A test for young earth creation?

Question

I've just thought of a possible way of putting YEC to the test! A potential decisive experiment.

YEC holds that all animals alive today were decended from the species on the ark (around 4,000 years ago), two of every unclean beast and SEVEN of every clean beast.

This makes a number of predictions:
1. If you calculated the diversity implicit in the mitocondrial DNA of unclean species and factored in their frequency of reproduction you would end up with the same answer for each species.
2. If you then factored in the rate of change of mitocondrial DNA you would get back to around 4,000 years ago
3. If you repeated the experiment on clean animals you would get radically different, universally "older" results.

What do you reckon? Could this decide the issue?

Well I must say I'm very dissappointed with the Biologists! I posted the same question in "religion and spirituality" and got better respsonses! C'mon guys - is the test possible? Is it feasible? I thought scientists liked testing things - not saying "no point - we already know".

Answer 1

If you were to conduct these experiments, you would learn that YEC is total hogwash, which was decided quite a long time ago. This, along with ID, offends me both as a scientist and as a Christian.

It offends me as a scientist because it is non-scientific thinking attempting to pose as actual science. In that sense it is no better than cold fusion, global warming, nuclear winter, second-hand smoke research, and everyone who claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine.

It offends me as a Christian because I believe it goes against what Christ has commissioned us to do. Christians are supposed to spread the gospel openly to everyone. Nowhere has Jesus commanded us to make up a bunch of secular-sounding nonsense and use it to disguise and sneak His teachings quietly into the public school system. Nowhere did He say "act like you are more clever than the smartest people in the room."

Answer 2

Please understand that you will never get an exact time period, time periods are only approximations and can be off by years or days,
this explains the difference in your results. The time period that you first received on unclean species will never match the same time period of the cleaner species not because they weren't around during the same time period but due to different specie types,therefore scientist only make speculations based on their findings and make allowable adjustments when necessary.

Answer 3

You declare that : Geologists have known that the Hell Creek Formation, the position B. rex replaced into discovered, is sixty 8 million years old they have known no such ingredient. they arise with that date in holding with *assumptions*. the information is the information. Evolutionists can not clarify why dinosaur bones have not fossilised. it isn't only one. Many more desirable were discovered. The question try to be asking is why carry out a touch human beings refuse to envision their personal assumptions about age? they're going to have self assurance actually something except that dinosaurs did not die out tens of millions of years in the past after all. that could no longer a medical frame of mind. it really is a bigoted non secular/philosophical stance masquerading as technological know-how. possibly you may want to opt to expalin how bones can live to inform the tale unfossilised for sixty 5 million years. even as your are at it, attempt explaining why coal and diamonds comprise carbon 14, indicating that they couldn't be tens of millions of years old. and then attempt to describe why volcanic rock from Mt St Helens (only 30 years old) is dated making use of radiometric courting approaches and evolutionary assumptions, as million of years old. and then come decrease back and address the information :)

Answer 4

well recon ants spiders mice rats and rabbits should be running things now if you are going to listen to evolution, look at the way they can breed and the midges can eat a human alive according to some scottish fishermen, so maybe in the end thier will only be midges. the bible says the meek will inherit the earth.
so maybe we should stop worrying and get on with things of importance like carrying a fly spray at all times.

Answer 5

all very well and good apart from one small problem in your argument there is a highly conserved region present in mitochondrial DNA which does not undergo mutation. don,t think this would decide the issue which is a fundamental difference of opinion. one theory could be used to prove something and six months later a new theory could be put out to disprove it. people are going to believe what they want.

Answer 6

There is no issue, this is like trying to prove the earth is flat, just accept the earth is 4+ billion years old and worry about more important things. You can still believe in god without having to believe a book written 2 thousand years ago!

Answer 7

Your experiment would never be accepted as proof there was no ark since those wakos believe someone walked on water and came back from the dead. They will easily trick themselves into believing some rationalized (in their thinking) explanation for your results.

Answer 8

Interesting idea.
But mitochondrial DNA already supports the YEC position.
http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/creationontheweb?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=mitochondrial&spell=1

(A pity some of the other contributors above can't rise above sledging to actually debate science.)

Cut the crap elchisto - let's have your evidence, not just baseless ad hominem insults.

Answer 9

tell that to the dinosaurs

Answer 10

The issue is already decided. But yes, if the observations supported your predictions (and I see no reason why they wouldn't), it would be very strong proof.

But creationists will never accept any proof which differs with their ignorance. No matter how convincing.

They (YEC's) will simply conjure up all kinds of Ad Hoc Hypothesis to contradict your unsupportive data.

CHAS_CHAS...
It is my pleasure to expose dimwits and frauds whenever possible. Thankfully, scientifically illiterate YEC's like you are easy targets. First of all, the "Mitochondrial Eve" you are talking about is NOT evidence for anything that YEC's believe.

From http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html
"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."

As for the proof of evolution, visit http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ar5eJETVs9cVk8db6_LEKeojzKIX?qid=20061111005228AAWXuCw. The question was titled, "Question for people believing in Evolution?"

The asker, who is apparently a YEC, chose it as the best answer. That answer was mine (S'cuse me while I take a bow).

Not that you will actually consider it. It is so much easier to dismiss things as BS when you don't have a clue about the material being discussed.

That's the only reason YEC's are successful. They rely on people to just accept their criticisms of evolution, and not really look into it.

So, Chas, whenever you're ready to debate science, pose your question.