And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Genesis 3:20Many people laugh off the story of Adam and Eve like no educated person could believe such a fairy tale. There is a scientific way to look for them, and that is through genetics. I think most people are aware of the 46 chromosomes that humans have with females having two X chromosomes and males having an X and a Y. Are you aware that there is other genetic material in your cells called mitochondrial DNA? The mitochondria are little structures inside the cell that function like powerhouses to generate energy for the cell to operate. Mitochondria have a small chromosome that controls their operation and multiplication. Because sperm only contribute their 23 chromosomes to a fertilized egg, this means that the mitochondrial DNA in your cells all came from your mother. We can then trace this back and have discovered that all humans on earth have descended from one woman. Likewise, men get their X chromosome from their mother so the Y chromosome is only donated by males and it can also be tracked back to one man. This actually supports the Bible’s version because if one human evolution version is true then humans evolved multiple times from an ancestor called Homo erectus. This is called the “Multi-regional Hypothesis”.
One thing that has caught geneticists off guard is that as they try to put a time on when this one man and one woman lived they do not match up. The single woman dates back much further than the single man. They assume this is within the range of error for the measurements. We need to consider one other factor that could explain this. Remember the story of Noah’s flood? Who survived? We have Noah and his three sons and all their wives. This means that all men on earth today trace back to one man, Noah, that doesn’t date as far back as Adam. The wives would have come from different families so as we trace back to one woman it would still point to Eve. The flood story actually explains why geneticists show the one man being much younger than the single female date.
I don't know anything about chromosonal dating so I may be completely off kilter here. I guess I have a few comments: 1) How can you date chromosones and trace their origin through dead things? 2) How do you trace chromosones through things that you cannot find, for instance, King David, or any other person through which we are dating chromosones, but don't have a body for. 3) If chromosones are able to be traced to Noah, why can't they continue to be traced back to Adam? 4) If we use the same logic for tracing women even through the flood, why not men? 5) Does this not prove God creating the earth with history rather than something that had to grow before it was sustainable?
ReplyDeleteDan,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I can answer all your questions in writing but geneticists study the mutation rates of DNA and then back calculate to see how long ago it would have been when that piece of DNA had one original sequence and therefore belonged to the single person it came from. Because all of the survivors of the ark were descendants of Noah, our back calculations would lead to him before we had a chance to get all the way back to Adam. The women survivors all came from other families so the single female be calculate back to would be Eve. If you know the mutation rate you can put a time figure on it. Genetically, moderm humans are estimated at begining between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. We cannot say anything specifically about individuals such as king David without a body but if achaeologists uncovered something we could get DNA from such as a mummy or person preserved by being frozen we could then compare and see how they fit into the picture. For instance, Native American DNA most closely resembles Chinese DNA so this helps verify the hypothesis that man crossed the Bering land bridge to get to the Americas from Asia. I hope that is clear as mud now. We'll talk in person soon.