What proof do you have we didn't evolve from 2 humans?

This person believes humans evolved, but that the Genesis account is still real:

I would like to give evolutionists a chance to respond. What would evolutionists like to say to him?

 

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That's not how evolution works. Our DNA shows evidence of our common ancestor with many other species.

 

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We know that similarities in human DNA are determined by how long ago our most recent common ancestors were. For example, your brother and you have very, very similar DNA because you share a parent. If you shared a great-grandparent then it would be a bit less similar. If you shared an ancestor 30,000 years ago, then an Inuit and you would be even less similar.
Extending that, if humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor, we could use what we learned above to see when it happened. We could see the changes that happen to our genome over 1 generation, 3 generations, 10 generations, 1000 generations etc and calculate back from that. And when we do that, we see that we shared a common ancestor 13 million years ago.

 

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I would like to say that it's too bad he didn't learn basic biological theory in high school, but maybe his local community college is not too expensive - if he's actually curious about such matters.

I'm assuming from his wording he's already tried studying from the internet, and apparently isn't suited to it - few people are, so that's no disgrace. Go take a class - it's interesting stuff, well worth the effort.

 

And there's no such thing as an evolutionist. They just call them biologists.

 

Meaningless. There is proof that humans descended from a common ancestry with chimps, gorillas and bonobos.

Stop equivocating: Millions of years ago -- if you mean the Last Common Ancestor (LCA) with chimps, bonobos and gorillas.

Evolve. Organisms evolve. Humans evolved. Homo sapiens evolved. Homo evolved from a LCA with chimps, bonobos and gorillas.

Farther back than what?

Yes but 7th graders are able to understand this -- so why all the games?

Not on your life. Go find the technical articles that prove whatever you are claiming. This statement makes no sense -- what is it even trying to say?

Half of the language of the OP is unintelligible. It purports to talk about evolution, but pretends to have never heard of evolution, and to have never researched the subject.

 

Is it possible to tell from the DNA of a snake, that God made it crawl on its belly as a punishment?
And is the digestive system of the snake adapted to eat dust?
Both of these things would be proof that Genisis is scientifically accurate.

So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, "Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.

 

Well, thing is... technically speaking, an all-powerful God figure that created life could have easily created humans, chimps, bonbons, et al similar enough that our testing would register us as common ancestors, when in fact we arrived at around the same time (Genesis story).

Then again... Genesis states things in terms of "days"... what is a day to God? What would a "day" be before Earth existed (since our 24 hour day is based upon the day/night cycle which... wouldn't have existed at the time, according to Genesis)

*shrugs* Just food for thought

 

Biblical literalists always seemed a tad on the crazy side to me.
The really crazy thing is the those who would speak against the bible also tend to be literalists.

Metaphor
If you do not understand it or can not understand it, stick to math.

 

Like I said, it depends on how you want to look at it - if we are assuming an all-powerful, all-capable, all-knowing figure who, for whatever reason, didn't want to be immediately assumed to be the creator of all... wouldn't he/she have the ability to create the world/universe in such a way that he/she wouldn't be suspect?

 

And he could have carefully laid down successive layers of fossils so that it would look like a progression over time. But that would mean he intended to deliberately deceive us into thinking there was no creation event as described in the Bible. And then why did he add evidence of a common ancestor beyond the similarity between DNA? I mean we can even calculate when the common ancestor lived due to genetic drift. It defies credulity to think God is such a faker.

 

Indeed.

Add to that the limited scope of our knowledge of the Universe as a whole... for all we know, we could be descendants of a long-lost race that set out among the stars and settled on Earth, forgoing technology for a "return to their roots" kind of living [okay, yeah, that's a bit extreme but meh]

 

That is not possible, given the evidence of our ancestry on earth.

 

I've noticed that too.

On the other hand, I'd hesitate to say that the authors of Genesis intended it to be metaphor.

 

Personally, I would dismiss that person's views with a simple "Poppycock!"

Luckily, other "evolutionists" have more patience:

...there’s one bedrock of Abrahamic faith that is eminently testable by science: the claim that all humans descend from a single created pair—Adam and Eve—and that these individuals were not australopithecines or apelike ancestors, but humans in the modern sense. Absent their existence, the whole story of human sin and redemption falls to pieces.

Unfortunately, the scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible. Genetic data show no evidence of any human bottleneck as small as two people: there are simply too many different kinds of genes around for that to be true. There may have been a couple of “bottlenecks” (reduced population sizes) in the history of our species, but the smallest one not involving recent colonization is a bottleneck of roughly 10,000-15,000 individuals that occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That’s as small a population as our ancestors had, and—note—it’s not two individuals.

Further, looking at different genes, we find that they trace back to different times in our past. Mitochondrial DNA points to the genes in that organelle tracing back to a single female ancestor who lived about 140,000 years ago, but that genes on the Y chromosome trace back to one male who lived about 60,000-90,000 years ago. Further, the bulk of genes in the nucleus all trace back to different times—as far back as two million years. This shows not only that any “Adam” and “Eve” - in the sense of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA alone - must have lived thousands of years apart, but also that there simply could not have been two individuals who provided the entire genetic ancestry of modern humans. Each of our genes “coalesces” back to a different ancestor, showing that, as expected, our genetic legacy comes from many different individuals. It does not go back to just two individuals, regardless of when they lived.

These are the scientific facts. And, unlike the case of Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty.​

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/adam-and-eve-the-ultimate-standoff-between-science-and-faith-and-a-contest/

Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a member of both the Committee on Genetics and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology.​

 

I wouldn't. I've met some good storytellers - in general they are profound, and they know what they are doing.

 

Nicely put. However……...it is straying into religion to say this, but since Coyne does so I feel justified………..I would not agree with him that, "Absent their existence, the whole story of human sin and redemption falls to pieces."

I have always thought the Genesis story, the doctrine of Original Sin and so forth, are a poetic allegory of how reason, and hence moral awareness and moral responsibility, arose in Man and how Man has in consequence an inbuilt conflict between his animal instinct and this moral sense. All that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil seems to capture the double-edged nature (loss of innocence etc) involved in reaching a state of reason very well.

I don't pretend this is all entirely orthodox theology: the Catholic Church still seems to insist implausibly on Adam and Eve being real people who committed a specific original sin - maybe they will catch up in a couple of hundred years

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. But the general idea of Genesis being allegorical rather than literal has been accepted by the major denominations for centuries, so I see no reason why Adam and Eve cannot be treated in the same way.

 

I'd hesitate to put Genesis in that category.

 

Oh c'mon - imagine the original of that remnant shadow of material, that outline, being told in five or six separate but connected stories by the resident Shakespeare. It even rolls a bit in the modern Cliff Notes version, at least as the King James version has it.

 

Firstly, a note here: the OP is apparently referring to human evolution rather than that of non-human species.

Secondly: if one wishes to invoke magic, as Kittamaru has done, that cannot be gainsayed. I cannot unsay magic with naturalism. And neither can garbonzo, our resident philosophical prestidigitator, demonstrate that his magic is real. An omnipotent, omniscient being could, of course, have laid any number of tricks in the rocks of old, and no one - least of all me - the wiser. This is the reason that there is no contact surfaceexcepting perhaps in the most narrow and facile of elements, between science and religion; one does not read Gould for nothing. How so?: well, literal interpretations of Genesis are disproved, and so it takes on an even weightier, meatier and vastly more interesting and intellectually satisfying interpretation. And that is the way of the human mind.

As for what evolutionists would like to say specifically to garbonzo's new windmill: it is theoretically conceivable but extremely unlikely. Extremely. Bordering on absolutely impossible. Most populations require a reasonable population size to persist and avoid inbreeding: the rule of thumb is a minimum of 500 genetically distinct individuals. (Cheetahs survive without any such effective breeding size, but men are not cheetahs.) A massive but extremely brief reduction in effective breeding population can be survived - if brief. New generations produce reasonably outbred individuals, and many rare alleles are lost. But heterozygosity as represented by common alleles can be preserved if that reduction is brief. Humans are reckoned to have come through a severe population bottleneck roughly 50,000 years BC. (And yes, I wrote "BC". And why? Because fuck "BCE", that's why.)

Having said that, humans did not 'come from' only two individuals, because such a tiny population size at a single point forces close inbreeding - inevitable, continuous, and for generations uncounted - on that population. Every single breeding from that point forward would carry substantial reductions in fitness and terrible genetic diseases expressed from recessive genotypes. Each new interbreeding would continue to carry that staggering genetic load, and increase it as rare variants continued to be lost and fewer and fewer balanced variants survived. The bottleneck that humanity came through probably reduced it to a few thousand individuals, not two. Furthermore, even these proposed two individuals came from still earlier individuals and they from ancestors even more distant. There is no reason to think based on the fossil record or simple DNA cladograms that they were unrelated to other primates, and beyond the Primates to still other orders of mammals.

Fundamentally, however, the title is just a foolishness: "what proof do you have we didn't evolve from two humans". What proof is there we did? The literally-interpreted scribblings of a band of desert nomads? Bugger off.