Age of the Earth and Evolution

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rossum said:
It is not a “Law” any longer, not since Eddington’s observations in 1919 showed that Newton was wrong and Einstein correct.
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Call it anything…

Return to actual Bio-Science…
 
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rossum said:
It is not a “Law” any longer, not since Eddington’s observations in 1919 showed that Newton was wrong and Einstein correct.

You need to learn more about how science works if you want to argue about science.
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I’m hip.

I’ve studied both.

You leave me with the impression that your bio-science acumen is lacking?

Anything else?
 
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Are you shifting the goalposts? Where does the “The Magisterium of The Catholic Church” say that Genesis should be taken literally?
 
I already have.
Hugh_Farey said:
Since 1950, evidence increasingly suggests that the human race did not descend exclusively from two individuals, and that Pope Pius’s injunction is no longer applicable. I don’t think that ‘the Church’ will defend it, and indeed the International Theological Commission’s 2005 report entitled Communion and Stewardship said: “While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage.”
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Hugh_Farey said:
Are you shifting the goalposts? Where does the “The Magisterium of The Catholic Church” say that Genesis should be taken literally?
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I’ve not shifted anything…

It’s time for you to expound on what in your opinion is not to accepted in Genesis…
 
Not at all. My opinion is irrelevant. The Catholic Church, in the sources I quoted above, which you responded to with “They’re fine”, makes it clear what she thinks, including the decision that evolution provides a more satisfactory explanation of the history of life than does a literal reading of Genesis. Now you seem to be claiming that an unidentified “Magisterium” denies this. What source have you for that?
 
Dan123 said:
The law of gravitational attraction only describes what gravity does. The theory attempts to explain why. The theory is incomplete.
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Newton’s “Laws” were mathematically not quite accurate but quite good enough for many, many purposes!
 
I think you’re quite right about polygenism in the normal sense. However, I feel that Humani Generis uses it in a more restrictive sense, distinguishing a single human as the source of all humanity from “a humanoid population of common genetic lineage”, as the ICT put it.

Your source at thomisticevolution says that “one would need to posit the existence of 10,000 original humans to properly account for the genetic diversity that we see among the seven billion human beings living today.” Later it suggests that a sub-group of these 10,000 mutated in such a way as to be distinguishable in behaviour from the others, and in Part IV there is an attempt to imagine a bottle-neck of two “behaviourally modern humans” among a group of “anatomically modern humans”, from whom all modern humans are descended. However, this would not be possible unless there was genetic (name removed by moderator)ut from the other 10,000 via considerable interbreeding. Rev. Nicanor is a little unclear about this, suggesting that “there could either have been one contemporaneous original couple or a handful of original contemporaneous and even related members of a family”, whose genetic descendents were necessarily the result of “interbreeding that took place between behaviorally modern humans and their archaic hominin contemporaries”.

This he says, “theologically understood” was “bestiality, which still occurs today. However, because of the similarities in appearance and behavior among these closely-related hominin species, it is likely that it would have occurred more frequently in the past than it does today. The genetic similarity would have also made these matings fruitful in a way not possible today.”

This is biologically sound, and if it helps people who need it reconcile evolutionary biology with Adam and Eve, then that’s fine. However, I think it is unlikely to last scientifically as a possible gap-filler, and I also think that Pope Pius would have taken a very dim view of it indeed.
 
I think perhaps Rrv Nicano is perhaps speculating too much here also. But his argument seems to work. The rest of the site is much less risky with regards to Church positions.

I highly recommend it.
 
The sources I have listed do not quibble. The Catholic Church has no problem with Evolution. The International Theological Commission’s report on Communion and Stewardship makes this perfectly clear.
 

Upcoming book leaves scientific possibility for existence of ‘Adam and Eve’​

Christians are often taught to reject evolutionary biology. With this research, it is my hope they will attain a greater respect for the discipline.​

Nathan H. Lents

Opinion contributor

Scientists, even religious ones, rarely spend time analyzing religious creation myths. After all, when taken literally, these stories are usually in direct conflict with what we know about Earth’s natural history. When faith requires people to cling to those myths anyway, science is cast aside. One would be hard-pressed to think of a scriptural story more at odds with physical evidence than the Garden of Eden.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, a leading public scholar — Joshua Swamidass, a physician and genome scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri — is making a bold new attempt to reconcile the biblical story of Adam and Eve with what we know about the genetic ancestry of the human race. His “genealogical hypothesis” arrives at a time of great cultural upheaval when facts are malleable, politics perverts science, and the gulf that divides our red and blue tribes is reminiscent of another biblical myth: the parting of the Red Sea.

What we already know​

The scriptural challenge is that Adam and Eve are purported to be the ancestors of everyone “to all the ends of the earth,” by the year 1 BCE. But we know with as much certainty as scientifically possible that our species does not descend from a single couple and instead has its origin in Africa around 300,000 years ago. We have evolved through a long line of ancestry that connects with all other living things going back nearly 4 billion years.

So there’s that.

And yet, in his upcoming book, “The Genealogical Adam & Eve,” Swamidass makes an audacious claim: A de novo-created Adam and Eve could very well be universal human ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the last 6,000-10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to reconcile the Garden of Eden story with science, but rarely does someone with Swamidass’ credentials do what most scientists would deem unthinkable: Take the story seriously. However, some atheist scientists are taking Swamidass seriously.

Swamidass is not peddling pseudoscience. Indeed, earlier this year, he and I teamed up on the pages of Science to rebut claims by evolution critics. In addition, “The Genealogical Adam and Eve” went through a rigorous process of open peer review, involving scholars from many diverse disciplines and even some secular scientists, including myself and Alan Templeton, a giant in the field of human population genetics. Invited to find fault in his analysis, we couldn’t, partly because the hypothesis is so narrow, but also because it appears to be correct.

www.usatoday.com

Upcoming book leaves scientific possibility for existence of 'Adam and Eve'

Christians are often taught to reject evolutionary biology. With this research, it is my hope they will attain a greater respect for the discipline.
www.usatoday.com
 
buffalo said:
Upcoming book leaves scientific possibility for existence of ‘Adam and Eve’
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Universal descent from a single couple is not a problem. Hence, his idea adds nothing to the science of evolution since every biologist agrees that we are all descended from Mitochondrial Eve’s parents, as well as from Y-Adam’s parents. His idea of a recent miraculous creation of such a couple is untestable, so it is doubtfully scientific; I will leave the theology to others.

For a longer discussion of his idea, see Bogus accommodationism. It appears that his work is aimed more at a Christian audience than a scientific audience.

You appear to be reading too much science into this book, buffalo. De novo creation is not a part of science.
 
Forgiver me if I’m not sure what the point of your post is. This topic is not about whether any particular aspect of evolution is true or not, but whether belief in evolution can be “a logical position to take as a Catholic, considering if it were the case, that it would mean that before the creation of Adam and Eve there was millions of years of chaotic life, and death and evolution, all which contradict the Biblical account of a world created perfect by God and into which death only entered after Adam and Eve’s sin?”

It clearly can.
 
buffalo said:
And yet, in his upcoming book, “The Genealogical Adam & Eve,” Swamidass makes an audacious claim: A de novo-created Adam and Eve could very well be universal human ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the last 6,000-10,000 years.
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Certainly audacious. Australian aborigines have occupied The island continent of Australia for over 50,000 years and their descendants are with us today.
 
buffalo said:
Invited to find fault in his analysis, we couldn’t, partly because the hypothesis is so narrow, but also because it appears to be correct.
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Without being able to find out more about his hypothesis I’d have to assume that it’s just based on some sort of mathematical model which shows that it’s possible for one couple to spread their genes throughout the entire world within a 4-8 ?? thousand year time frame.

Does anyone know anything else about Swamidass’ hypothesis?
 
1Lord1Faith said:
Does anyone know anything else about Swamidass’ hypothesis?
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Swamidass appears to say that up until about 6,000 years ago the human population was soulless evolved upright primates, with compatible DNA to modern humans. Then God miraculously created a pair of souled humans (including the rib story). He then shows that these special two could have produced enough genealogical descendants through interbreeding of their children with their soulless contemporaries with compatible DNA. God handed out souls as required. See the link in my post #304 for more details.

I have seen this basic idea before, often as a solution to the Mrs. Seth problem.
 
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