Recovering Evangelicals #94 – A Recent Adam & Eve?
A medical scientist who fully affirms human evolution and common ancestry with the apes shows that science can’t rule out a recent Adam&Eve.
There are many who believe in a historical Adam&Eve as recently as six thousand years ago, based on a direct, surface-level reading of the first couple chapters of Genesis.
And then there are many others who accept that humans evolved over millions of years from an ancestor we share in common with gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans on the one hand, and Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Naledi on the other hand, as per an abundance of paleontological and genetic evidence.
And then there are some who believe both origin stories to be true simultaneously!
Whaaaaat!?
Dr. Joshua Swamidass, an MD with graduate training in biology and information/computer science, has shown that science does NOT rule out the idea of a recent Adam&Eve, contrary to what many might think. The key to doing this is understanding the subtle and yet profound difference between genetics and genealogy.
You see, a scientist will read the genome of an animal …. or a human … and connect it to a genetic Tree of Life that can go back millions of years, showing how a successive accumulation of genetic changes documents the transformation of one species into another, over and over again.
Someone else wanting to research their family tree to find out who they might be related to, on the other hand, will go backward through time and dig up the family connections between children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents …… and so on. Each one of us has two parents, each of whom had two parents, who in turn had two parents … and so on. In other words, the number of ancestors we’re genealogically related to doubles with each generation. If we go back only 50 generations (or roughly one thousand years, assuming that each generation takes 20 years to produce the next generation), we could be genealogically connected to 1,125,899,906,842,624 people (that’s 2 raised to the exponent power of 50). A quadrillion people!? That’s actually more people than were alive a thousand years ago!
And now let’s go through that exact same mental exercise, but now moving forward through time. Start with everyone who existed on the face of the earth a thousand years ago, and imagine them coupling up and producing kids. Each time they couple up, they combine two distinct family lineages (excluding those uncomfortable situations where siblings or first cousins produced kids …. iccck!). After several generations, more and more distinct family lineages are brought together: someone might be related to the MacDonald family line through their father, and to the Griswald line through their mother, and the Kennedy family through their grandmother on their dad’s side, and the Garcia-Lopez family through their maternal grandmother, and the Yamaguchi line through some other distant relative ….. you get the idea?
By the time we get to the present day, it’s possible that I’m related in this genealogical way to everyone who existed on earth a thousand years ago.
And the same would be true for you …. and for everyone else on the face of the earth today.
And if one of those couples from a thousand years ago happened to be named “Adam” and “Eve” ……
… then we are all related to … and descendants of … Adam and Eve only one thousand years ago. Genealogically speaking.
You might want to hear this directly from our guest expert. And of course, it’s hard not to talk about descent from an original couple without getting into several theological issues, beginning with … you guessed it … that cringe-inducing idea of “original sin”.
As always, tell us what you think…
Find more about Dr. Joshua Swamidass at https://peacefulscience.org/authors/swamidass/ and at https://pathology.wustl.edu/people/joshua-swamidass-md-phd/
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