Category: Faith
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Science moves closer to Adam and Eve?
Yesterday, the journal Science published a study providing evidence that humans are descended from very small population. The authors detect a bottleneck lasting about 100,000 years with an average effective population size of about 1280. They date this to about 813,000 to 930,000 years ago, placing it before the divergence of Neandertals and Denisovans from […]
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Video: Adam, Eve and human genetic diversity
This video summarises my understanding of the current genetic evidence on whether or not humans could have passed through a bottleneck of a single couple at some point in our history. It is a talk I gave in May 2020 for a group of scientists from across Europe who identify as Christians. This audience came […]
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Video: More than evolution
Here is a 20 minute lockdown video I published on YouTube a few days ago. In it, I make one major point: it is as hard to be an atheist today as it was 2400 years ago. In fact, a little harder. I have seen a few responses to this video by atheists since I […]
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Did Darwin make atheism credible?
Imagine that my wife and I walk into our living room one morning to find that our son’s toy box has fallen over, and pieces of BRIO train set track lie jumbled on the floor. But eight of the pieces are joined together in a perfect circle, lying on the floor, with a train on […]
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Adam and Eve our ghostly ancestors?
That a single couple could be the ancestors of all living humans is widely seen as an area of conflict between genetics and the Abrahamic religions. Though little detailed attention has been paid to this idea in the scientific literature (see ‘Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis?’), current models of the history of genomic variation in […]
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Unselfish gardeners? Christianity and the environment
Human degradation of the natural environment is a great tragedy of our time. One of its major drivers is selfishness leading to over-consumption and waste. Despite growing concern about the environment, the majority of us struggle to forgo convenience and consumption for the long-term good of the planet. We find it easy to signal environmental […]