The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

great expansion of the date for (the evolutionary) Y Chromosome Adam. In fact, it brought it to within a similar date range for (the evolutionary) Mitochondrial Eve. While some have argued that the exact date was a bit off (Elhaic et al. 2014), the point is that a single new discovery caused a radical redating of an established evolutionary ancestor. We need to point out that this new haplogroup (A00) is extremely rare. Additional men living in Cameroon have been found that belong to this group, but the fact is that rare lineages tend to not persist over deep time. The more rare a variant is, the more likely it is to be lost to drift. Do these men really represent an extremely old branch that managed to persist in an out-of-the-way corner of Africa, or are they from a much newer branch that more recently experienced an elevated mutation rate? The fact that they carry the “ancestral” allele at multiple positions is taken as proof that they are from an older branch. But, since one out of three SNVs at places where humans and chimpanzees differ will result in the assumed “ancestral” allele, any highly mutated branch will naturally fall into that pattern, even if they share no common ancestry. 3. Patriarchal drive? For both chrY and chrM, certain lineages have picked up more mutations compared to others in the same amount of time (Moorjani et al. 2016). The reason for this is unknown. Population size (Krašovec et al. 2017), overall heterozygosity (Yang et al. 2015), and the presence of known mutagens in the environment, such as surface rocks containing high amounts of thorium (Forster et al. 2007), can affect mutation accumulation. But genetic factors such as the frequency of recombination (Hinch et al. 2011) and the presence of defective or directional repair enzyme systems (Pinto et al. 2016) can also play a role. It is known that mutation rates vary from one family to another (Conrad et al. 2011; Rahbari et al. 2015), due to genetic factors. We know that mutations accumulate like clockwork in some genetic systems, even given strong natural selection (Carter and Sanford 2012), and the types of mutations can be predictable (Carter 2014). The reason for this is that certain chemical reactions are more likely than others. Thus, the spontaneous deamination of methylated C in CpG nucleotide pairs leads to recurrent and frequent C→T mutations in eukaryotes. We also know there is an age effect. It is known that as people grow older, their reproductive cells accumulate more mutations. This is especially true for males (Crow 1997; Kong et al. 2012; Francioli et al. 2015). In the biblical model, the patriarchs grew to be exceedingly old. The very old patriarchs would have contributed a huge number of new mutations to their children, assuming similar rates of cell division and polymerase-induced mutation in the gonads as seen today. We note that Noah is the oldest father recorded in the Scriptures. Because of this, Shem, Ham, and Japheth could have received a huge number of new mutations, and so it is possible that each son could have established, in a single generation, a substantial new branch on the phylogenetic tree. Also, the paternal age-effect appears to be non-linear (Crow 1997), perhaps even exponential, meaning that very old men having children late in life could have instantaneously created brand new lines on the family tree. These lines are assumed, by most, to be the result of slow mutation accumulation over time, but biblically we have reasons to reject this uniformitarian assumption. Instead, we would like to introduce the term “patriarchal drive” to indicate the genetic, demographic, and mutational effects inherent in a biblical model with centuries-old people as both founders and long-term residents within that population, who continue to have children until late in life. For most of human history, normal population genetics and demographics would apply. But this is not true in the early years of biblical history. 4. Out of Babel, not Out of Africa The general pattern of what we see in both Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA supports a single primary dispersion of humanity in the recent past. Some call this dispersion “Out of Africa”. We call it “Out of Babel”. The data reveals an interesting pattern, in that multiple major branches have arisen from surprisingly closely related individuals, in very short windows of time. In both trees, multiple major branches can be traced to identical ancestral individuals. These could be brothers/sisters or cousins. If the mutation rate for chrY and chrM is less than one per generation, it might not be possible to capture all lineage-forming events, but the fact remains that the individuals who gave rise to the major clades were not far apart in time. This is not at all feasible in the evolutionary model. The chances are vanishingly small that in a large population any two closely-related people would go on to have millions of ancestors. Yet this is exactly what we see happening, many times, in both of the chrY and chrM trees. The credible way to explain this it that an explosive population expansion happened early in human history, starting with just a few families or small tribes. This does not fit well with the evolutionary model, and evolutionary ideas of human demography, but it naturally falls out of the biblical model with rapid growth from a single small population (Carter and Hardy 2015; Carter and Powell 2016). In order for history to capture multiple major branches that trace back to very closely related individuals, humanity must have gone through an extreme population bottleneck followed by explosive population growth, as concluded by other studies (Keenan and Clark 2012). This is the exact scenario one would predict in a Flood/Babel model. Nearly all major group ancestors seem to trace back to the Middle East. The most common Y chromosome haplotype in Africa today (E) apparently arose outside of Africa (Karmin et al. 2015; Poznik et al. 2016). This makes the Out-of-Africa theory even more problematic. 5. Polytomy reveals much about human history Another indication of the rapid formation of both the chrY and chrM major haplogroups is the presence of multiple polytomies. As data density has increased from SNV data to fully sequenced chromosomes, most polytomies have been resolved. However, the remaining ones are extremely problematic for evolutionary theory, and “near-polytomies” (arising almost simultaneously) are more common and are almost as problematic. 6. Violations of the molecular clock hypothesis The molecular clock might be applicable in certain situations where the reproducing entity is simple and only a few individuals Carter et al. ◀ Y Chromosome Noah and mitochondrial Eve ▶ 2018 ICC 145