Episodes

  • Seabird shennanigans

    Seabird shennanigans
    Nov 12 2024
    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 the cormorants? Should they also be included? Baraminology has not revealed the limits of the created kinds, so we have much work still to do. Notes and links: Species were designed to change, part 1 God Deliberately Engineered Life to Change, but How Much Change is Allowed? Biblical Biology 101 (my new book!)
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    10 mins
  • Placing Noah’s sons on the Y chromosome tree

    Placing Noah’s sons on the Y chromosome tree
    Oct 29 2024
    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 Shem, Ham, and Japheth belong even though Genesis is true. Notes and links: Carter, R., Can we place the sons of Noah on the Y chromosome tree? The solution is harder than most people think, 29 Oct 2024. Distribution map of haplogroup R1b in the Old World”, eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1b_Y-DNA.shtml. Carter, R.W., Patriarchal drive in the early post-Flood population, J. Creation 33(1):110–118, 2019; creation.com/patriarchal-drive. Additional references can be found in the main article.
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    26 mins
  • DNA from the last woolly mammoths supports the Bible

    DNA from the last woolly mammoths supports the Bible
    Sep 18 2024
    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 or fewer individuals and only 1 mitochondrial lineage was among them. They also estimated that the population grew to a few hundred before finally going extinct. This, it turns out, is a wonderful natural laboratory for biblical events. Consider that there were only 8 people on the Ark. How much genetic diversity would we expect to lose? Is that population too small to prevent so much inbreeding that humans would have gone into mutational meltdown? Etc. Etc. Carter, R., DNA from the last woolly mammoths: surprising results support the Flood account, creation.com. Dehasque M et al., Temporal dynamics of woolly mammoth genome extension prior to extinction, Cell 187(14):3531–3540.e13, 2024. Carter R, Biblical bottlenecks are not bad, biblicalgenetics.com, 27 May 2020. Carter R, Evolutionary bottlenecks are disastrous, biblicalgenetics.com, 2 Jun 2020. Carter R, Did we evolve from 10,000 people in Africa? biblicalgenetics.com, 19 Jul 2022. Carter R, Evolutionists predict super bottleneck (it would have killed us), biblicalgenetics.com, 9 Nov 2023. Carter R and Powell M, The genetic effects of the population bottleneck associated with the Genesis Flood, Journal of Creation 30(2):102–111, 2018. Carter R, Effective population sizes and loss of diversity during the Flood bottleneck, Journal of Creation 32(2):124–127, 2018. Carter R, Mutations and why you shouldn't marry your cousin, creation.com, 12 Aug 2017. Carter R, How carbon dating works, creation.com, 12 Apr 2022.
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    20 mins
  • Natural selection has little power in the real world

    Natural selection has little power in the real world
    Sep 10 2024
    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 selection pressures in the natural world fluctuate. This cause the chromosomal targets of selection to shift over time, etc., meaning that many thousands of scientific studies that found evidence for natural selection are probably wrong. This paper is a gold mine of quotes, so Dr Rob quotes it extensively. Links: Carter, R., Natural selection in the real world is mostly ineffective, creation.com. Daphnia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnia Lynch et al., The genome-wide signature of short-term temporal selection, PNAS 121(28):e2307107121, 2024; pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38959040 Darwin's Bluff: the Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished by Robert Shedinger, see also amazon.com/Darwins-Bluff-Robert-Shedinger/dp/1637120370
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    25 mins
  • Can creationists explain Neanderthals?

    Can creationists explain Neanderthals?
    Aug 20 2024
    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 against the very foundation of Christianity: the Bible. Can we incorporate these enigmatic people into any sort of biblical history? If so, how? Dr Rob gives his solution here. Neanderthals are a post-Flood people group, descendants of Adam and Eve, and descendants of Noah. There were fully human, but also highly mutated. Joachim Neander: wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Neander Praise to the Lord, the Almighty: wikipedia.org/wiki/Praise_to_the_Lord,_the_Almighty Pettyjohn's Cave: walkercountyga.gov/discover/recreation/crockford-pigeon-mountain-wildlife-management-area/caving/ Virchow: creation.com/african-invasion-of-the-bodysnatchers POGs = People Outside the Garden: creation.com/review-swamidass-the-genealogical-adam-and-eve Questions about Cain: creation.com/cain-chronology Neanderthals POST Flood: creation.com/neanderthals-pre-flood Patriarchal Drive (article): creation.com/patriarchal-drive Patriarchal Drive (video): biblicalgenetics.com/old-fathers-are-genetic-poison/ Long branch attraction: wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_branch_attraction Not the Flintstones—it’s the Denisovans: creation.com/denisovan An overview of the Denisovan puzzle: creation.com/denisovan-puzzle Neanderthal the changing picture: creation.com/neandertal-man-the-changing-picture Poznik's claim that most African Ys arose outside of Africa: Poznik, G.D. et al., Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences, Nature 48:593–599, 2016, nature.com/articles/ng.3559. Thumbnail photo by Jakub Hałun Model of Homo neanderthalensis man in The Natural History Museum, Vienna - via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homo_Sapiens,_Cro-Magnon_1_The_Natural_History_Museum_Vienna,_20210730_1223_1272.jpg.
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    18 mins
  • Biblical contradiction solved! Explaining the Jesus genealogies

    Biblical contradiction solved! Explaining the Jesus genealogies
    Jul 30 2024
    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 were restored from the Babylonian Captivity. In this episode, Dr. Rob presents a logical answer to the problem that follows Old Testament law and basic logic and that does not have to invoke improbable circumstances. The key is realizing that Matthew is probably not a genealogy. Instead, it is a list of the rightful kings of Judah. Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, was the rightful king and a descendant of David. His kingship and his descent from David are both attested to in the New Testament.
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    31 mins
  • A deep dive into the nation of Edom

    A deep dive into the nation of Edom
    Jul 9 2024
    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 textual mysteries in Edom's data, but they can be solved satisfactorily if we think through the issues carefully.
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    15 mins
  • An Introduction to Esau

    An Introduction to Esau
    Jul 2 2024
    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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    17 mins