via The Panda's Thumb..
Had to put this up. Apparently creationists have their own take on the recent findings that Neanderthals interbreed with modern humans.
Svante Paabo who has led the effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome and has a popular book about it writes:
There were many others who were interested in the Neanderthal genome – perhaps most surprisingly, some fundamentalist Christians in the United States. A few months after our paper appeared, I met Nicholas J. Matzke, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics at UC Berkeley. Unbeknownst to me and the other authors, our paper had apparently caused quite a flurry of discussion in the creationist community. Nick explained to me that creationists come in two varieties. First, there are “young-earth creationists,” who believe that the earth, the heavens, and all life were created by direct acts of God sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago. They tend to consider Neanderthals as “fully human,” sometimes saying they were another, now extinct “race” that was scattered after the fall of the Tower of Babel. As a consequence, young-earth creationists had no problem with our finding that Neanderthals and modern humans had mixed. Then there are “old-earth creationists,” who accept that the earth is old but reject evolution by natural, nondivine means. One major old-earth ministry is “Reasons to Believe,” headed by a Hugh Ross. He believes that modern humans were specially created around 50,000 years ago and that Neanderthals weren’t humans, but animals. Ross and other old-earth creationists didn’t like the finding that Neanderthals and modern humans had mixed. Nick sent me a transcript from a radio show in which he [meaning Hugh Ross] commented on our work, saying interbreeding was predictable “because the story of Genesis is early humanity getting into exceptionally wicked behavior practices,” and that God may have had to “forcibly scatter humanity over the face of the Earth” to stop this kind of interbreeding, which he compared to “animal bestiality.”
Clearly our paper was reaching a broader audience than we had ever imagined.
Aha.. so that's why humans colonized the entire planet. It was punishment for engaging in bestiality.
There is also a transcript of a bizarre conversation between creationists trying to answer the deep question that while there are references in scripture of God destroying angel-human hybrids, Neanderthal -human hybrids eventually died out too, leaving humans to be with humans only.
Had to put this up. Apparently creationists have their own take on the recent findings that Neanderthals interbreed with modern humans.
Svante Paabo who has led the effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome and has a popular book about it writes:
There were many others who were interested in the Neanderthal genome – perhaps most surprisingly, some fundamentalist Christians in the United States. A few months after our paper appeared, I met Nicholas J. Matzke, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics at UC Berkeley. Unbeknownst to me and the other authors, our paper had apparently caused quite a flurry of discussion in the creationist community. Nick explained to me that creationists come in two varieties. First, there are “young-earth creationists,” who believe that the earth, the heavens, and all life were created by direct acts of God sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago. They tend to consider Neanderthals as “fully human,” sometimes saying they were another, now extinct “race” that was scattered after the fall of the Tower of Babel. As a consequence, young-earth creationists had no problem with our finding that Neanderthals and modern humans had mixed. Then there are “old-earth creationists,” who accept that the earth is old but reject evolution by natural, nondivine means. One major old-earth ministry is “Reasons to Believe,” headed by a Hugh Ross. He believes that modern humans were specially created around 50,000 years ago and that Neanderthals weren’t humans, but animals. Ross and other old-earth creationists didn’t like the finding that Neanderthals and modern humans had mixed. Nick sent me a transcript from a radio show in which he [meaning Hugh Ross] commented on our work, saying interbreeding was predictable “because the story of Genesis is early humanity getting into exceptionally wicked behavior practices,” and that God may have had to “forcibly scatter humanity over the face of the Earth” to stop this kind of interbreeding, which he compared to “animal bestiality.”
Clearly our paper was reaching a broader audience than we had ever imagined.
Aha.. so that's why humans colonized the entire planet. It was punishment for engaging in bestiality.
There is also a transcript of a bizarre conversation between creationists trying to answer the deep question that while there are references in scripture of God destroying angel-human hybrids, Neanderthal -human hybrids eventually died out too, leaving humans to be with humans only.
Is it not apparent that Neanderthals (and Denisovans) , being 15-16ths human and 1-16th ape very close to chimpanzee, were the last in a sequence of human-ape hybridization ?
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