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Another condescending atheist. How boringly predictable.

The condescension is on your part. When one is snarky and demonstrably wrong one loses the ability to comment on supposed condescension. Tell me, why do you refuse to learn even the basics of science? It looks as if you know that if you learn that you will realize your errors.

Learn how science is done and what is and what is not evidence and you will be a better debater.

 

[renniks]

Tell me, why do you refuse to learn even the basics of science? It looks as if you know that if you learn that you will realize your errors.

Learn how science is done and what is and what is not evidence and you will be a better debater.

I have. And we have had this conversation before.
How about you just try not to reply to my posts if they bother you so much.

 

[renniks]

Actually the fact that they do appear in nature shows that a designer is not required.

Way to self own.

No, the fact they appear in nature shows that someone designed the natural world. Chance cannot create the computer in front of you and it certainly can't create the endless complexity found in this world.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I have. And we have had this conversation before.
How about you just try not to reply to my posts if they bother you so much.

I doubt that you understand the basics. Someone that did would have no problem taking me up on my offer. Here are a couple of simple questions for you:

Is there massive scientific evidence for evolution?

Is there any scientific evidence for creationism?

 

[klutedavid]

I wana discuss with atheists how this universe came into existence. Please keep it simple and easy to understand as i wana see the atheistic perspective. Maybe i got it wrong and maybe you are right. I want to keep it as honest, rational and easy as possible. I personally think God is the best explanation for this organised universe not a random process. Now how is evolution or some other explanation more logical?

Keep it simple?

Apparently the singularity expanded and in that initial expansion the four fundamental forces were not yet in operation. So theoretically, science will never know the origin of the universe, because it cannot be understood using scientific investigation.

 

[Subduction Zone]

No, the fact they appear in nature shows that someone designed the natural world. Chance cannot create the computer in front of you and it certainly can't create the endless complexity found in this world.

This is the sort of statement that tells me that you do not understand the basics of science, or even of logic for that matter.

If you want to claim design you put a burden of proof upon yourself. What is the evidence for design? No hand waving allowed. Why can't complexity arise naturally? Let's see those peer reviewed papers from a well respected scientific journal that support your claims.

 

[renniks]

Is there massive scientific evidence for evolution?

Depends what you mean by evolution.
Organisms are designed to adapt to their environments, and that is what I see massive scientific evidence for.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Depends what you mean by evolution.
Organisms are designed to adapt to their environments, and that is what I see massive scientific evidence for.

That statement is worthless without evidence. I can say with just as much authority that a magical green goblin is needed.

The only "evidence" for design is evidence for an incompetent designer. Hand waving is not evidence. The reason that scientists as a whole do not accept ID is because no one has ever presented any evidence for it.

And you dodged. My meaning was clear. A dodge is as good as admitting that you do not understand the concept of evidence.

 

[renniks]

Let's see those peer reviewed papers from a well respected scientific journal that support your claims.

How about we instead show how many scientists confirm design?

This is the sort of statement that tells me that you do not understand the basics of science, or even of logic for that matter.

If you want to claim design you put a burden of proof upon yourself. What is the evidence for design? No hand waving allowed. Why can't complexity arise naturally? Let's see those peer reviewed papers from a well respected scientific journal that support your claims.

Recognition in peer-reviewed literature is not an absolute requirement to demonstrate an idea’s scientific merit. Darwin’s own theory of evolution was first published in a book for a general and scientific audience -- his Origin of Species -- not in a peer-reviewed paper.
But here are a few:

: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
Category 1: Scientific Publications Supportive of Intelligent Design Published in PeerReviewed Scientific Journals, Conference Proceedings, or Academic Anthologies
Selected Publications from this Category
 Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic
categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239
(2004) (HTML).
 Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First
Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4):1-27
(December 2010).
 Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional
Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).
 Michael Behe and David W. Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein
features that require multiple amino acid residues,” Protein Science, Vol. 13 (2004).
 William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the
Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational
Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010).
 Mariclair A. Reeves, Ann K. Gauger, and Douglas D. Axe, “Enzyme Families-Shared
Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family,”
BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2014 (4).
 Ann K. Gauger and Douglas D. Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme
Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2011(1).
 Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive
Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,”
BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2010 (2).
 Dustin J. Van Hofwegen, Carolyn J. Hovde, and Scott A. Minnich, “Rapid Evolution of
Citrate Utilization by Escherichia coli by Direct Selection Requires citT and dctA,” Journal
of Bacteriology, Vol. 198 (7): 1022-1034 (April, 2016).
 David W. Snoke, Jeffrey Cox, and Donald Petcher, “Suboptimality and Complexity in
Evolution,” Complexity, Vol. 21(1): 322-327 (September/October, 2015).
Bibliographic and Annotated List of Peer-Reviewed Publications Supporting Intelligent Design 14
 Douglas D. Axe and Ann K. Gauger, “Model and Laboratory Demonstrations That
Evolutionary Optimization Works Well Only If Preceded by Invention-Selection Itself Is
Not Inventive,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2015 (2).
 Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, “The ‘Wow! Signal’ of the terrestrial
genetic code,” Icarus, Vol. 224 (1): 228-242 (May, 2013).
 Joseph A. Kuhn, “Dissecting Darwinism,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings,
Vol. 25(1): 41-47 (2012).
 Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Measuring meaningful
information in images: algorithmic specified complexity,” IET Computer Vision, Vol. 9 (6):
884-894 (December, 2015).
 Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of
Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International
Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 3047-3053 (October, 2009).
 Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary
Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional
Constraints,” PLoS One, Vol. 3(6):e2246 (June 2008).
 Kirk K. Durston, David K. Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the
functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling,
Vol. 4:47 (2007).
 David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin
models,” Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006).
 Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent Life in Cosmology,” International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol.
2(2): 141-148 (2003).
 Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall, and Michael Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic
Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 219: 325-342 (2002).
 Stanley L. Jaki, “Teaching of Transcendence in Physics,” American Journal of Physics, Vol.
55(10):884-888 (October 1987).
 Granville Sewell, “On ‘compensating’ entropy decreases,” Physics Essays, Vol. 30:1
(2017).
Bibliographic and Annotated List of Peer-Reviewed Publications Supporting Intelligent Design 15
 Granville Sewell, “Postscript,” in Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN
(New York: Springer Verlag, 1985).
 A.C. McIntosh, “Evidence of design in bird feathers and avian respiration,” International
Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(2):154–169 (2009).
 Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational
Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. 56(3):205-232 (September, 2008).
 Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig and Heinz Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangement and
Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 36:389–410 (2002).
 Douglas D. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on
Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 301:585-595 (2000).
 William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small
Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Annotated Bibliography of Publications in this Category

 

[Subduction Zone]

How about we instead show how many scientists confirm design?


Recognition in peer-reviewed literature is not an absolute requirement to demonstrate an idea’s scientific merit. Darwin’s own theory of evolution was first published in a book for a general and scientific audience -- his Origin of Species -- not in a peer-reviewed paper.
But here are a few:

: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
Category 1: Scientific Publications Supportive of Intelligent Design Published in PeerReviewed Scientific Journals, Conference Proceedings, or Academic Anthologies
Selected Publications from this Category
 Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic
categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239
(2004) (HTML).
 Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First
Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4):1-27
(December 2010).
 Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional
Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).
 Michael Behe and David W. Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein
features that require multiple amino acid residues,” Protein Science, Vol. 13 (2004).
 William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the
Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational
Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010).
 Mariclair A. Reeves, Ann K. Gauger, and Douglas D. Axe, “Enzyme Families-Shared
Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family,”
BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2014 (4).
 Ann K. Gauger and Douglas D. Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme
Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2011(1).
 Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive
Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,”
BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2010 (2).
 Dustin J. Van Hofwegen, Carolyn J. Hovde, and Scott A. Minnich, “Rapid Evolution of
Citrate Utilization by Escherichia coli by Direct Selection Requires citT and dctA,” Journal
of Bacteriology, Vol. 198 (7): 1022-1034 (April, 2016).
 David W. Snoke, Jeffrey Cox, and Donald Petcher, “Suboptimality and Complexity in
Evolution,” Complexity, Vol. 21(1): 322-327 (September/October, 2015).
Bibliographic and Annotated List of Peer-Reviewed Publications Supporting Intelligent Design 14
 Douglas D. Axe and Ann K. Gauger, “Model and Laboratory Demonstrations That
Evolutionary Optimization Works Well Only If Preceded by Invention-Selection Itself Is
Not Inventive,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2015 (2).
 Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, “The ‘Wow! Signal’ of the terrestrial
genetic code,” Icarus, Vol. 224 (1): 228-242 (May, 2013).
 Joseph A. Kuhn, “Dissecting Darwinism,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings,
Vol. 25(1): 41-47 (2012).
 Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Measuring meaningful
information in images: algorithmic specified complexity,” IET Computer Vision, Vol. 9 (6):
884-894 (December, 2015).
 Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of
Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International
Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 3047-3053 (October, 2009).
 Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary
Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional
Constraints,” PLoS One, Vol. 3(6):e2246 (June 2008).
 Kirk K. Durston, David K. Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the
functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling,
Vol. 4:47 (2007).
 David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin
models,” Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006).
 Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent Life in Cosmology,” International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol.
2(2): 141-148 (2003).
 Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall, and Michael Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic
Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 219: 325-342 (2002).
 Stanley L. Jaki, “Teaching of Transcendence in Physics,” American Journal of Physics, Vol.
55(10):884-888 (October 1987).
 Granville Sewell, “On ‘compensating’ entropy decreases,” Physics Essays, Vol. 30:1
(2017).
Bibliographic and Annotated List of Peer-Reviewed Publications Supporting Intelligent Design 15
 Granville Sewell, “Postscript,” in Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN
(New York: Springer Verlag, 1985).
 A.C. McIntosh, “Evidence of design in bird feathers and avian respiration,” International
Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(2):154–169 (2009).
 Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational
Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. 56(3):205-232 (September, 2008).
 Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig and Heinz Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangement and
Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 36:389–410 (2002).
 Douglas D. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on
Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 301:585-595 (2000).
 William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small
Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Annotated Bibliography of Publications in this Category

Nice Gish Gallop, buy your whole list fails if even one fails when you present "evidence" this way. Are you sure that you want to do this?

An honest debater would have chosen his best evidence. But if you want to go that route it is fine with me.

 

[renniks]

That statement is worthless without evidence. I can say with just as much authority that a magical green goblin is needed.

The only "evidence" for design is evidence for an incompetent designer. Hand waving is not evidence. The reason that scientists as a whole do not accept ID is because no one has ever presented any evidence for it.

Lol, lots of evidence has been presented. But, there's some kind of stigma involved in acknowledging that we did not drag ourselves out of the primordial goop, apparently.

"Tour signed Discovery’s Dissent List on Darwinian theory years ago when the National Center for Science Education asserted that only a handful of scientists doubt Darwin’s theory. Our list of dissenters started at 100, then grew to 800. At that point we stopped inviting people to sign it because their names on the list were used by Darwinists to persecute them professionally. Some lost their jobs."

It's a dangerous thing for a biologist especially to publically question evolution theory.

 

[pitabread]

A.C. McIntosh, “Evidence of design in bird feathers and avian respiration,” International
Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(2):154–169 (2009).

I find it hilarious that the DI keeps pushing this paper, since it doesn't demonstrate any evidence of design for anything.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Lol, lots of evidence has been presented. But, there's some kind of stigma involved in acknowledging that we did not drag ourselves out of the primordial goop, apparently.

"Tour signed Discovery’s Dissent List on Darwinian theory years ago when the National Center for Science Education asserted that only a handful of scientists doubt Darwin’s theory. Our list of dissenters started at 100, then grew to 800. At that point we stopped inviting people to sign it because their names on the list were used by Darwinists to persecute them professionally. Some lost their jobs."

It's a dangerous thing for a biologist especially to publically question evolution theory.

No, you have yet to present any evidence. Do you want to lost by default?

And you do know that the list that Tour signed has been largely refuted as well don't you? Please, all you have is fail.

You presented a Gish Gallop. That is an improper posting of falsehoods and half truths with the knowledge that it would take to long to refute all of them. As a result if the poster does not choose a source any one source will refute the list.

Do you have any evidence? I am waiting.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I find it hilarious that the DI keeps pushing this paper, since it doesn't demonstrate any evidence of design for anything.

And let's not forget the first article on his list. It was published without proper peer review and has been refuted countless times since. In fact Meyer presents no evidence in the paper. It is merely a long negative argument. He presented no evidence for design in his paper. He had no model. No model, no evidence.

 

[renniks]

No, you have yet to present any evidence. Do you want to lost by default?

And you do know that the list that Tour signed has been largely refuted as well don't you? Please, all you have is fail.

You presented a Gish Gallop. That is an improper posting of falsehoods and half truths with the knowledge that it would take to long to refute all of them. As a result if the poster does not choose a source any one source will refute the list.

Do you have any evidence? I am waiting.

You have it backward. If Darwinism is the dominant view, all one has to do it cast doubt on it being the only option possible from the evidence provided.

For example:

 Ola Hössjer, Ann Gauger, and Colin Reeves, “Genetic Modeling of Human History Part
1: Comparison of Common Descent and Unique Origin Approaches,” BIO-Complexity,
Vol. 2016 (3).
Did humans evolve from apelike creatures or were they intelligently designed?
According to the standard evolutionary view, humans share a common ancestor with
chimpanzees, and our lineage diverged about 6 million years ago in Africa and then
evolved by unguided evolutionary mechanisms into its present form. This paper
evaluates the assumptions underlying the standard evolutionary model of human
origins and finds “it is full of gaps and weaknesses.” Instead, the authors maintain that
“a unique origin model where humanity arose from one single couple with created
diversity seems to explain data at least as well, if not better.”


After reviewing five main mechanisms invoked by standard evolutionary models of
population genetics to explain human genetic diversity (mutation, genetic drift, natural
selection, recombination, and colonization and migration), the paper observes that:
Neo-Darwinism accounts for the above-mentioned mechanisms I–V, and among
them germline mutations are essentially the only way by which novel DNA can
arise. The theory does not allow for large amounts of new and suddenly
appearing diversity. The reason is that neo-Darwinism is framed within
methodological naturalism. This prevailing approach to science only allows for
natural hypotheses. But if an intelligent designer is invoked as a possible
explanation, and if humanity originates from one single couple, it is possible that
their chromosomes were created with considerable diversity from the beginning.
Thus, the authors report discovery of “a sixth mechanism of genetic change,” one which
is almost universally ignored by evolutionary models: “Created founder diversity is
biologically plausible for DNA of non-sex chromosomes.”
With these mechanisms in mind, the article compares standard evolutionary “common
ancestry” models of human origins with “unique origin” models, where an initial pair of
humans was created with significant founder diversity. There are two main common
ancestry models of human origins: the Out-of-Africa model, where humans evolved in
Africa and then migrated out one single time, and the Multiregional Evolution model,
where humans evolved in Africa but migrated out multiple times, with different human
populations around the world evolving in parallel. There are also two “unique origin”
models: An African Ancestry model, where the initial created pair was located in Africa,
and a Middle East ancestry model, where an initial couple was created in the Middle
East and then humans migrated around the world.
The authors note that the “main argument against a unique origin is that the nucleotide
diversity of human DNA data seems too high in order make a single founding couple
possible.” But they argue it is possible that humans are descended from an initial couple
if “they were created with genetic diversity in their autosomal and X-chromosome
DNA.” What about the location of the initial couple? Non-African populations of humans
seem more genetically similar compared to African humans, and they note that “the
Middle East ancestry model faces some challenges, in particular to explain why African
DNA looks older than non-African DNA.” However, a Middle East origin model could
explain the data if “the age of humanity is much more recent” than common ancestry
models predict, and if African populations experienced higher rates of genetic change
and lived in isolated communities where unique diversity was easily fixed into small
populations. They cite previous literature to support these ideas, making the Middle
East unique origin model a realistic possibility.
The authors conclude that “Any common descent model faces a challenge to explain the
genetic differences rather than the similarities with other species, the consequences of
inbreeding depression and increased genetic entropy, human DNA mixture with archaic
populations, and that our DNA resembles a mosaic of about four founder genomes.”
Thus, they find that “The provisional conclusion is that a unique origin model seems
more plausible.” But which unique origin model best explains the data? They urge
future research is needed to test the two unique origins models, which is what the
authors plan to do in subsequent papers. It may be that multiple models can explain the
data, in which case they conclude that “the common descent model of our origin from
ape-like ancestors can no longer be claimed as conclusive proof that there could not
have been a single first pair.”