| Dr. Rob Carter [as interviewed by Tim Mahoney]: |
| Since I love genetics, genealogy, history, and the Bible, I chose to spend a significant portion of my life studying genetics in relation to Biblical history. Biblical genetics is a natural combination of those two ideas. But before we go anywhere, I want to tell the audience my strategy is to take the most conservative position possible and see if it can be defended. Throughout my career, I’ve done that. I ask myself, does this reasonable hypothesis actually work? Does the data support it? The reason I take that strategy is because if I can defend the most difficult position, the fallback position will be even easier to defend. |
| My first real job out of graduate school was at the Institute for Creation Research, then in California. I was working for Dr. John Sanford, the developer of the gene gun and the theory of genetic entropy. The first task he wanted me to do was look at mitochondria, the piece of DNA we only get from our mothers, and where they’re found in the world to compare them to languages. If the Tower of Babel is true and God separated people according to language, then a different language group should have different female lineages. Well, that project fell flat on its face. |
| However, I remembered that God didn’t separate the people according to the female lineage, but according to the male lineage. It was a very patriarchal society. So females, if they married across from one family to the other, when they spread out of Babel, each of the groups would have all the different female lines. And that’s pretty much true. Next, I looked at how much diversity we see in this little piece of DNA that everyone in the world has. The answer was, not much. So I asked, how long would it take to accumulate all those mutations based on a normal mutation rate? The answer was five to six thousand years. Therefore, the female ancestor of everyone in the world lived less than six thousand years ago. |
| Every single person in the world has a single female ancestor, and that is represented by a little piece of DNA called a mitochondrial chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. It happens to be very different from the chimpanzee mitochondrial DNA, extremely different. And our ancestor lived only a few thousand years ago. Now, you can’t put an exact date on that because what was the mutation rate 3000 years ago? That depends on a lot of things. But, you can take a modern mutation rate, which we can measure by studying families, two parents and a child. If you measure thousands upon thousands of those, you can count the mutation rate, which is about one mutation every five to ten generations. That puts Eve, what we like to call her, just five to six thousand years ago. |
| Now, the evolutionary date given for Eve is 200-300,000 years ago, but they’re using a ridiculously low mutation rate. That’s not the mutation rate we can measure in the laboratory or in family trees. But they have to do that because they can’t have a Biblical Eve. It doesn’t match their view of history and evolution. |
| The same is true for Adam. There is one Y chromosome in every single man on the planet. In fact, scientists just fully sequenced the chimpanzee Y chromosome last summer. There’s like a 30% similarity between a chimpanzee Y chromosome and the human Y chromosome. So, they’re completely different from one another. Yet, all men in the world have a Y chromosome that is very similar. If you look at the number of differences between men to figure out the mutation rate from father to son, Adam ends up being only a few thousand years ago. |
| When we try to put a time-frame on them, there are thousands, not tens and not hundreds of thousands of years ago. Consider the fact that the Bible demands an Adam and Eve and genetics tells us there was an Adam and Eve. There’s only one Y chromosome and one mitochondrial lineage. That is a very Biblical proposition. |
| The evolutionary model doesn’t have Adam and Eve as a couple. They say, in Africa hundreds of thousands years ago, our population got very small and nearly went extinct. In small populations you have a lot of inbreeding, and in the inbred population, the branches of the family tree tend to get pruned. Diversity is lost, and given enough time, a very long time in a small population, eventually only one Y chromosome survives. All the others get lost. So, in the evolutionary model, Adam isn’t the founder of the human race. He’s just a person who’s alive in a small population and through dumb luck, his Y chromosome happens to be the only one passed on. |
| The Biblical account is clear. We started from a couple named Adam and Eve. The population grew for about 1,600 to 1,700 years to some unknown number. The Bible says the Earth was full of violence; I assume a lot of murder, a lot of death. God got frustrated with the world. Apparently, a man named Noah was the only righteous person left. God told him to build a big ship. Then God sent a great flood that destroyed every single person and all the land-based animals that weren’t on the ark. After the flood, the people and the animals from the ark repopulated the world. There were only eight people: Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their three daughters-in-law. |
| Adam, Eve, and Noah’s flood are statements on genetics because they limit the number of people, the amount of diversity, and the time-frame for when these things could have happened. From there, we have to explain Neanderthals, and the similarity of chimps and humans. We have to explain all sorts of things, and we can. A lot of work has been done already but there is a lot of work still to be done. But we have answered some giant questions and published the answers. |
| I’ll tell you that as a geneticist, I’m consistently frustrated with bad data. There are very few gene sequences that I can trust because the machines make mistakes. And the humans in charge of collating the information coming out of the machines have to make decisions about good or bad sequences. So, on the first chimpanzee genome they ever made, they actually used the human genome as a guide to construct it. They didn’t build it on its own genome but on the human genome. That’s frustrating. That means they humanised the sequence. |
| Finally, just recently, a laboratory published a full length chimpanzee genome that was made from scratch. It took over 20 years to make, after the first genome was published. And the first finished human genome, the Y chromosome was just finished recently as well. So for the first time, we have high quality, full length genomes. I’ve been working with them a lot lately, and I’m very happy with the quality. So all the time before when scientists were talking about genetics, evolution, and human history they were using bad data. It’s not until, literally this year, that we actually have something to work with that’s accurate. |
| In our cells, we have something called DNA deoxyribonucleic acid. It has four chemical components: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). They are basically an encyclopedia of us, our genetic information. So there’s an encyclopedia of Robert Carter. There’s an encyclopedia of Tim Mahoney. They’re similar because apparently we have similar ethnographic backgrounds. Your ancestors obviously came from Northern Europe, just by looking at you. My ancestors came from Europe, and anyone could tell just by looking at me. So the letters in my encyclopedia spell out a five-foot-eleven, skinny guy with light skin and brown eyes, who loses his hair at age 50. All those kinds of things about me are spelled out in that encyclopedia that we call a genome. It’s the compilation of all my genes that are written out on DNA. |
| Scientists only look at select letters because some 99.99% of the genome of all our three billion letters is exactly the same in every person on earth. So most of the time, all the people in the world have the same letters. When we look at racial groups such as African, Chinese, Native Americans, Northern Europeans, we find only about 10 million out of three billion letters will vary. All those variations are found in every population. So, it’s really hard to find a letter that’s only found in Europe and when you find one, it’s not found in every European, and when you find something that’s only found in Africa, it’s not found in every African. |
| That means we came from a common population. All the races in the world, all the people in the world, came from a single founding population that got divided as we spread out on the earth. Then, over the last several thousand years, some mutations have happened, like blue eyes in Europe or sickle cell anaemia in Africa. Unique things have popped up occasionally in these populations. It’s actually really hard to separate people genetically. |
| Those ancestry companies, they’re not perfect because we share so much DNA since there is only one human race because we really did come from Adam and Eve. We’re all the same race, the human race. |
| Now, I don’t want to belittle the experience of minority groups. People have been really mean to other people throughout all of our history, very bigoted and very biased. It’s only now in modern times when people are saying, we need to treat each other the same. The Christian community should have been pushing that before. It’s something we have failed at in a lot of ways. But it was the Christian community, specifically in England, that got rid of slavery because of William Wilberforce and his cadre of people. |
| The idea that we all came from Adam and Eve means we’re all equal. That should have been more clear in theology over the centuries. Unfortunately, when Europeans found people of different colour in different places around the world, they struggled to explain it because of their myopic view. They assumed Adam and Eve would’ve looked like them. So they asked, where did black people come from, or Native Americans come from? Some people said they were from different origins, that God created them separately. That’s not good because that means they’re not related and if you’re not related to Jesus, you can’t be saved. So clearly, that was bad theology, but a lot of people in the 1700s and 1800s thought along those lines. |
