How Does DNA Uncover a Biblical History of Humankind? - Dr. Kurt Wise

 

Two different stories of human history exist: one defined by the supernatural creation of humanity as recorded in the Book of Genesis, the other by natural processes of evolution that caused humans to arise from apes. Which history does the evidence support? In this presentation, paleontologist Dr. Kurt Wise examines mitochondrial DNA, one specific kind of evidence for history and how it applies to these two very different ideas.

𝘐𝘴 𝘎𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘴 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺? is a documentary series that reveals how science intersects with the Bible. In over a hundred videos, scientists and scholars explore the evidence for creation in six normal days, a real Adam and Eve, a global Flood, a tower of Babel, plus hundreds of other fascinating aspects of God’s creation. Dr. Del Tackett serves as your guide in this amazing series that has impacted millions of people worldwide.

#kurtwise #creationism #humanevolution

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." Romans 1:20

My name is Kurt Wise, a professor at Truett McConnell University in

Cleveland, Georgia.

I want to address the question of the history of humanity.

There are two different stories that are common in our culture, in

our subculture perhaps.

The biblical story of human history is very different from the

evolutionary view of human history.

And I want to look at one specific kind of evidence for history and

how it applies to those those two ideas.

And that is the history of mitochondrial DNA.

I'll explain what that is in a moment.

First of all, I want to go over briefly the biblical view of Earth history.

It is a radically different view of history than we are used to in

the evolutionary story.

First of all, it doesn't occupy very much time compared to the

evolutionary story.

It begins about 6,000 years ago with two people, Adam and Eve,

according to Genesis 1, Genesis 2.

And what the Bible recounts is that there is a period of 1656

years or so, depending on what texts you use.

The commonly used text would say 1656 years, where population

apparently just uniformly increased, probably in an

exponential fashion.

It doesn't tell us exactly that, but we can infer that that's

probably what happened.

Probably producing some millions or so people on the earth.

Then Scripture tells us that the Flood occurs and drops the

population down to eight.

Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their respective wives.

Then there is a period of time that we estimate to be about 300

years or so, about three centuries, between the Flood and

the Tower of Babel, where humans stayed together in one population.

Probably the population increased again exponentially, but it's

obviously a much shorter period of time, so it doesn't reach as high

a value as we see in the pre-Flood time.

Then Scripture tells us that at Babel population is divided.

God gives apparently each family group a different language in such

a way that they cannot interact with, communicate with, other

family groups.

And so the different family groups disperse out from Babel.

They each become independent groups growing in population

separately from the others, at least for a large number of generations.

So Scripture would tell us that we can infer from Scripture that then

the population increases probably exponentially from there up to the

present time, with obviously some losses from wars and that sort of

thing, but for the most part an exponential growth.

Again this is a...

it's actually a very specific story of earth history that is...

and we're gonna see that it's important that it drops down at

one point to a small number, in particular three females.

It's going to be important for the story and that's very different

from the evolutionary story, which has humans existing for at least a

thousand times longer.

So whatever the timeline is for humanity in the biblical scenario,

the evolutionary scenario would say humans have been here a

thousand times longer than that and that's as humans.

Now genetically they would have inherited information from

organisms that lived for millions, hundreds of millions of years

before that, but just focusing on humans it's going to be a thousand

times deeper in time than this one.

So evolutionary history begins...

actually Homo sapiens sapiens begins about a hundred thousand

years ago or so.

Homo sapiens, the species...

that's Homo sapiens sapiens is probably about a hundred thousand

years ago.

Homo sapiens is a species about a...

let's say a third of a million years ago.

The genus Homo begins about two million years ago.

They of course, according to evolution, are descended from

primates that would have begun somewhere around 65 million years ago.

Mammalia...

the primates are of course mammals.

There would have been an early mammal from which the primates

supposedly evolved that would have been about 200 million years ago.

The mammals are supposed to have been derived from reptiles and

before them amphibians, before them the fish, and so vertebrates

would have been beginning about a half billion years ago.

And then the vertebrates would have come from invertebrates

stretching that back to at least 600 million years before present.

So very much deeper history in time for the evolutionary scenario.

Now a little bit of information about what mitochondrial DNA is.

In the animals and in a previous slide I stopped this at animals.

Animals would have been descended from non-animals, from protists

before that, but our story is going to begin with animalia

because it's the animal cells that contain mitochondria.

And everybody from there on out has mitochondria.

Humans have inherited mitochondria according to evolution from the

primates and them from the mammals before them, them from the

vertebrates before them, and then from the invertebrates before them.

And it's in the mitochondria of individual cells which are called

the energy factories of the cell.

The mitochondria produces the energy that the cell needs to do

all of its activities.

It more or less takes sugar, breaks the sugar down into its

component parts, releasing the energy sort of like producing

electricity for the cell in the form of ATP, adenosine triphosphate.

Interestingly enough the mitochondria have their own DNA.

When we think of DNA of organisms we usually think of what's called

nuclear DNA and DNA that's in the nucleus of the cell.

And we often ignore the additional DNA that's found in mitochondria

and in chloroplasts.

There are a few cell organelles that actually contain their own DNA.

So that DNA changes independently of and operates independently of

the nuclear DNA.

So in this talk I'm going to be focusing on the mitochondrial DNA.

Mitochondrial DNA is a string in humans of sixteen and a half

thousand or so nucleotides.

That's a series of nucleotides 16,569 long.

About a little over a third of them can mutate, can change from

one nucleotide to another nucleotide without decimating the

making the mitochondrial DNA of no use.

These mutable portions of the DNA mutates at roughly one every three generations.

A mutation every three generations or so.

And those mutations are then inherited by the subsequent mitochondria.

And you can actually use those mutations that you find in

populations of organisms to reconstruct a history of that population.

But what's interesting about this is it's...

so for example we we have an evolutionary tree or family tree

of something. Doesn't matter what it is.

And we find that in three of these fellers there's a particular

mutation that none of the others have.

Here's one that four of them have a particular mutation.

Here's one where where three plus four plus two nine of them have

one mutation that no one else has.

And then of those two of them have an additional mutation.

And if you just had the population didn't know anything about the

history back here and you had this information about what what

mutations the various organisms have you can very often work out

this kind of a family tree reconstructing the history of that

particular set of organisms.

Now the thing about this that's kind of interesting is that

mitochondria only comes from the mother nothing from the father.

Because when in humans in particular most mammals would be

the most animals that would be the case you've got an egg cell that

is fertilized by sperm.

The egg cell has all of the components that the cells of the

adult would have including the mitochondria.

It's fertilized by a sperm from the father but the only thing the

sperm actually contributes to this is the sperm's DNA.

The rest of the sperm and there are mitochondria in the sperm but

the egg will not allow the mitochondria from the sperm into the egg.

Therefore the only thing the father donates is his his DNA.

So the mitochondrial DNA which is in the mitochondria do not come

from the father to the child. They only come from the mother.

So mitochondrial DNA traces out the history of females.

So it's not a history of the males of the population but the females

and that's going to be interesting for our story.

Now let's return to the to the broad view of evolutionary history.

What is the history of humans, specifically females, in an

evolutionary scenario?

This is more or less the representation of the

mitochondrial DNA tree or what we might expect because what each of

these vertical lines represent would be one lineage of people

that has not interbred with other people.

You think on the present earth with people spread all over the

planet that the fossil record indicates that very early in the

development of humans, namely about two million years ago in

conventional dating, they had already spread to the farthest

points of the earth.

At least the farthest points of the old world.

And so the people that did that...

people that let's say ended up in Spain are not from then on

probably going to be interbreeding with people that ended up in

Eastern Asia or those that ended up in Southern Africa.

And so one can imagine there were probably thousands of populations

across the world that once they were established, something in the

order of a million years ago, they have never interbred with any

other population around the world.

So there's probably thousands of these individual trees and

although the trees, if you blew this up and looked at each of

these vertical lines very carefully, you'd see oh look

there's an evolutionary tree within that.

But at this scale we would expect there to be probably thousands, at

least hundreds, of individual human lineages that did not

interbreed with other lineages.

And they would have done so for thousands of generations.

If a generation of humans is let's say 20 years just to make it easy

to figure out, this is only 20,000 years of time.

Humans have been around for a long longer than that if it's just a

thousand generations.

If every three generations there's a mutation we would expect

thousands of mutations within each lineage across hundreds to even

thousands of lineages.

So if we step back and looked at all the mitochondrial DNA history

of all humans it would look something like that.

A big mess really.

Now what would the biblical view of mitochondrial history look like?

Well again remember we're starting at 6,000 years ago so we're not

talking about very many generations.

First of all the height of the evolutionary tree is thousands of mutations.

If we've got 20 years per generation and it was actually

longer earlier in Earth history we're only talking about 300

generations since the beginning.

So it would be three mutations per generation every three generations.

Mutation every three generations. There we go.

Would mean we've only got maybe a hundred mutations.

So whereas the evolutionary tree is going to be thousands high,

thousands of mutations high, the biblical history is only going to

be a hundred high.

So it would probably be a hundredth or even a thousandth the

height of the evolutionary tree.

Also according to biblical history it starts from two people, goes up

to a Flood just 1,600 years later. That's a single lineage.

Whereas evolution is looking at maybe thousands of lineages in the

biblical timescale there's only one lineage leading up to the Flood.

There's only one family that goes through the through the Flood and

they stay together as one probably one family unit up until Babel.

It's only since Babel which we think to be about 4,000 years ago

4,500 years ago somewhere in there.

The population divides into the biblical account gives us allows

us to estimate the number of families each of which got a

different language depending on how you count them somewhere

between 47-76 families.

So whereas we have thousands of individual lineages in evolution

we're only going to have something on order of 47 to 76 lineages,

separate lineages in the biblical account of history.

And then each of those lineages is going to increase for 134 to 156

generations which again dividing that by three we're only talking

about 40 50 mutations.

So again we compare the...

basically this is what it would look like.

This is what the mitochondrial DNA family tree would look like for humans.

First of all, all humans would go back to a single point which is

representing one female that would be Eve and then 1656 years later

so that many generations divide that three nodes...

there should be three nodes because there's only...

if we assume that Noah's wife didn't bear any more children

after they were more 600 years old then the only females that are

bearing children after the Flood would have been the three wives of

the three sons of Noah.

So for whatever 1656 years is divided by the number of

generations and there's ten generations given in Scripture

we're probably only just talking about three three mutations long

branches that leave from Eve to a node.

The node is where the descendants of each of the females goes

separately into across the world.

There would be this many lineages somewhere between 47 and 76

lineages coming off of those three nodes.

How they're distributed...

Scripture gives us a little bit of information but let's say to make

a simple... make it simple...

you can divide an equal number of lineages from each of these and

this is what the tree would look like.

Now for scale, remember the evolutionary tree is much longer...

many generations longer.

So if you compare the two trees from your distance over there this

is what they look like.

Here's the evolutionary tree...

the mitochondrial...

the prediction...

rough prediction...

of an evolutionary mitochondrial DNA tree.

Well where's the biblical one?

It's right there.

That's the size of it.

It's 1/100 or less the height of the evolutionary tree

and it's only got 76 lineages maximum somewhere in something

that's a little dot compared to this.

Now there's enough of a difference, I would suggest,

between those two trees for us to look at the mitochondrial DNA of

humans and see which one fits better.

It ought to be easy to tell the difference between them.

So what does the actual tree look like?

There it is.

It looks just roughly at this scale really close to the biblical prediction.

It's not a deep model.

The mitochondrial DNA tree does not show thousands of generations

of difference.

It shows only a few hundred generations of difference total.

Now let's look at this a little more closely.

Here's the tree as we predicted it.

Just a simple view of sort of a model for what it should look like.

Evolution says the length of these bars should be a thousands high,

thousands of mutations high.

Creation prediction somewhere in the order of 32 to 36 high.

That's the difference the distance between the middle and the outer edge.

You would expect no nodes, no common ancestors at least within

the last hundreds of thousands of years, and no geographic pattern.

Whereas in the creation model you should have three nodes that are

three mutations apart from each other.

There should be 47 to 76 of these deeply indented trees and the

biblical account suggests when you look at it carefully that the

three sons of Noah divided and went into three different

directions roughly corresponding to the three different continents

there that converge in the Middle East.

That Japheth's descendants went Europe in the direction of Europe.

Ham's descendants went in the direction of Africa and the Shem's

descendants went in the direction of Asia.

So we might expect that these three different nodes correspond

to three different geographic locations.

Whereas you wouldn't expect any particular pattern in the

evolutionary scenario.

So what do we actually find?

The actual tree is about 39, almost 40 mutations high which is

a little bit higher than we expected with our simple model,

but certainly nowhere close to the evolutionary prediction.

There are in fact three nodes, three primary nodes, that are

about 3.3 mutations apart from each other, which is very close to

the biblical prediction.

Three nodes at three mutations apart from one another.

And there appear to be...

it's hard to count them given their different lengths, but

there's about 84 primary branches in comparison with a prediction of

47 to 76 in the creation model and again thousands in the

evolutionary model.

It just does not fit the evolutionary model.

And the three different nodes roughly correspond to three

different continents.

So look more closely at this.

The blue represents the lineages that go to Africa or in Africa.

The purple are the lineages that are in Asia.

The green are the lineages that are in Europe.

And so what you see is, with a few minor exceptions, one of the nodes

goes to Africa.

Another node, node and a half we'll say, goes to Asia and then

the other half node goes to Europe.

So there is definitely a geographic division, which is what

we'd expect in the creation model.

This, when I laid all the stuff out, and it takes a little bit of

work to go through each one of these and find out where each one

of these are at and everything, but this is astonishing to me.

It shouldn't be, because I know the biblical account is correct,

but I didn't expect that things would look this pretty, this close

to the creation prediction.

On so many levels human mitochondrial DNA is much more

compatible with biblical history than it is with evolutionary history.

There's just no comparison.

The height of the tree, the number of nodes, the distance the nodes

are away from each other, the number of primary branches...

all of these things are very close to the description we are given in

Scripture and nowhere close to the evolutionary view of Earth history.

So I think we have very powerful confirmation from mitochondrial

DNA of the biblical account of human history.