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

the most divergent. DISCUSSION Any origin-of-man model will have significant problems due to the inherent limits of historical science. Thus, we suggest there should be a great deal of humility on all sides as we explore this very significant topic. Even as Bible believers, we should not pretend to understand the thoughts or actions of God, except as He has revealed them to us. The best we can do is to encourage the faithful by providing reasonable evidences and credible models that are consistent with the Word of God. Before we address the various ways in which a literal Adam and Eve might be reconciled with the observed allele distributions, we must first point out that the human evolutionary model has many fundamental problems of its own. For example, there is strong evidence that human populations cannot survive in deep time due the relentless accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations (Sanford 2014). Many of the mutations that account for the millions of rare alleles in the human population should be very slightly deleterious. This should result in continuous genetic degeneration and eventual extinction. A second profound problem with the human evolutionary model is the fact that there is simply no credible way that mutation/selection can create the vast amount of new information that would be required to change an ape population into a human population. The enormous difficulty of creating the biological information that makes life, and makes us human, has been demonstrated on many levels (Marks et al. 2013). The counter-claim has been that the famous nylonase gene is proof that it is easy to create new functional biological information. However, the spontaneous nylonase claim has recently been falsified (Cordova and Sanford 2017). The human evolution model has a third glaring problem called “the waiting time problem”. It turns out that it would take at least 84 million years to create and fix a nucleotide string consisting of only two letters in a human-like ancestral population (Sanford et al. 2015). Yet human evolution requires a vast number of specific nucleotide strings that are much longer than two letters long. A fourth serious problem associated with the human evolutionary model involves the fact that the bones that are popularly claimed to be “transitional fossils” are actually highly contested within the field of paleoanthropology (Rupe and Sanford 2017). If we start with the premise of amiraculously createdAdamand Eve, the idea of “designed diversity” is a logical deduction. It provides the most coherent explanation for the beneficial variations that we see within the human race today. Since all parties acknowledge that nearly all non-neutral mutations are deleterious, only designed variants can credibly account for all the “good diversity” we see (i.e., variations that are desirable, and have no pathological effects). This should be especially obvious when we consider the various forms of human beauty, and the various types of human gifts and talents such as mathematical or artistic genius. Desirable human variations of this type cannot rationally be attributed to Darwinian mutation/selection. In addition, when designed diversity is coupled with natural selection, it optimally enables rapid local adaptation and rapid fragmentation of populations into sub-populations after the Flood. It is reasonable to expect that diversity would be part of God’s design, both for humans and for all living things. It is easy to envision a great deal of genetic diversity being front- loaded into the genomes of Adam and Eve. However, it is more difficult to understand how such designed allelic variation could result in allele distribution patterns that are strongly skewed toward low-frequency alleles, and hence line up with the actually observed human allele distribution. We have simulated evolutionary populations in deep time (Figure 2b). We have simulated Sanford et al. ◀ Designed genetic diversity in Adam and Eve ▶ 2018 ICC 209 Figure 6a. A preliminary simulation combining both mutational and designed alleles (all designed alleles starting at 50%). We performed this simulation using biblical parameters (an initial population of two, and ten generations later severe single generation bottleneck with 6 individuals), and a mixture of designed and created alleles. This run is essentially a combination of Figure 2d and Figure 3c. Note how different this distribution is from the actual allele distribution (Figure 1a). The spike of alleles on the far left is due to the continuous accumulation of mutational alleles, most of which remain rare throughout the 200 generations of the experiment. The broad bulge centered on 0.50 represents the designed alleles – all of which started at a frequency of 50%. Note the problematic “gap” in the distribution, in the range of 3 – 20%. Mendel has plotted allele frequencies from 1–100%. Simulated and plotted using Mendel version 2.7.2. Figure 6b. This is a heterozygous Adam and Eve simulation . A simulation combining both mutational and initially designed alleles (with all designed alleles starting at 25%). We performed this simulation using biblical parameters and a mixture of initial designed alleles and accumulating mutational alleles (case ff824f). There were 296,700 initial designed allele pairs (purple alleles are less favored and gold alleles are more favored). The accumulated mutational alleles are shown in red. Note how similar this distribution is compared to the actual allele distribution (Figure 1a, Figure 8). Mendel has plotted allele frequencies from 1–50%. Simulated and plotted using new Mendel-Go version.