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

appears at least as far back as Woodmorappe (1996), but also more recently in Lightner (2016), Jeanson and Tomkins (2016), Wood and Francis (2016), and Jeanson and Tomkins (2017). Likewise, ID proponents are now examining the concept of designed genetic diversity, for example, Hössjer et al. (2016a, 2016b), and Gauger (2018). Our 2005 version of the numerical simulation program Mendel’s Accountant (hereafter “Mendel”) included an “initial contrasting alleles” (ICA) option that was intended to enable the study of created diversity in a human population. At that time, we understood that the first human couple could have been designed with millions of variable genetic sites. Mendel is best understood as an accounting program. Just as a large corporation or government must faithfully track a vast number of financial transactions and then calculate gain or loss at many different levels, Mendel tracks all of the old and new alleles that exist in a population, accounts for enormous numbers of genetic transactions that take place over many generations, and finally tallies final outcomes on many different levels. Some may dismiss numerical simulation as an arbitrary “black box”. This is unfortunate because numerical simulation has been widely tested and has become a powerful tool in many fields of applied science. Furthermore, Mendel was developed by high- level scientists with proven expertise in the numerical simulation of real-world phenomena, and it has been widely validated in both creationist and secular literature (Sanford et al. 2007a; Sanford et al. 2007b; Baumgardner et al. 2008; Sanford et al. 2008; Sanford and Nelson 2012; Baumgardner et al. 2013; Brewer et al. 2013a; Brewer et al. 2013b; Brewer et al. 2013c; Gibson et al. 2013; Nelson and Sanford 2013; Rupe and Sanford 2013; Sanford et al. 2013; Sanford et al. 2015). It is true that there are bad or dishonest numerical simulations, even as there are bad or dishonest accountants. But this does not invalidate financial accounting in general, nor does it invalidate genetic accounting in general. On the contrary, valid financial accounting can and must happen, and valid genetic accounting can and should happen. The Designed Diversity Model requires an expanded vocabulary. Traditionally it has been assumed that genetic variation only comes from mutations, giving rise to mutational variants (“mutational alleles”). However, given a miraculous creation, there could be a very different class of created variants (“designed alleles”). Mutational alleles and designed alleles would be different in several important respects. Mutational alleles need time to accumulate, while designed alleles can exist from the beginning. Mutational alleles are essentially random typographical errors in the genome and so are typically harmful, while designed alleles would logically be created to be beneficial. While mutational alleles always arise in a population as a single isolated copy, designed alleles would logically be created at higher frequencies. It is widely understood that a mutational allele arises as a single copy – which is, therefore, on the verge of its own extinction. When a new mutation enters a population, its frequency is just one copy in a population of 2 n (with n being the population’s size). Therefore, most mutational alleles are rapidly lost due to genetic drift within just a few generations (Rupe and Sanford 2013). While mutational alleles are typically very rare, designed alleles would typically be expected to be abundant, in accord with the nature of their function, and in accord with their initially designed frequencies. The smallest possible unit of genetic variation involves a single letter difference in the genome. Population geneticists call these single nucleotide variants (SNVs). If the minor allele is found at a frequency greater than 1%, such a variant allele is also called a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). For simplicity, and in keeping with the final report from the 1000 Genomes Project (1000 Genomes 2015), we will use the term “SNP” for all single nucleotide variations, regardless of their allelic frequency. The 1000 Genomes Project detected 84 million SNPs within the human population (1000 Genomes 2015). The vast majority of these are very rare alleles (about 64 million of the observed SNPs had allele frequencies of less than 0.5%). However, this is still a serious underestimate of how many rare human alleles exist. Given our current population size and mutation rate, every nucleotide site in the human genome should mutate many times every generation somewhere on this planet. Therefore, the number of existing SNPs should be roughly the size of the genome (3 billion). But most of these variants are so rare that they are not detectable, due to limited sampling size. Most rare human alleles are unique to a single people group or sub-population. This indicates that most of these rare variants have arisen via mutation in the relatively recent past. We have previously proposed that, excluding rare alleles, a large fraction of currently observed human genetic diversity might have arisen from designed genetic variants that were built into Adam and Eve when they were first created (Sanford and Carter 2015a, 2015b). The latest analysis of the human genome (1000 Genomes 2015), indicates that there are only 8 million SNPs with allele frequencies of 5% or more. Hypothetically, most of these common alleles could be designed alleles. The average person living today carries 4–5 million SNP alleles (Levy et al. 2007). Therefore, a single human today accounts for a large fraction (approximately 30%) of all common genetic variation (Carter 2018). The African people groups tend to have slightly higher rates of polymorphism (Gurdasani et al. 2014; 1000 Genomes 2015). Since there are only about 8 million common SNPs in the human population, and since most of the SNPs in a single person are common SNPs, this means that any given person carries a very significant percentage of all the common genetic variants found across the world (Carter 2018). A single modern couple should carry most of the 8 million common SNPs that are ubiquitous in the human population. Obviously, the genomes of Adam and Eve could have contained this amount of diversity and much more (Sanford and Carter 2015a, 2015b). Some fraction of the pre-Flood genetic diversity would be lost due to the genetic bottleneck of the biblical Flood. However, population geneticists have known for decades that even the most extreme bottleneck (i.e., two people) can capture a significant amount of a population’s pre-bottleneck diversity, assuming the bottleneck only lasts for one or just a few generations and is followed by rapid population re-growth (Nei et al. 1975). This has also been demonstrated using computer simulations of a single- generation Flood-type bottleneck involving just three founding Sanford et al. ◀ Designed genetic diversity in Adam and Eve ▶ 2018 ICC 201