Mistah MOJO

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Posts by Mistah MOJO

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  27

  Adam and Eve Real or Fiction?

  by plmkrzy in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  .

  did mankind start with a single set of parents?

  plm

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  Mistah MOJO

  Hi Plmkrzy
  
  You're welcome. Looks like my view of modern humans evolving simultaneously at various locations is a minority view, and one which the Human Genome Project has disproven.
  
  MM
• 
  3

  Plesae help - source of JW teachings on 'army of stars' teaching

  by Qcmbr in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  hi, continuing my discussions with my jw friend he mentioned that genesis 2:1 'host' of heaven was actually a reference to an army of stars.

  he mentioned that the same phraseology is used in psalms and he quoted a psalm (i think!

  ) which had actual names of stars in it.

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  Mistah MOJO

  Hi Qcmbr
  
  The Hebrew word translated "host" (sabaoth) does indeed mean "army" as in "Jehovah of Armies." (Think back to your NWT) So, yes, speaking of "all the hosts of heaven" means "all the armies of the sky" or "all the amies of heaven." This is poetic writing, not an excuse for JW's or any other nutjobs to start running around screaming "the Bible teaches there are armies in outer space!" oir "the Bible teaches that the stars are literally an army!" If that's what trhe cracker is trying to say he's substandard in intelligence and critical thinking ability. That's being nice. MM
• 
  27

  Adam and Eve Real or Fiction?

  by plmkrzy in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  .

  did mankind start with a single set of parents?

  plm

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  Mistah MOJO

  Hi. The human genome project established that homo sapians possess no DNA, either mitochondrail and chromosomal, from any other specie of human. At least, that is how it was presnted to me by a doctor who is even more of a science maven than I am, and who worked on the HGP in minor capacity.
  
  I found this material online:
  
  

  What, if anything, is a Mitochondrial Eve?

  by
  Krishna Kunchithapadam

  I wrote this essay in December, 1995 for the ERRANCY mailing list (which is devoted to the discussion and refutation of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy).

  Krishna.

  ---

  One of the best indications that a scientific and mathematical statement has not been explained properly is the many different (and incorrect) ways people interpret it.

  Excellent discussions of the Mitochondrial Eve are to be found in:

  • Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, Bantam Press, 2001.
  • Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, Basic Books, 1995.
  • Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon and Schuster, 1995.

  ---

  Here are some points to note:

  • The name Eve, in retrospect, is perhaps the worst possible name to give to the entity in question. I believe that this is probably the cause of so much confusion in understanding what the significance of this entity is. People think that this title has some deep theological or religious consequences. Nothing of that sort. Someone you come across who claims that the bible (or the book of Genesis) has been validated by the discovery of the Mitochondrial Eve, is talking crap---you should feel free, and even obligated, to tell them so.
  • The Mitochondrial Eve of 200,000 years ago (ME for short henceforth) is NOT our common ancestor, or even common genetic ancestor. She is the most-recent common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect to matrilineal descent. That may seem like a mouthful, but without even a single one of those qualifying phrases, any description or discussion of the ME reduces to a lot of nonsense.
    While each of us necessarily has two parents, we get our mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA from the ovum (and hence from our mothers). Our mothers got their mitochondrial DNA from their mothers and so on. Thus, while our nuclear DNA is a mish-mash of the DNA of our four grandparents, our mitochondrial DNA is an almost exact copy of the DNA of our maternal grandmother (the match may not be exact due to mutations. In fact, the mutations in the mitochondrial DNA provide the molecular clock that allows us to determine how much time has elapsed since the ME lived).
    The ME represents that woman whose mitochondrial DNA (with mutations) exists in all the humans now living on Earth. That does not mean that she is our lone woman ancestor. We have ancestors who are not via matrilineal descent. For example, our father's mother (who did pass on her mitochondrial DNA to her daughters) is an example of an ancestor who is not matrilineal to us. However, she did exist at one time and was probably of the same age as our mother's mother, who is a matrilineal ancestor of ours and from whom we got our mitochondrial DNA.
  • The term Mitochondrial Eve itself is a title given retroactively to a woman. Often (and as is certainly the case with the ME that we are discussing) the conferring of the title occurs many hundreds of thousands of years after the death of the woman in question.
  • ME lived with many other humans (men and women); she was certainly not alone. When she was alive, she was most certainly NOT the Mitochondrial Eve. The title at that time was held by a distant ancestor of hers (and of the many humans who were her contemporaries).
  • The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve is NOT a theory; it is a mathematical fact (unless something like a multiple-origins theory of human evolution i.e. the human species arose independently in different geographically separated populations, and that the present-day ease of interbreeding is the result of a remarkable convergent evolution, is true. Few people subscribe to the multiple-origins theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve observation is a refutation of multiple-origins).
  • The proof for the existence of a Mitochondrial Eve is as follows (based on an argument by Daniel Dennett in the above mentioned book).
    Consider all the humans alive today on Earth. Put them into a set S.
    Next, consider the set of all those women who were the mothers of the people in the set S. Call this set S'. A few observations about this new set S'. It consists of only women (while set S consists of both men and women)---this is because we chose to follow only the mother-of relationship in going from set S to set S'. Also note that not every member of set S' needs to be in set S---set S consists of all people living today, while some of the mothers of living people could have died, they would be in set S' but not in set S. Third, the size of set S' is never larger than the size of set S. Why? This is because of the simple fact that each of us has only one mother. It is however overwhelmingly more likely that the size of set S' is much smaller than that of set S---this is because each woman usually has more than one child.
    Repeat the process of following the mother-of relationship with set S' to generate a new set S''. This set will consist of only women, and will be no larger (and very likely smaller) than set S'.
    Continue this process. There will come a point when the set will consist of smaller and smaller number of women, until we finally come to a single woman who is related to all members in our original set via the transitive-closure of the mother-of relation. There is nothing special about her. Had we chosen to follow the father-of relation, we would have hit the Y-chromosome Adam (more on him later). Had we chosen to follow combinations of mother-of and father-of relations, we would have hit some other of our common ancestors. The only reason why the mother-of relationship seems special is because we can track it using the evidence of mitochondrial DNA.
    Thus there must exist a single woman whose is the matrilineal most-recent common ancestor of every in set S.
    A few others points to keep in mind. One might say that if each woman has only a single daughter (and however many sons), the size of the sets will be the same as we extrapolate backwards. But also note that this backwards mathematical extrapolation is an extrapolation into the past. This process cannot be continued indefinitely because the age of the Earth, life on Earth, and the human species is finite (this argument comes from Dawkins).
    Also important to keep in mind is that while the final set S'* has only one member (the Mitochondrial Eve), she was by no means the only living woman on Earth during her lifetime. Many other women lived with her, but they either did not leave descendents or did not leave descendents via the matrilineal line, who are still alive today.
  • Let us now see how the title of Mitochondrial Eve can change hands.
    Consider an extremely prolific woman living today. She has many daughters and takes a vacation to a remote Carribean island for a week. During the same week a plague of a mutated Ebola virus sweeps the Earth and drastically decreases the fecundity of all living women. Not only that, the viral infection also changes the genome of these women so that the daughters they give birth to will inherit this reduced fecundity. This means that far more than average of their fetuses will undergo abortions (or, in a somewhat kinder scenario, their female fetuses will be aborted more often than male ones).
    Only this one woman and her daughters who were off in this Carribean island are safe from the viral plague. Also assume that the viral plague consumes itself within that fateful week. This woman and her daughters are now free to breed in a world where their reproductive potential far outstrips that of every other woman alive (and to be born of these women). Soon, almost every one on Earth will be related in some fashion to this one woman. Finally, when the last woman who was born to one of the matrilineal descendents of an infected woman dies, the non-infected Carribean tourist takes on the title of the new Mitochondrial Eve. Every human alive on Earth at that point in time is now related via the mitochondrial line to her.
    But consider this new twist. Suppose a group of astronauts (men and women) were sent off into space during the infection week, and were thus not infected themselves. After many centuries in a Moon or Mars colony, they returned to Earth. At that time, suddenly, the title of Mitochondrial Eve would revert back to our own ME. The humans alive on the Earth at that time would all share their mitochondrial DNA with an earlier common ancestor.
  • Thus the title of Mitochondrial Eve depends very critically on the present human population of the Earth. As people die or are born, the title can change hands. Once a ME is established (via the death of a matrilineal line), further births cannot change the title. Further deaths can, however, transfer the title to a more recent woman. The older ME is still the common ancestor of all humans alive today on Earth with respect to matrilineal descent, but she is not the most-recent .... This is part of the reason why I said that each and every word of that definition was important.

  As an exercise, try to eliminate just one phrase of the definition of the ME and see what happens. The key terms are most-recent, common ancestor, humans alive today, matrilineal descent.

  ---

  I mentioned the Y-chromosome Adam (YcA for short) earlier in discussing patrilineal descent. The YcA has also been identified (by the careful sequencing of a small region of the Y-chromosome that all men carry) and has been dated considerably more recent than the ME (yet another slap-in-the-face for bibliolaters---their Adam and Eve lived many tens of thousands of years apart). The YcA is not as special as the ME because only men carry the Y-chromosome, whereas all humans, men and women, carry mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA. So the YcA would not leave the same kind of trace in women living today as the ME did. However, the existence of the YcA is as mathematically necessary as the existence of the ME (use the earlier set argument, but now with the father-of relationship).

  While the existence of the ME and the YcA are mathematical, I am more interested in the point in time when the titles were conferred on the particular ME and YcA were are talking about today. These people have held their respective titles for perhaps many centuries, but the really tantalizing question is when they qualified. Was the original human population (from which we all descended) so small that our ME was identified very quickly after her death or did the death of an old woman in a remote village in Southern Africa during the time that the Pharohs ruled in Egypt represent that critical demise of the last matrilineal line not connected with our ME. Similar arguments hold for the YcA.

  A final note. The techniques of DNA sequencing, DNA-relatedness comparisons, and the calibration of the molecular clock have been improving dramatically over the past few years. The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve and the Y-chromosome Adam are no longer in any doubt (remember, both are mathematical necessities)---what is still being discussed is the estimation of how long ago they lived. Determining their ages requires an accurate calibration of the molecular clock and there is some disagreement here.

  ---

  Copyright © Krishna Kunchithapadam
  Last updated: Mon May 1 16:46:06 PDT 2000
  Mirrored from: http://www.geocities.com/krishna_kunchith/misc/eve.html

  ---

  This page is part of the Fossil Hominids FAQ at the talk.origins Archive.

  Home Page | Species | Fossils | Creationism | Reading | References
  Illustrations | What's New | Feedback | Search | Links | Fiction

  http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html, 12/14/2000
  Copyright © Jim Foley || Email me
• 
  27

  Adam and Eve Real or Fiction?

  by plmkrzy in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  .

  did mankind start with a single set of parents?

  plm

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  Mistah MOJO

  There were a number of human species at one time. Which species are you referring to? Modern homo sapians? Cro magnon? Neanderthal? Homo Erectus (no he wasn't gay just horny)? Homo Habilis? Etc.
  
  If you're referring to Homo Sapiens, I'm fairly certain the Human Genome Project established (through mitochondrial DNA) that all homo sapians are descended from one woman. It also established that we possess no DNA from other human species such as Neanderthal, nor any other branch of the human tree that was an evolutionary dead end. There was no interbreeding of the various human species.
  
  Other studies have established, through chromosomal DNA, that we are descended from a group of a few thousand males that survived the last planet-wide extinction of life. So, although the time-line won't allow it, it's nonetheless funny to think of one woman with thousands of partners.
  
  To address this a bit more in detail, I think you're asking "Was there a time when there was only one homo sapian female and one homo sapian male?" Since we are all descended from one woman, one could conclude there was only one female and one male. On could also conclude that homo sapians, like the other various human species, arose at a number of locations with variations. Through warfare, diseas, natural disasters, and planet-wide extinctions, the number was reduced to one of each gender. I think that is probably the current view. How the descendents of these two humans avoided being born with all of the problems associated with inbreeding is beyond me. Perhaps humans are so screwed up precisely because we are the result of inbreeding. MM (Real name Nate Merritt, Hi Blondie!)
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  28

  W.E.Vine and ThirdWitness - Brothers Beneath The Skin?

  by hillary_step in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  thirdwitness,.

  speaking of w.e.vine and your stated respect for his profound understanding of scriptual exegesis and his scholarly expertise about such subjects, i wonder what comments you have on this observation by the man : .

  unauthorized systems.

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  Mistah MOJO

  Dear DEATH TO THE PIXIES
  
  You wrote:

  "Theology aside, a JW would quote Vine merely for his definition of "parousia" in a certain place, for this alone they quote. Who cares about his theology, especially on an unrelated topic. You seem to like unrelated topics, no?"
  
  Well well well. What an interesting view of facts and scholarship you seem to have. In other words, it doesn't matter if someone is full of shiite up to their eyebrows, you'll use a quote from them to substantiate a point. You evidently see no problems in this approach, so please indulge me as I point out a few salient features.
  
  If you quote sources that are known to be humbugs full of balderdash, you stain yourself and your writings with their poor reputation.
  
  You will also cause embarrassment to others who adopt your rather shaky position, for when you're exposed as having relied on a humbug, they will share in your shame.
  
  This position exposes a cavalier attitude on your part toward facts, truth. Your attitude sounds like the WTS attitude. Use whatever source you can find to support your preconceived notions, not matter how attenuated their connection to reality.
  
  There are probably other problems with your approach, but I'm tired. Go forth and have fun in the world of scholarship. Take a fire extinguisher and a life jacket with you. MM
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  25

  WTF? Cancelling our Karma.

  by Sparkplug in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  from the years 500 bce to 800 ce, the religion is in its classical age.

  according to religious studies done at the

  the same source simplified it by using the explanation that life is bad and unpleasant so the hindu must want to die.

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  Mistah MOJO

  Hi Arthur
  
  Speaking as a priest of the Hongaku Jodo sect of Shin Buddhism, I would like to point out there is no "sin" in Buddhism as there is no God to sin against. There is indeed negative karma, which is Sanskrit for "action." Americans are very confused about karma, saying such things as "Your karma must be bad." That is confusing karma with the fruit of karma.
  
  Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism teaches that one can be "awakened" (enlightened) at any moment, to see things as they really are, and hence be free of the wheel of rebirth. It is Hinduism, not Buddhism, that declares that everyone must live for hundreds-thousands-millions of lifetimes to overcome one's negative karma. Buddhism says that by grasping/comprehending the Four Noble Truths and following the Eightfold Path, one can awaken at any moment and be free.
  
  Namaste,
  MM
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  20

  BLOOD BAN BOMBSHELL summer 2006

  by DannyHaszard in

  1. watchtower
  2. medical

  jehovah's witness convention

  cleveland plain dealer, oh - 29 minutes ago july 29 2006 .

  final weekend sessions of the jehovah's witnesses district convention are from 9:30 am to 4 pm today and sunday at the cleveland state university wolstein ...

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  Mistah MOJO

  Hi Danny
  
  It's been thirty-five years since I was disfellowshipped. (Do they simply call it "shunning" now?) I no longer suffer the probs I had for a few years after escaping from the Tower. I'm glad to see some changes coming, albeit slowly. The JWs seem more mainstream nowdays, less radical. When I was a JW it was normal to get into Bible debates in the field service. Now that is not permitted or is at least strongly discouraged.
  
  Thank for your comments about my book Jehovah Unmasked at Blogspot.
  
  Namaste,
  MM
• 
  20

  Joe Hovah and his SEVENTEEN Commandments! Not Merely Ten!

  by Mistah MOJO in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  3. thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain..

  6. thou shalt not kill..

  8. thou shalt not steal..

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  Mistah MOJO

  Dear Ade
  
  Thank you, very much, for such a friendly and enjoyable read. I too have a profound experience of God, especially Love, so we're two peas in a pod in that respect. I'm finally getting comfortable again with referring to the supreme reality as God. May both of our experiences continue to grow and deepen.
  
  Cordially yours,
  MM
• 
  34

  What is the JW View of Clowning :o)??

  by Seeker4 in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  (i threw this into the "jw view of cloning" thread yesterday, and thought maybe a few would like to have some fun with it so i gave it its own thread.

  there was this comment in a letter to the body of elders about clowning in march 2003:

  "as to the matter of clowning, we can see from phil.

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  Mistah MOJO

  Jeez Louise! When I first became involved in the JWs at age fifteen, thirty eight years ago, we had dance parties with live rock bands and strobe lights! We had parties and dances on a regular basis. People could smoke and drink! Even kids under eighteen smoked! We were radically different from, say, the Baptists. (I knew a lot of Baptists)
  
  
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  22

  You are from your father the devil!

  by sinis in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  has anyone stopped to think what jesus was really saying to the jews?

  jesus also says that you have neither seen nor heard him.

  well the ot speaks of how the jews on several occassions not only saw gods ass (backside) but also heard him speak.

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  Mistah MOJO

  Hey Narkissos. Back when Hercules, the Legendary Journeys was popular I wrote some Hercules fanfic. In it, I brought Samson to Greece "on the lam from Jehovah." I also had him followed by two big clods, twins, named Tohu and Bohu. Chaos and Vacant. Fit the characters really well. MM