PODCAST · science
Biblical Genetics
by Dr. Robert Carter
Biblical Genetics is a vlog/podcast by Dr. Robert Carter. His posts explore modern genetics through the lens of biblical history, and vice versa.
Episodes
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The two types of natural selection, and why each fails
Natural selection comes in two forms, positive and negative. Positive selection is supposed to improve species, but Dr Rob gives a clear example where bad mutations are amplified. Negative selection is supposed to keep species from degrading, but Dr Rob uses the same example to show how it occurs...
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What is Genetic Drift?
Scientist throw around words and phrases that are sometimes hard to understand. This is not one of them. Genetic drift is an easy concept. Dr Rob brings up the example drift among of human mitochondria, perhaps the most extreme form anyone has ever seen. And, since natural selection is generally...
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When did Eve live?
One woman is the ancestress of all living people. They call her Eve. Is she the Eve of the Bible? How long ago did she live? Join Dr Carter as he explains how scientists struggle to assign a date to Eve. It may come as a surprise, but the ‘date’ is based on questionable assumptions and debatable...
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The Dark Proteome
Even though it was completed a quarter century ago, geneticists still struggle to estimate the number of genes in the human genome. They went from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to “22 thousand”, then more recently to “about 19,500”. The number, however, has just exploded. Tens of thousands of new genes...
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Dedicated anti-creationist makes huge blunder
In a recent presentation on human-chimp similarities to LOGOS Research Associates, I made the (correct) claim that most new mutations are lost. An opponent attempted to make hay of this, claiming it disproves the ‘creationist’ calculations of the time to Y Chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve....
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Your favorite cheese might be facing extinction
In a recent Creation magazine article, I talked about an interesting new case study done on one of the world’s most favorite cheeses, Brie, and its relatives Camembert and Roquefort. A long time ago, cheesemakers unknowingly selected non-sexually reproducing fungal lines for these cheeses. Now,...
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Mendel’s Law of Exponential Trait Combination
Gregor Mendel was the father of modern genetics. He wrote his most important papers on the topic just a few years after Darwin published the Origin of Species. What people don’t realize is that Mendel’s papers did not only describe how traits are passed down. He also explained how his ideas of...
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Seabird shennanigans
Dr Carter spent some time recently in New Zealand. While there, he stopped by a giant colony of gannets. These sea birds number in the millions but they create a bit of a taxonomic mystery. Are three living species of gannets and the eight living species of booby one ‘created kind’? What about…
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Placing Noah’s sons on the Y chromosome tree
It is only natural for people to want to compare the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) to geography, linguistics, ancient history, and/or patterns in human DNA. The solution, however, is harder than most people think. Here, I list multiple reasons why it might actually be impossible to know where…
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DNA from the last woolly mammoths supports the Bible
The woolly mammoth is strongly associated with the Ice Age, but they survived until surprisingly recent times in the far north. Recently, the genomes of multiple mammoths from the last surviving population on Wrangel Island were sequenced. The scientists concluded the population was founded by 8…
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Natural selection has little power in the real world
Mike Lynch and colleagues published a paper that is devastating to thousands of past studies on natural selection. By sequencing DNA from multiple natural populations over several years, they showed that the net effect of natural selection is “zero” for most genetic variants. They caution that...
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Can creationists explain Neanderthals?
Neanderthals got their name from a valley that was, in turn, named after a beloved pastor and hymnwriter named Joachim Neander. Thus, since their first discovery, they have been associated with Christianity, believe it or not. Problem is, Neanderthals have been consistently used as arguments...
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Biblical contradiction solved! Explaining the Jesus genealogies
There are two conflicting genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament. Anyone can see that the name lists in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 are not at all similar. Worse, 1 Chronicles 3 adds a THIRD conflicting genealogy for a pivotal person in these lists, Zerubbabel, the first governor of Judah after they...
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A deep dive into the nation of Edom
In this, the 7th episode in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob takes us deep into the genealogy of the nation of Edom. This was a people/tribe/kingdom that existed south of the Dead Sea and southeast of the kingdom of Judah, which dominated Edom for several centuries. There are several...
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An Introduction to Esau
Video Link: https://youtu.be/OTj_P8P1v6Q In this, the 6th episode on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains where the nation of Edom came from, how they tie into the main biblical story, and how to handle several tricky textual problems in Genesis 36.
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The Nations Surrounding Israel
In this, the 5th episode in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains the origins of the nations that surrounded (and still surround) Israel. He explains who the Philistines, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Edomites were while adding lots of…
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Working through challenging genealogical details
In this fourth installment in a series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob works through three challenging details that must be overcome if one is to use those genealogies to build a chronology of biblical history: how to link Genesis 5 and 11, how old Terah was when Abram left Haran, and how old Abram...
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What is a chronogenealogy?
In this third installment in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains why the data in Genesis 5 and 11 are so important. These are not just lists of names. The added ages allows us to piece together a timeline of biblical history. Problem is, you can’t directly connect the two passages.…
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Getting started with Biblical Genealogy
In this second installment on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains why all those names (or at least most of them) in the Bible are so important. This should be encouraging to anyone who struggles to read the Bible for comprehension.
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Ancestor vs descendant trees
This is the first in a multi-part series on biblical genealogies. To understand what we are dealing with, we first need to know that there are two completely different types of name lists in the Bible. The first, an ancestor tree is easy. Ancestor trees are balanced and have a known number of...
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What is the longest match between the human and chimpanzee genomes?
Human-chimpanzee similarity is a hotly-debated topic in the evolution-creation wars. Are we 98, 95, 90, or 85% similar? One way to get at the question is to ask what is the longest stretch of DNA that is shared between the two species. This is a very difficult question to answer! But…
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Junk or genius? How functional is the human genome? Part 2
https://youtu.be/-jpoxCZgZKQ Is the human genome highly functional or mostly junk? This is a question that is not only being asked in the creation-evolution debate; it is a question raging in the ivory tower as well. The ‘old guard’ is much more likely to resist any claim that large swaths of the...
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DNA – highly functional or mostly junk? Part 1
Is the human genome highly functional or mostly junk? This is a question that is not only being asked in the creation-evolution debate; it is a question raging in the ivory tower as well. The ‘old guard’ is much more likely to resist any claim that large swaths of the genome are useful. The…
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The Incredible Shrinking Human Genome
No, the size of the genome has not changed, but the number of genes we thought it contains certainly has. After lots of double checking, there are fewer known protein coding genes today (~19,000) than there were when the human genome was first published, and even that count (~23,000) was…
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James 3 vs the anticreationists
A slew of videos has recently come out arguing for and against the work of Dr Jeffrey Tomkins, who claims humans and chimps are only about 85% similar. His detractors have made some massive blunders and I attempt to document them here. This is not to gloat, however. I understand that all humans…
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Recombine-o-mania
Chromosomal recombination is an essential part of the life cycle of all sexually reproducing organisms. Yet, the system is complex, involving hundreds to thousands of proteins and RNAs. It also involves DNA repair pathways, which are themselves incredibly complex. The newest available information...
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Let’s talk about ancient DNA
My new video made quite a splash! Apparently, lots of Christians are asking questions about the DNA we can now pull from very old skeletons. How do they do it? What are the data telling us? How is it even there, if the bones are as old as claimed? Without revealing too many details about what is…
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African cichlids – ‘fast species’ are very, very biblical
African cichlids are a diverse group of fishes that have frequently been used as evidence for evolution. Yet, now that the genomes of several hundred species have been published, the true history of this group has been revealed. All parties must now acknowledge that the many species arose…
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Darwin’s Finches: the little birds that destroy evolution
Darwin’s finches have long been considered an icon of evolution. A recent analysis included 40 years of morphological measurements and genealogy tracing among four finch species on a small island in the Galapagos chain. This was coupled to 30 years of DNA sampling, including the recent sequencing...
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Evolutionists predict super bottleneck (it would have killed us)
A new paper claims that the pre-human population went through an extremely small and extremely long population bottleneck. Starting about one million years ago, the population was reduced to at most 1,280 “breeding individuals” and this lasted for over 100,000 years. To get there, they examined...
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Human vs Chimp Part 3: a deep dive into how statistics are being misused
The opponents of biblical creation have made some glaring errors in their criticisms of prior work on human-chimpanzee genetic differences. Specifically, several of their claims are in conflict with both theory and experiment. I document these here in detail. They have also shown a rudimentary...
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Human vs Chimp part 2
This is the second installment in a now multi-part series on human and chimpanzee genetic differences. I had a lot of pushback from my last episode, including negative reviews posted by Gutsick Gibbon, Creation Myths, and Dapper Dinosaur. Unperturbed, I push on. Here, I lay out some of the...
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Human vs Chimp: an honest evaluation of our genetic differences
Several anti-creationists have made a hobby out of attacking creationists. Their best efforts, however, have generally failed. For example, see: Sanford 2013 Critic ignores reality of Genetic Entropy: the author of a landmark book on genomic decay responds to unsustainable criticisms creation.com…
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Eschatological Genetics
Dr Rob outlines three aspects of genetics that tell us that, scientifically, the human species is doomed to eventual extinction. These include the rate of mutation accumulation in our population over time, the inability of natural selection to remove most of those mutations, and the sheer number…
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Fisher’s failure and the dramatic end of neo-Darwinism
Dr Rob discusses a fundamental aspect of neo-Darwinism (Fisher’s Theorem of Natural Selection) and how it fails mathematically. First postulated in 1930, Fisher’s idea was promoted as something as firm and settled as the 2nd Law. Problem is, he made several incorrect assumptions that invalidate…
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Geeking out about DNA damage repair
Dr Rob waxes eloquent about some amazing new revelations involving DNA damage repair systems. Researchers recently turned AI onto the human genome, probing the genes and gene systems that are involved in maintaining and repairing DNA. The results shocked everyone. Many more genes that anyone...
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Why you can’t trace your family tree to Adam and Eve
Everybody loves genealogy, but we are severely limited in what we can know about our family histories. There are two main reasons for this. First, family records only go back so far. Even the longest family trees can’t go back thousands of years. Second, personal genetics testing can only tell…
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It’s an RNA world after all
Notes and links: Genetic Entropy, by John Sanford Keffer oak RNA: the epicenter of genetic information, by John Mattick and Paulo Amaral (reviewed by Witold Filipowicz)
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Bacteria deceived us! Life is not simple
Science advances in fits and starts, and it sometimes takes a detour onto a dead-end road. Bacteria represent one of those roads. Studying bacteria gave us a sense that we could easily figure out biology, that there was a direct connection between genes and behavior, and that life was simple....
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How I made fluorescent fish (a Christian response to genetic engineering)
Genetic engineering is a controversial topic. From vaccines to fetal cells to transhumanism, the debate rages. Yet, there are certain aspects to genetic engineering that are demonstrably good. How are we supposed to make heads or tails of this new technology, especially since it is impacting…
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Scopes, 100 years later: the lingering effects of the famous “monkey trial”
We are approaching the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey Trial”. Dr Rob was in the neighborhood, so he stopped by the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, TN to tell the part of the story most people have never heard. This was the first time evolution was put on ‘trial’ in a US courtroom and…
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Can creationists make any real predictions? Or are they just preaching to the choir?
Given the biblical accounts of Creation and the Flood, can we draw any conclusions about what we would expect in genetics? That depends on status of the species in question (e.g., ‘clean’ vs ‘unclean and ‘on the Ark’ vs ‘not on the Ark’), its population history, the amount of created diversity...
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Sexual Recombination, complex genetics, and challenges to the Out-of-Africa theory
Notes, links, and things to think about: Hinch et al. 2011. The landscape of recombination in African Americans. Nature 476:170–177, 2011. Eberle et al. 2017. A reference dataset of 5.4 million human variants validated by genetic inheritance from sequencing a three-generation 17-member pedigree....
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Things I no longer believe
Dr Rob spills the beans about several things he no longer believes, including Darwinian evolution, the simplicity of bacteria, Linnean taxonomy, and the thought that the human embryo goes through the stages of evolution as it develops. This is a deep dive into the world of uncertainty and...
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Where are the skeletons of all the REALLY old people? Archaeology vs the Bible.
There is scant evidence for very old people in the archaeological record, but the Bible claims people once lived for centuries. Is this a major contradiction? Not really. First, regarding the physical evidence, we would not necessarily know what to look for. Second, just because a person can get...
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Genealogy vs Phylogeny: The War Continues
Mutations are known to occur at much higher rates than can be accounted for in evolutionary theory. Given measurable rates, Y Chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve would have lived only a few thousand years ago. To answer this, evolutionists generally appeal to natural selection or genetic drift....
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How the butterfly got its stripes
The genetics of the humble butterfly tells us a lot about the creation-evolution debate, the definition of ‘species’, the definition of ‘junk DNA’, and how complex the control systems for things like wing patterns are. The ‘unit’ of creation is not the species but the baramin (e.g., the ‘created...
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Why Egyptians are not ‘Black’
Egyptian culture is thousands of years old, yet they never maintained perfect isolation from the nations among whom they lived. They have been conquered and they themselves have conquered many times. Invading armies brought hordes of soldiers, who would have left behind children. Given that Egypt...
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DNA of the Ancient Pharaohs
Dr Rob describes the horrible levels of inbreeding within the ancient Egyptian royal family and how this affected them over time. This includes the problems we see in the mummies of King Tut and his father Akhenaten, plus further up the family tree in the time of Hatshepsut (who may have been the...
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How did they build the pyramids so soon after Noah’s Flood?
Dr Rob travels to Egypt to answer some difficult questions about the biblical timeline, population growth, the people of Egypt, and how, on earth, there were enough people to build the pyramids just a few centuries after Babel. Notes and links: Tour Egypt with CMI book Egyptian chronology and the...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Biblical Genetics is a vlog/podcast by Dr. Robert Carter. His posts explore modern genetics through the lens of biblical history, and vice versa.
HOSTED BY
Dr. Robert Carter
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