Posts by Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

Abaddon:

Sorry Earnest, I was in a hurry this morning...

Apology accepted. We all have our bad days. I came off my bicycle on Friday and am sporting a real bruiser of an eye so as bad days go you are not alone.

First of all, I'm not sure if you are even clear on the term 'mtDNA Eve'.
Make people alive today X0. Make the mothers of those people X1... Make the mothers of X1 = X2...Carry on the regression...Eventually, the population of Xx = 1. That is mtDNA Eve.
Thus mtDNA Eve is a fact, provable mathematically. This is well known.

I have read the article at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html which explained it in a similar way to yourself but credited Daniel Dennett for the explanation in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon and Schuster, 1995).

Well, beyond about 50,000-100,000 years so much degradation of DNA takes place it is not posssible with current techniques to do good work with the surviving DNA. There may be a limit to what is possible even with better technology. This is well known.

Thank you for explaining that. I ought to point out that using the expression "This is well known" adds nothing to the information and is a common tool used by fundamentalists to bolster their arguments. Not that you need to bolster this particular argument, but the ease with which you add these little put-downs certainly identifies you with the fundamentalist class.

Now, quite why you want to know about mtDNA to determine whether a fossil is hominid or simian, when you would get as good an answer from 'normal' DNA, is why I was such a grouchy camper.

You clearly misunderstood my question but I didn't explain it sufficiently at first. My question was not whether we could distinguish between hominids and simians by using mitochondrial DNA. But whether we could determine from fossils (either hominid or simian) whether their mitochondrial DNA could be used to identify them as our ancestors. As I said in my last post :

It occurred to me that if we could identify mitochondrial DNA in the fossil record then we could say with certainty whether or not a distant mitochondrial Eve was an apelike creature, and further back a small rodent.

You then said :

Thus my analogy about a painter. It was obvious to one extent or the other, you didn't know what you were talking about. You might object to me saying this, and I know why you object to me saying it - it's called the democratic fallacy; that everyone's opinion is as good as everyone elses'.

Oh dear, fundamentalism at its best. First, set up the straw man with an assertion "You might object to me saying this"..., then make it a fact "...and I know why you object to me saying it", and then knock it down. As your original premise (that I didn't know what I was talking about) was about a question I asked, and a question that you misunderstood in your morning haste, I do wonder why you bothered to reply at all. If I knew the facts I would not have asked the question so why should I object if you know more than I do on this subject?

This is demonstrably untrue, but time and time again I have had to contend with people who, to one extent or the other, didn't know what they were talking about, and were using this 'position of authority' to make sweeping statements or assertations that they would not make if they knew their subject.

Two straw men in two sentences.

[Mitochondrial DNA] clearly indicates that the Biblical account of creation is [genealogically incomplete], as mtDNA Eve lived long long before any Biblical Eve.

Agreed.

But beyond giving a time point for that common ancestor, it doesn't prove diddly either way as regards origins. You are wrong.

This time you misunderstood something as clear as day. I said that a common female ancestor "can either point to an ancestor that evolved or one that was created". In other words, a common female ancestor doesn't prove diddly either way as regards origins. I'm glad we agree.

I know my strengths!...time again Creationist apologetics try to pass themselves off as knowledgable when they are not.

Another straw man.

Your complaining about this is pointless...

And another...actually it's a repeat of the first straw man some paragraphs above.

Avoiding this particular Gordian knot is something believers in supernatural entities are VERY good at. It convinces them, at any rate...

And another...

Oh, and how can I be a fundamentalist...

Regards,

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

Abaddon:

Thank you for the links which you provided. I had asked whether it is "possible to determine the mitochondrial DNA of fossils whether they be hominid or simian". Unfortunately, the links made no reference to mitochondrial DNA in fossils. They did say :

Svante Paabo's team of geneticists in Leipzig managed to sample a tiny fragment of Neanderthal DNA, and showed that it was very different to that of living people. That might be the nail in the Neanderthal coffin, evidence that they were not our ancestors. However, that is just one piece of a huge genetic blueprint. We might yet find a Neanderthal gene that is still around today.
The DNA was extracted from remains of a Neanderthal found in Vindija Cave, Croatia.
So far, only two other samples of DNA from Neanderthal bones have been analysed.
One came from fossils found in Feldhofer Cave, western Germany, the other from a Neanderthal child found in Mezmaiskaya Cave in the northern Caucasus.

The discussion on this topic has touched on a common female ancestor of all living humans. It has been suggested that this common female ancestor, termed mitochondrial Eve, would have had her own mitochondrial Eve when she was alive, and that if we go back far enough the mitochondrial Eve was an apelike creature, and further back she was a small rodent. I suggested with my limited understanding that the mitochondrial DNA found in living humans is what we would expect if there was a mother ("Eve") of all humans who was the first human mother. It occurred to me that if we could identify mitochondrial DNA in the fossil record then we could say with certainty whether or not a distant mitochondrial Eve was an apelike creature, and further back a small rodent.

Although the links you provided did not discuss mitochondrial DNA and suggest by the very limited amount of fossil DNA that has been extracted that it is unlikely this can be proved, the evidence of the DNA referred to above suggests to me that Neanderthals did not share the same mitochondrial Eve no matter how far back one goes.

You said:

I'm happy to have a debate provided this doesn't include filling you in on the current state of affairs in evolutionary theory or providing you with a gap-fill education in biology. You should already know that sort of thing if you want to have a debate about the subject and make valid points or contribute something.

My question was a very simple one to which I thought I knew the answer but I have not studied molecular biology and the fossil record to the same extent as others have done and so rather than assert something I asked for guidance. We cannot all have the same degree of knowledge on all subjects and to suggest I cannot contribute an idea because I am uncertain of some facts is a reflection more on yourself than it is on me.

You said:

As for the "this is all theory and nothing can be proven" thing... there is no explaination how a super-powerful being could have come into existence from nothing and created the Universe.

You miss my point entirely. The fact that mitochondrial DNA proves that we have a common female ancestor can either point to an ancestor that evolved or one that was created. If it could be shown from mitochondrial DNA in fossils that our distant mitochondrial Eve was an apelike creature or a rodent then that would be convincing molecular evidence. If that cannot be shown then on a molecular level it is simply theory. Creation is also a theory. Simply because creation cannot be proved does not make a rodent-like mitochondrial Eve a fact.

I fear that fundamentalists behave the same whatever they believe - creationists and evolutionists alike.

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

Perhaps I could ask a question of those more familiar with DNA than I am. As we are talking of a mitochondrial Eve of many thousand years ago, is it possible to determine the mitochondrial DNA of fossils whether they be hominid or simian. My question is not about insects trapped in amber but about the ancestors we are actually talking about.

If it is not possible to determine the DNA of the majority of fossils then I have to agree with hooberus that this is all theory and nothing can be proven.

Earnest

17

World Ends in 2060 According to Isaac Newton

by blondie in

jw
friends

http://www.nj.com/newsflash/international/index.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?a0481_bc_israel-endoftheworld&&news&newsflash-international

jerusalem library said to hold newton's prediction for the end of the world

by steve weizman .

Earnest

Hi Blondie,

I watched the programme "Newton:the Dark Heretic" on BBC2 with great interest as Newton's rejection of the trinity must be the most scholarly analysis of the teaching and its origins I have ever read. His protege and successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, one William Whiston, was less secretive about his beliefs than Newton and was subsequently expelled from the University. Had he lived a hundred years earlier he would have been burned at the stake.

Anyway, about the programme. It was advertised as :

For centuries the true character of Sir Isaac Newton was expunged from history. This film reveals that the founder of modern science was a religious zealot who spent years decoding the Bible.

There is a fuller description at http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/tv_radio/miscprogs/newton.shtml.

In 1999 when Stephen Snobelen was on a doctoral fellowship to Cambridge (from the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia) he wrote an article, "Isaac Newton, heretic: the strategies of a Nicodemite", in the British Journal for the History of Science (1999, 32, pp.381-419, http://members.aol.com/stevesnobelen/heretic.pdf) and this programme is really a follow-up on his research.

The programme did not actually reveal anything previously unknown although the general public image of Isaac Newton is inaccurate. The background to the programme is that after Newton died most of his papers went to his niece, Catherine Conduitt, and ended up with the Portsmouth family who gave them to Cambridge University Library in the late nineteenth century. In an act of sacrilege the library sold many of these papers by auction at Sotheby's in 1936. So most of his papers are now divided amongst several collections including the Keynes Collection at King's College, Cambridge; the Yahuda Collection at the Jewish National and University Library; the Public Record Office, London and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In the United States the Grace K. Babson Collection at Babson College, Massachusetts and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles hold a number of papers.

The programme made it seem that Stephen Snobelen has just discovered that Isaac Newton was a man of his times. That he was not "the first of the age of reason", but "the last of the magicians". This is because of his great interest in alchemy to the extent that he was one of Europe's leading alchemists albeit in secret. He spent nearly thirty years studying alchemy and wrote more than a million words about it. The programme suggested that Newton's interest in the "philosopher's stone" which turned metal into gold was not greed but to understand the secrets of God's creation, how he created everything from nothing. From what I know of Newton I think that is probably accurate.

There was also quite a lot on Newton's religious beliefs, his rejection of the trinity and of the Catholic Church as Babylon the Great, and his interest in chronology and the end of the world. Interestingly, Dr. Simon Schaffer, who is reader in history and philosophy of science and a fellow of Darwin College at Cambridge University, tells [in the programme] of an early manuscript where Newton made anagrams of his Latin name - Isaacus Newtonus - to form the words "Jehovah Sanctus Unus" which Schaffer translated as "One Holy God" but is in fact a form of the shemah "Jehovah our God is One Jehovah" - an early Newtonian rejection of the trinity.

Now what about this 2060? It really was a gross misrepresentation as any Newton scholar would know. Professor Snobelen (and the BBC) ought to be ashamed. Let me tell you what happened and then tell you the truth. Right at the end of the programme after Newton had died they went back to the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. For thirteen seconds it showed Stephen Snobelen handling a single page but didn't allow viewers to see what was written and didn't provide any identification, but said :

This [the page Prof. Snobelen was handling] shows that late in life Newton decoded from the Bible the date he believed would see the beginning of the end of the world - the Apocalypse!

and then identified the year as 2060 with great fanfare and the world ablaze.

The truth of the matter is that Newton's papers on the prophecies, on which he wrote a great deal, contain a number of calculations on the Day of Judgement. In his biography on Newton - "Never At Rest" - Richard Westfall writes regarding this particular "prophecy" (C.U.P., 1996 reprint, p.816) :

One of [the papers on the prophecies], apparently from the 1720s, concluded that it could not come before 2060 and that it might be later yet. [He then quotes from the page that Prof. Snobelen was waving about (Yahuda MS 7.3g, f. 13) :]
I mention this period [he continued] not to assert it, but only to shew that there is little reason to expect it earlier, & thereby to put a stop to the rash conjectures of Interpreters who are frequently assigning the time of the end, & thereby bringing the sacred Prophecies into discredit as often as their conjectures do not come to pass. It is not for us to know the times & seasons which God has put in his own breast.

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

When our Mitochondrial Eve was alive, the mitochondrial Eve at the time may have been a homo erectus or homo habillis. Go back far enough, and she was an apelike creature, further back she was a small rodent. But there's nowhere to draw a line. There was never just one man and one woman.

As the topic of this thread is the evidence in DNA of man's origin the question is what does DNA prove? It has been shown that man's DNA is similar to that of the simian group. But if it is argued, as it is above, that the mitochondrial link goes back to a small rodent and beyond then what would mitochondrial DNA in the earth's population show if the human race did start with one woman? If it would be no different to what it is then how can it be argued on the basis of the DNA that the human race developed from something that was not human?

Earnest

20

NEW WORLD TRANSLATIO. WAS IT INSPIRED BY JEHOVAH.

by nightwarrior in

who wrote the new world translation.?????????????

as it has no author,no one is brave enough to claim responsibility for this particular interpretation of the bible.

whom is responsible for all the changes of scripture, no one will put there name to doing this.therfore if no one from the society claims to being the author ,is it because they have invalidated the word of jehovah and are scared that they will receive the plagues as mentioned in revelation.for adding to the scriptures or taking things away.

Earnest

whom was credited with writing the gospels , Matthew / Mark/ Luke/ John / why the same said disciples.
Who wrote the NEW WORLD TRANSLATION.? AS IT HAS NO AUTHOR,No one is brave enough to claim responsibility for this PARTICULAR INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE.

One moment, please. Who claimed responsibility for writing the gospels ? Have a look in your own copy of the Bible. No one claimed responsibility. True, they have been attributed to these four writers but in none of the gospels does the writer identify him/her self. So in this respect the translators of the NWT have imitated the example of those first gospel writers in not drawing attention to themselves.

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

It was never the case that some apelike creature gave birth to a mutation that was fully human and she happened to be lucky enough to meet someone with the exact same mutation in her lifetime.

I agree I over-simplified evolution to the point of absurdity but your suggestion that "it works through tiny tiny changes over long periods of time" is by no mean a consensus among evolutionists. The theory of punctuated equilibrium, popularised by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, is one of several alternative theories accepted by many. But the thrust of this thread is the role of DNA :

OK, you've got the idea of mitochondrial Eve completely wrong...There was nothing special about "Eve" within her own lifetime. She was one of many females living at her time, and there were a similar number of males. She is only important in that she happens to have becom the most recent common ancestor in the purely maternal line.

If you had bothered to read the article in talkorigins (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html) to which I referred you would not have felt the need to repeat this decription of mitochondrial Eve. The article clearly says that mE is the most-recent common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect to matrilineal descent. 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. This process of theoretically tracing back mitochondrial Eves cannot be continued indefinitely because life and the human species is finite (this argument comes from Dawkins). Eventually, you would get back to a woman who had no mitochondrial Eve, who was Eve herself, even if she was not the alluring seductress imagined in poetry and art.

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

Realist:

analysis of mitochondrial DNA suggests that all europeans come from i believe 5 (maybe it was 7) different females.

You are probably thinking of the ideas of Bryan Sykes, professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University who wrote the book "The Seven Daughters of Eve". If you are interested a company, Oxford Ancestors (http://www.oxfordancestors.com), will trace your maternal ancestory for a mere $190. However, professor Sykes also found that the seven ancestral mothers seem to be descended from one of three clans that exist today in Africa.

AlanF:

There is an interesting article on "mitochondrial Eve" at talkorigins (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html) which explains that although the "daughters of Eve" are probably not the original descendants of the first woman, that if we go back far enough there was one woman, which is what I suggested. The article says, in part:

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).

Not being a scientist myself I wasn't too sure of my facts but it has always seemed to me that the ease with which humans breed with other humans regardless of different culture or race was evidence of a common ancestry of two human parents. I am pleased to see that mitochondrial DNA now seems to confirm that. If I reason on this a little further and suppose that the first woman evolved from a common ancestor to other homo- species (as well as chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.), it seems a remarkably fortunate event that the first man evolved within her lifetime. In fact, considering the amount of time it takes for a new species to evolve I suggest that the chance of these two individuals meeting and procreating within their lifetime is nothing short of miraculous.

There is very good evidence that humans suffered an extreme bottleneck in population about 75,000 years ago, after the huge explosion of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia produced a sort of "nuclear winter" that precipitated another ice age cold spell and seems to have wiped out all but a thousand or so modern humans.

You are probably referring to the volcanoe Toba in Sumatra. Tambora erupted in 1815. An abstract of the hypothesis that the eruption of Toba created a "bottleneck in population" can be read at http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Ambrose_98.html. It is not quite clear to me why this hypothesis should be inconsistent with the "mother Eve" theory. The larger a population gets the more diverse the mitochondrial DNA. Subsequent bottlenecks, however they are caused, reduce the variation of mitochondrial DNA. There is no contradiction between the two theories as far as I can see.

The main indication we have that humans evolved -- whether by standard evolutionary mechanisms or something else is still not solidly determined -- is the fossil record.

To what extent the fossil record shows that humans evolved is not relevant to establishing what DNA demonstrates. The evidence presented thus far shows that all living matter has DNA, much of which is held in common. As you said in another post :

[Commonality's] also circumstantial evidence for an efficient Creator in terms of reuse of parts, but the existence of "junk genes" seems to me evidence against an efficient Creator.

So my conclusion is that DNA doesn't actually prove anything. Those who want to believe in creation will believe it demonstrates an efficient Creator. Those who want to reject creation will be able to justify their conclusions. However, as is true of so much we believe to be fact, believers and unbelievers alike will be acting on faith alone.

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

Jerry Bergman is only partly correct in saying that "Galileo's problems were his fellow scientists, not the Catholic Church". The article he referred to can be found at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/105/21.0.html. Galileo's primary problem was that the Pope (Urban VIII), a long-time acquaintance and admirer, a fellow Tuscan and alumnus of the University of Pisa, thought that Galileo had betrayed him.

The cosmology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which made the earth the immobile centre of the universe was not based on the Bible, but on the fourth-century-BC teachings of Aristotle and refined by the second-century Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. Galileo's various works both challenged Aristotelian physics and defaced the perfect body of the Sun by the identification of sunspots. Further, Galileo flouted academic tradition by writing in Italian rather than Latin which meant that everyone, not only the scientists, could read it. This enraged and insulted his fellow philosophers who were eventually the ones who brought a complaint against him.

On 5 March 1616 the Holy Office of the Inquisition ruled that Copernican astronomy was "false and contrary to Holy Scripture". It was not to be considered as fact but could be considered hypothetically. Urban, who only became Pope in 1623, had been instrumental in his role as Cardinal Barberini in keeping "heresy" out of the final wording of the edict. When Galileo met with him in 1624 he gave him his blessing and written protection as long as he labelled the system an hypothesis. Before printing his Dialogue he had gone to Rome and submitted it for approval and in 1631 he finally received it.

When Galileo's enemies complained about the book Urban demanded a re-examination as it was implied he was not defending the faith (at a time when Protestantism was rampant). An old note in Galileo's Inquisition dossier from 1616 showed that Galileo had been officially warned not to discuss Copernicus, ever, in any way at all. Urban considered he had been treated as a fool in order to gain his approval and the rest is history. It had nothing to do with the suppression of truth by religion, but everything to do with envy, jealousy, treachery and anger.

Earnest

126

DNA and Man's origin

by D wiltshire in

jw
friends

.

i think as time goes on and dna gets understood better and better it will be imposible for fundamental christians to defend thier position against evolution.

kind of like the catholic church going against galileio saying the "earth is not the center of the universe".. "eventually"(maybe not now) to fight against the evidence makes you look very stupid and under heavy mind control.. don't get me wrong i beleive there is a god, and i think he used "gradualism" to create the universe and life, i even feel the first 2 chapter of genesis are discribing a very long drawn out process that took just as evolutionist are telling us, billions of years till finally man appears.. eventually the wt is going to have to change its understanding of genesis to even stay credible..

Earnest

Thanks, Alan.

The way I have reasoned about this is that the same building blocks (i.e. DNA) have been used for all life but that sufficient variation was contained within different species to allow for subsequent adaptation.

So you would never find animal DNA in plants which might cause them to grow legs, or plant DNA in humans that would have us grow leaves. But if circumstances changed then it is likely that all living matter can adapt to its environment. Does this mean I believe Adam and Eve is a true account ? I think the jury is still out on this but I had understood that DNA proved we all came from a common human ancestor. Is this true ?

Earnest

Edited by - Earnest on 15 February 2003 18:15:55