Scientist throw around words and phrases that are sometimes hard to understand. This is not one of them. Genetic drift is an easy concept. Dr Rob brings up the example drift among of human mitochondria, perhaps the most extreme form anyone has ever seen. And, since natural selection is generally weak, genetic drift overwhelms selection at critical junctures during development. This has profound implications for the creation-evolution debate, but first, the explanation...

Source paper under discussion: Árnadóttir et al. 2024, The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees, Cell 187(15):3904-3910.



Fig 1: Mutant mitochondrial frequencies in child (y) vs mother (x), from the supporting data of the paper above.



Fig 2: Histogram of frequency changes from mother to child, same source as above.



Fig 3: Histogram data for each frequency bin in the mother (legend) vs child (x). Same source as above.

One woman is the ancestress of all living people. They call her Eve. Is she the Eve of the Bible? How long ago did she live? Join Dr Carter as he explains how scientists struggle to assign a date to Eve. It may come as a surprise, but the 'date' is based on questionable assumptions and debatable philosophy. All we can know is that the mutation rate is quite high and the mutation removal rate is quite low. Thus, science tells us that Eve lived not many thousands of years ago.

Note and links:

Carter, 2025, When did Eve live? creation.com, 18 Sep 2025.
Carter, 2025, The continuing saga of Mitochondrial Eve, bibicalgenetics.com.
Stern-Cardinale, 2025, I BLUNDERED! A Response to Dr. Rob Carter (he agrees with me), youtube.com.
Cann et al., 1987, Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution, Nature 325:31–36. [I accidentally said "1981"]
Carter, 2007, Mitochondrial diversity within the modern human population,  Nucleic Acids Res 35(9):3039–45.
Carter et al., 2008, The “Eve” mitochondrial consensus sequence, Proc 6th ICC, pp. 111–116.
Bandelt et al., 2014, The case for the continuing use of the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence (rCRS) and the standardization of notation in human mitochondrial DNA studies, J Hum Genet 59(2):66–77.
Gibbons, 1998, Calibrating the mitochondrial clock, Science 279(5347):28–29.
Wieland, 1998, A shrinking date for Eve, J Creation 12(1):1–3.
Árnadóttir et al., 2014, The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees, Cell 187(15):3904-3918.e8.
Carter, 2019, Patriarchal drive in the early post-Flood population, J Creation 33(1):110–118.
Carter, R., Genealogical vs phylogenetic mutation rates: answering a challenge, 9th ICC:68–180.
More references can be found in the original article on creation.com.

Even though it was completed a quarter century ago, geneticists still struggle to estimate the number of genes in the human genome. They went from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to “22 thousand”, then more recently to “about 19,500”. The number, however, has just exploded. Tens of thousands of new genes with important functions were discovered hiding in the ‘junk DNA’. Dr Rob explains what these new findings mean to the creation-evolution debate.

Links and notes:

Carter 2025 The dark proteome https://creation.com/dark-proteome
Carter 2024 The incredible shrinking human genome, https://biblicalgenetics.com/shrinking-genome/
Amaral et al. 2024 The status of the human gene catalogue, Nature 622(7981):41–47; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37794265/
Prensner et al. 2024 What can Ribo-seq and proteomics tell us about the non-canonical proteome? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.16.541049v1
Pennisi 2024 ‘Dark proteome’ survey reveals thousands of new human genes, Science 386(6725):951–952; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39607933/
Podcast: https://biblicalgenetics.com/contra-creation-myths
Carter et al. 2004 Cloning of anthozoan fluorescent protein genes, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part C 138:259–270; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15533784
Matz et al. 1999 Fluorescent proteins from nonbioluminescent Anthozoa species, Nature Biotechnology 17(10):969–973; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10504696/

In a recent presentation on human-chimp similarities to LOGOS Research Associates, I made the (correct) claim that most new mutations are lost. An opponent attempted to make hay of this, claiming it disproves the 'creationist' calculations of the time to Y Chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. What he failed to understand, however, is that the Y and mt chromosomes are haploid and behave very differently to the rest of the genome. In fact, mutations occur in them in a ratchet-like manner and no degree of natural selection can change that. Do you want a lesson in population genetics? Tune in!

Notes and links:

My presentation to LOGOS Research Associates: "Chimp and Human (Dis)similarities by Dr. Robert Carter"
Dan's attempt at a rebuttal: "Professional Creationist Makes Huge Admission" by Creation Myths
An older video where I answer the same claims (Creation Myths ignores other people!): Genealogy vs Phylogeny: The War Continues
Rupe and Sanford (2013) Using Numerical Simulation to Better Understand Fixation Rates, and Establishment of a New Principle: Haldane’s Ratchet
Carter (2023) Genealogical vs Phylogenetic Mutation Rates: Answering a Challenge
Fixation (population genetics) on Wikipedia
A shrinking date for Eve
Natural Selection in Paradise
The 'two circles' illustration

In a recent Creation magazine article, I talked about an interesting new case study done on one of the world's most favorite cheeses, Brie, and its relatives Camembert and Roquefort. A long time ago, cheesemakers unknowingly selected non-sexually reproducing fungal lines for these cheeses. Now, many decades later, mutations have built up in this lines to the point where they are starting to have trouble reproducing. Rescue efforts are underway, but in the meantime this gives us an object lesson about the impossibility of evolution, specifically the survival of the first organisms, which would not have been able to go through sexual recombination.

Links:
The Creation magazine paper: creation.com/cheese-verge-of-extinction
Signup for Creation magazine here: creation.com/en-us/creation-magazine
The original research: Harmi, M., French cheese under threat, news.cnrs.fr, 16 Jan 2024.
Additional info on Muller's ratchet: dl0.creation.com/articles/p145/c14588/j29_2_70-77.pdf
About Dr. Robert Carter: creation.com/dr-robert-carter-cv

Gregor Mendel was the father of modern genetics. He wrote his most important papers on the topic just a few years after Darwin published the Origin of Species. What people don't realize is that Mendel's papers did not only describe how traits are passed down. He also explained how his ideas of genetics lead directly to an explanation of the origin of species. Was Mendel directly and purposefully contradicting Darwin?

Links and notes:

Crompton et al. 2024 Mendelian speciation, part 1—what is the abundant source of significant biodiversity, J Creation 37(3):110–120, 2023.
Crompton et al. 2024 Mendelian speciation, part 2—latent genetic information, J Creation 38(1):77–86, 2024.
Crompton et al. 2024 Mendelian speciation, part 3—fixation and reproductive isolation, J Creation 382):97–104, 2024.
Crompton et al. 2024 Mendelian speciation, part 4—adaptive radiations and cis-evolution, J Creation 38(2):105–112, 2024.
Gregor Mendel on Wikipedia
"They believe in bigger miracles than I do" on YouTube.com
Species were designed to change on BiblicalGenetics.com
Species were Designed to Change on Creation.com
Arguments we think a creationist should not use on creation.com
Wort und Wissen

Dr Carter spent some time recently in New Zealand. While there, he stopped by a giant colony of gannets. These sea birds number in the millions but they create a bit of a taxonomic mystery. Are three living species of gannets and the eight living species of booby one 'created kind'? What about the cormorants? Should they also be included? Baraminology has not revealed the limits of the created kinds, so we have much work still to do.

Notes and links:

Species were designed to change, part 1
God Deliberately Engineered Life to Change, but How Much Change is Allowed?
Biblical Biology 101 (my new book!)

It is only natural for people to want to compare the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) to geography, linguistics, ancient history, and/or patterns in human DNA. The solution, however, is harder than most people think. Here, I list multiple reasons why it might actually be impossible to know where Shem, Ham, and Japheth belong even though Genesis is true.

Notes and links:

Carter, R., Can we place the sons of Noah on the Y chromosome tree? The solution is harder than most people think, 29 Oct 2024.
Distribution map of haplogroup R1b in the Old World”, eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1b_Y-DNA.shtml.
Carter, R.W., Patriarchal drive in the early post-Flood population, J. Creation 33(1):110–118, 2019; creation.com/patriarchal-drive.

Additional references can be found in the main article.

The woolly mammoth is strongly associated with the Ice Age, but they survived until surprisingly recent times in the far north. Recently, the genomes of multiple mammoths from the last surviving population on Wrangel Island were sequenced. The scientists concluded the population was founded by 8 or fewer individuals and only 1 mitochondrial lineage was among them. They also estimated that the population grew to a few hundred before finally going extinct. This, it turns out, is a wonderful natural laboratory for biblical events. Consider that there were only 8 people on the Ark. How much genetic diversity would we expect to lose? Is that population too small to prevent so much inbreeding that humans would have gone into mutational meltdown? Etc. Etc.

Carter, R., DNA from the last woolly mammoths: surprising results support the Flood account, creation.com.
Dehasque M et al., Temporal dynamics of woolly mammoth genome extension prior to extinction, Cell 187(14):3531–3540.e13, 2024.
Carter R, Biblical bottlenecks are not bad, biblicalgenetics.com, 27 May 2020.
Carter R, Evolutionary bottlenecks are disastrous, biblicalgenetics.com, 2 Jun 2020.
Carter R, Did we evolve from 10,000 people in Africa? biblicalgenetics.com, 19 Jul 2022.
Carter R, Evolutionists predict super bottleneck (it would have killed us), biblicalgenetics.com, 9 Nov 2023.
Carter R and Powell M, The genetic effects of the population bottleneck associated with the Genesis Flood, Journal of Creation 30(2):102–111, 2018.
Carter R, Effective population sizes and loss of diversity during the Flood bottleneck, Journal of Creation 32(2):124–127, 2018.
Carter R, Mutations and why you shouldn't marry your cousin, creation.com, 12 Aug 2017.
Carter R, How carbon dating works, creation.com, 12 Apr 2022.

Mike Lynch and colleagues published a paper that is devastating to thousands of past studies on natural selection. By sequencing DNA from multiple natural populations over several years, they showed that the net effect of natural selection is "zero" for most genetic variants. They caution that selection pressures in the natural world fluctuate. This cause the chromosomal targets of selection to shift over time, etc., meaning that many thousands of scientific studies that found evidence for natural selection are probably wrong. This paper is a gold mine of quotes, so Dr Rob quotes it extensively.

Links:

Carter, R., Natural selection in the real world is mostly ineffective, creation.com.
Daphnia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphnia
Lynch et al., The genome-wide signature of short-term temporal selection, PNAS 121(28):e2307107121, 2024; pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38959040
Darwin's Bluff: the Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished by Robert Shedinger, see also amazon.com/Darwins-Bluff-Robert-Shedinger/dp/1637120370

Neanderthals got their name from a valley that was, in turn, named after a beloved pastor and hymnwriter named Joachim Neander. Thus, since their first discovery, they have been associated with Christianity, believe it or not. Problem is, Neanderthals have been consistently used as arguments against the very foundation of Christianity: the Bible. Can we incorporate these enigmatic people into any sort of biblical history? If so, how? Dr Rob gives his solution here. Neanderthals are a post-Flood people group, descendants of Adam and Eve, and descendants of Noah. There were fully human, but also highly mutated.

Joachim Neander: wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Neander
Praise to the Lord, the Almighty: wikipedia.org/wiki/Praise_to_the_Lord,_the_Almighty
Pettyjohn's Cave: walkercountyga.gov/discover/recreation/crockford-pigeon-mountain-wildlife-management-area/caving/
Virchow: creation.com/african-invasion-of-the-bodysnatchers
POGs = People Outside the Garden: creation.com/review-swamidass-the-genealogical-adam-and-eve
Questions about Cain: creation.com/cain-chronology
Neanderthals POST Flood: creation.com/neanderthals-pre-flood
Patriarchal Drive (article): creation.com/patriarchal-drive
Patriarchal Drive (video): biblicalgenetics.com/old-fathers-are-genetic-poison/
Long branch attraction: wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_branch_attraction
Not the Flintstones—it’s the Denisovans: creation.com/denisovan
An overview of the Denisovan puzzle: creation.com/denisovan-puzzle
Neanderthal the changing picture: creation.com/neandertal-man-the-changing-picture
Poznik's claim that most African Ys arose outside of Africa: Poznik, G.D. et al., Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences, Nature 48:593–599, 2016, nature.com/articles/ng.3559.

Thumbnail photo by Jakub Hałun  Model of Homo neanderthalensis man in The Natural History Museum, Vienna - via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homo_Sapiens,_Cro-Magnon_1_The_Natural_History_Museum_Vienna,_20210730_1223_1272.jpg.

There are two conflicting genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament. Anyone can see that the name lists in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 are not at all similar. Worse, 1 Chronicles 3 adds a THIRD conflicting genealogy for a pivotal person in these lists, Zerubbabel, the first governor of Judah after they were restored from the Babylonian Captivity. In this episode, Dr. Rob presents a logical answer to the problem that follows Old Testament law and basic logic and that does not have to invoke improbable circumstances. The key is realizing that Matthew is probably not a genealogy. Instead, it is a list of the rightful kings of Judah. Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, was the rightful king and a descendant of David. His kingship and his descent from David are both attested to in the New Testament.

In this, the 7th episode in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob takes us deep into the genealogy of the nation of Edom. This was a people/tribe/kingdom that existed south of the Dead Sea and southeast of the kingdom of Judah, which dominated Edom for several centuries. There are several textual mysteries in Edom's data, but they can be solved satisfactorily if we think through the issues carefully.

Video Link:

https://youtu.be/OTj_P8P1v6Q



 

In this, the 6th episode on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains where the nation of Edom came from, how they tie into the main biblical story, and how to handle several tricky textual problems in Genesis 36.

 



 

 

In this, the 5th episode in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains the origins of the nations that surrounded (and still surround) Israel. He explains who the Philistines, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Edomites were while adding lots of interesting little factoids that help us better understand the Bible.

Notes and links:

Egyptian mummies and Hebrew perfume
Who were the Philistines?
The 'Table of Nations' (Genesis 10  and 11)



The descendants of Seir, the kings of Edom, and the chiefs of Edom



 

In this fourth installment in a series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob works through three challenging details that must be overcome if one is to use those genealogies to build a chronology of biblical history: how to link Genesis 5 and 11, how old Terah was when Abram left Haran, and how old Abram was when God made the "Promise".

In this third installment in our series on biblical genealogy, Dr Rob explains why the data in Genesis 5 and 11 are so important. These are not just lists of names. The added ages allows us to piece together a timeline of biblical history. Problem is, you can't directly connect the two passages. A several-year ambiguity is created when you try. There are other interesting factoids that pop out when one studies the chronogenealogies, so you will enjoy this episode much.

Links:

SCAPER (a creationist organization in Norway)
Undeland Mission farm
The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth
Biblical chronogenealogies
LXX vs MT articles
Length of the Egyptian Sojourn

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/