Biblical Genetics Dr. Robert Carter

In this second installment on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains why all those names (or at least most of them) in the Bible are so important. This should be encouraging to anyone who struggles to read the Bible for comprehension.

This is the first in a multi-part series on biblical genealogies. To understand what we are dealing with, we first need to know that there are two completely different types of name lists in the Bible. The first, an ancestor tree is easy. Ancestor trees are balanced and have a known number of people at each level. Even better, nearly all biblical ancestor trees only list fathers, so there is but one person at each level. The second, descendent trees, are the stuff of genealogical nightmares. Dr Rob makes it all easy.



Here are some helpful images.



Ancestor trees:







2. A descendant tree:







3. A mixed tree:







 

Human-chimpanzee similarity is a hotly-debated topic in the evolution-creation wars. Are we 98, 95, 90, or 85% similar? One way to get at the question is to ask what is the longest stretch of DNA that is shared between the two species. This is a very difficult question to answer! But, unperturbed, Dr Rob set out to answer it. Will our fearless hero be able to pull it off? Spoiler alert: not quite, but the path of discovery is still very interesting.



LastZ github.com/lastz/lastz

LastZ chaining github.com/hillerlab/make_lastz_chains

Mummer4 mummer4.github.io/

Blast blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium primate projects github.com/marbl/Primates

Python python.org/



Standard Bases:



A: Adenine

C: Cytosine

G: Guanine

T: Thymine (in DNA)

U: Uracil (in RNA)



Ambiguous Bases (IUPAC Codes):

These codes are used when there is ambiguity in the nucleotide present at a particular position:



R: A or G (puRine)

Y: C or T (pYrimidine)

S: G or C

W: A or T (Weak)

K: G or T (Keto)

M: A or C (aMino)

B: C, G, or T (not A) (B comes after A)

D: A, G, or T (not C) (D comes after C)

H: A, C, or T (not G) (H comes after G)

V: A, C, or G (not T) (V comes after U; U is replaced with T in DNA)

N: Any base (A, C, G, T) (N for any nucleotide)





Silver Comet Trail silvercometga.com/

https://youtu.be/-jpoxCZgZKQ







Is the human genome highly functional or mostly junk? This is a question that is not only being asked in the creation-evolution debate; it is a question raging in the ivory tower as well. The 'old guard' is much more likely to resist any claim that large swaths of the genome are useful. The 'young punks' in science is more willing to accept the obvious fact that the genome is highly functional. Who is going to win? In this episode, Dr Rob puts a few more nails in the coffin of junk DNA..



Notes and links:'



Carter 2023 What proportion of the human genome is actually functional? And how much variation is tolerable?

Chen et al. 2023 A genomic mutational constraint map using variation in 76,156 human genomes

Moran 2023 What's in your genomes? 90% of your genome is junk

Is the human genome highly functional or mostly junk? This is a question that is not only being asked in the creation-evolution debate; it is a question raging in the ivory tower as well. The 'old guard' is much more likely to resist any claim that large swaths of the genome are useful. The 'young punks' in science is more willing to accept the obvious fact that the genome is highly functional. Who is going to win? In this episode, Dr Carter highlights four new studies that ratchet the argument toward high function.



Notes and links:'



Carter 2023 What proportion of the human genome is actually functional? And how much variation is tolerable?

Zhang et al. 2023 FOXP3 recognizes microsatellites and bridges DNA through multimerization

Walter 2024 Are non-protein coding RNAs junk or treasure?

Stepankiw et al. 2023 The human genome contains over a million autonomous exons

Chen et al. 2023 A genomic mutational constraint map using variation in 76,156 human genomes

Moran 2023 What's in your genomes? 90% of your genome is junk



 

No, the size of the genome has not changed, but the number of genes we thought it contains certainly has. After lots of double checking, there are fewer known protein coding genes today (~19,000) than there were when the human genome was first published, and even that count (~23,000) was shockingly small, according to the predictions of the world's top geneticists. The nature of the genome has consistently surprised people, but mostly because they applied Darwinian concepts to it. Instead, the genome is a wonderful testimony to the engineering prowess of God, who built something unexpected.



LInks:



GeneSweep

One-gene-one-enzyme

Central dogma of molecular biology

Amaral et al. 2014 The status of the human gene catalogue, Nature 622(7981):41-47.

What on earth is a ‘gene’? Slicing and dicing the genome

The Barrier has been breached: new discoveries are challenging neo-Darwinism