Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

Yes they are always very fuzzy about their dates.

The bottom line is that they do not equate human beings with the appearance of the first anatomically modern homo sapiens. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But they want Adam to be early enough to try to make him the predecessor of all human beings, and late enough to fit the biblical evidence for when Adam existed.

And that is the problem, there is no model that is going to satisfy both conditions.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Philtill@aol.com
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 9:45 PM
  Subject: Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

  In a message dated 4/14/2006 7:12:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time, drsyme@cablespeed.com writes:
    That is not my understanding of the RTB model.

    Ross et al, are explicit that the homo genus is not equivalent with humanity. They would say that only those homo's that are specially created in the "image of God" are human beings. They place the first human being, Adam, in the Neolithic revolution. The archeological-cultural "big bang" is a result of the presence of human beings, that is, because Man was created in the image of God, he was able to produce this explosion in tools, agriculture, civilization, etc.

  This is not correct. In his recent book _Who Was Adam_, Fuz Rana was very clear in putting Adam at about 90,000 years ago by identification with mitochondrial and/or y-chromo convergence, plus a number of other DNA convergences that have the same approximate date. These dates are all well before the archeological big bang (ABB). I think RTB's earlier discussion of the ABB associated Adam with it in part because the DNA convergences were not measured so well, but now with the better DNA data it became clear that the ABB is too recent, and so the model was revised. That's my understanding of why it was revised -- maybe I'm wrong about that, but in any case the RTB model does put Adam 90kya and associates him with all modern homo sapiens well before the Neolithic.

  Phil Metzger
Received on Fri Apr 14 22:40:53 2006