Robert W. Carter, PhD
Scientist and Speaker, Creation Ministries International, Atlanta, GA
www.CreationOnTheWeb.com
Granted, the book of Genesis is a history book, not a science book. However, Genesis makes some grand claims about the past that should become evident as we explore the world through science. And if Genesis is a reliable source for the early history of man, we should be able to detect the major events of Genesis using the tools, techniques and data developed by modern genetics. There are three events that, if they occurred at all, should have left an indelible mark on our genetic makeup: the Creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, and evidence for each one of these can be clearly seen if one knows where to look.
For instance, the amount of diversity among all world populations fits well with the initial creation of two people and the subsequent accumulation of mutations, particularly since the Flood/Babel. This includes the amount of variation (single letter differences approximately occur once every 100,000 nucleotides) and the types of variation (most single letter variations are shared across the world, most deletion mutations are not).
The variation among world populations fits well with a short but severe bottleneck event (the Flood) followed by a subdivision of the world population along paternal lines several generations later (at the Tower of Babel). According to this, we would expect a low diversity of Y chromosomes worldwide since there was only 1 lineage on the Ark (Noah’s), and we would expect Y chromosome variations to be geographically specific. This indeed is what we find. Likewise, we might expect three main mitochondrial lineages (pertaining to the three daughters-in-law of Noah) and we would expect to find them dispersed throughout the world. Like the Y chromosome data, the mitochondrial data fits nicely with Biblical expectations.
We need more than neat correlations, however, to build a Biblical model of human genetic history. According to the Recent African Origins theory, the evolutionary data clearly indicate a single, worldwide dispersal of people, traveling in small groups, moving through the Middle East, into previously-uninhabited territory, in the recent past. If we take this data and strip away the evolutionary assumptions, it is not hard to see the Biblical picture. The timing of this dispersal fits well with the Biblical account if we use real-world mutation rates (as opposed to phylogenetic estimates). And the idea that the focal point of the dispersion was in Africa is derived from the observation that the NE African people exhibit more genetic diversity than the people in other areas of the world. There are several critical assumptions that must be true if the starting point is accurate, but each one of these assumptions has been questioned in the evolutionary literature (Carter 2007). One is left to wonder about the applicability of a model that is hanging on what many consider to be false premises.
There is a lot more to this than I have given here. The data are there for all to see. It takes some work, but the evolutionary interpretations can be sorted out from the data, and what is left correlates well to the grand scheme of world history given in Genesis. But how can this be? Genesis is considered to be a myth by most of the secular world, but this ancient Jewish mythology closely describes the real-world genetic data! The major predictions of Genesis are being almost accidentally rediscovered in the modern genetics laboratories of the world. I conclude that this ancient book has been generally validated and call on others to add more detail to the Biblical model of human genetic history.
