Adam & Eve
Some people believe that the story of Adam & Eve is exactly that, just a story, but most Christians, Jews and Moslems believe that they were the beginning of all of humanity. Moreover, that they are the cause of all sin in the world today. Well I do not believe this fabled story any more. Let us have a look at a few issues I have with it.
Was Adam created with standard male genitals? Why I am asking is that when he was created he did not have a reason to use it. Apologies for the explicitness, but the truth does hurt sometimes. (He might have had a penis so that he can aim properly…) God first sent all the animals to Adam to see if he could find the right “helper” for himself (Gen 2: 18-22). When that did not work, then only did God create Eve from Adam’s rib. Did God not know He was going to create Eve? He first tried all the animals on Adam before even considering creating Eve. Maybe God endowed Adam with a “set” while He was making Eve. Imagine his surprise when he woke up!
Eve was created from Adams rib, but Adam and almost everything else was created from the earth. Why? Maybe it signifies the equality of man and woman. That is what I believe. Then why are woman treated by the Christian faith and other religions, based on the Old Testament, as less than men, right up to the 21st century?
So, what is done with the story of Adam and Eve?
"God, being a pure spirit, has no hands, and He causes His creatures to develop one from another by the power which He has imparted to Nature. If, therefore, the Lord made Adam from the dust of the earth, we must understand that man came out of that earth under the Divine Influence and yet after a natural manner." "History of Magic" by Eliphas Levi
Eliphas Levi is saying is that the method by which God created the first Human beings was via evolution. God, if He existed, created the Universe using the Big bang in a way that would facilitate the evolution of humankind on Earth following normal natural laws of nature. Adam and Eve may represent the first two Human Beings, or the first conscious ones. This portrays god as a god of the gaps: As nature and science account for the existence of life and consciousness, God itself is no longer directly responsible or necessary in order to explain these things.
After Adam and Eve had children, how did they proceed onto the third and fourth generation? The children must have slept with each other and their own parents. How do you explain this to an inquisitive child without condoning incest? Incest was the order of the day, and would have been required for many generations. The same applies to the story of Noah's Ark. The children of Noah's family and his wife's family must have slept with members of their parent's family, or each other. Any further generations would again be faced with the same choice.
The main problem is not morals; it can be argued that just because it is immoral does not mean that it did not happen. The main problem is biological. Interbreeding in families causes severe retardation, mutation and infertility. This happens to isolated human population even when there are more than two families. The problem increases with severity the more the inbreeding occurs.
"...full-sibling or parent-child incest results in about 17% child mortality and 25% child disability, for a combined result of about 42% nonviable offspring" Donald Brown, 'Human Universals'
The phenomenon of nonviable offspring from breeding between closely related family members is not limited to humans, but to most life, especially amongst mammals and multi-cellular organisms:
"A study of 38 captive mammalian species found a cross-species average of around 33% offspring mortality resulting from closely incestuous matting" Donald Brown, 'Human Universals'
Due to the non-viable offspring that result from incest, which gets worse with each generation, the Adam and Eve story cannot be the literal whole truth. When a Christian next time relies on the urban myth of "Christian Family Values" then wonder how they would explain to someone the big question of "What happened after creation and the Flood?" The only moral escape route is to admit that the Adam and Eve story is a metaphor. The only biologically correct explanation known is that we evolved slowly from lower animals so that incest was never a problem.
A Third option
As I have stated earlier there is a major battle between “creationists” and “evolutionists”, but there is a third leg to this triangle of “the theory of the creation of mankind”. Let us have a look at this third theory, just for the sake of interest and to be thorough in our investigations.
In whose image was The Adam – the prototype of modern humans, Homo sapiens – created?
The Bible asserts that the Elohim said, “Let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness.” However, if one is to accept a tentative explanation for enigmatic genes that humans possess, offered when the deciphering of the human genome was announced in mid-February [2001], the feat was decided upon by a group of bacteria!
“Humbling” was the prevalent adjective used by the scientific teams and the media to describe the principal finding – that the human genome contains not the anticipated 100,000 - 140,000 genes (the stretches of DNA that direct the production of amino-acids and proteins) but only some 30,000+. Little more than double the 13,601 genes of a fruit fly and barely fifty percent more than the roundworm’s 19,098. What a comedown from the pinnacle of the genomic Tree of Life!
Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes. They are comparative to not the presumed 95% but to almost 99% of the chimpanzees, and 70% of the mouse. Human genes, with the same functions, were found to be identical to genes of other vertebrates, as well as invertebrates, plants, fungi, even yeast. The findings not only confirmed that there was one source of DNA for all life on Earth, but also enabled the scientists to trace the evolutionary process – how more complex organisms evolved, genetically, from simpler ones, adopting at each stage the genes of a lower life form to create a more complex higher life form – culminating with Homo sapiens.
It was here, in tracing the vertical evolutionary record contained in the human and the other analyzed genomes, which the scientists ran into an enigma. The “head-scratching discovery by the public consortium,” as Science termed it, was that the human genome contains 223 genes that do not have the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.
How did Man acquire such a bunch of enigmatic genes?
In the evolutionary progression from bacteria to invertebrates (such as the lineages of yeast, worms, flies or mustard weed – which have been deciphered) to vertebrates (mice, chimpanzees) and finally modern humans, these 223 genes are completely missing in the invertebrate phase. Therefore, the scientists can explain their presence in the human genome by a “rather recent” (in evolutionary time scales) “probable horizontal transfer from bacteria.”
In other words: At a relatively recent time as Evolution goes, modern humans acquired an extra 223 genes not through gradual evolution, not vertically on the Tree of Life, but horizontally, as a sideways insertion of genetic material from bacteria…
Now, at first glance it would seem that 223 genes is no big deal. In fact, while every single gene makes a great difference to every individual, 223 genes make an immense difference to a species such as ours.
The human genome is made up of about three billion nucleotides (the “letters” A-C-G-T which stand for the initials of the four nucleic acids that spell out all life on Earth); of them, just a little more than one percent are grouped into functioning genes (each gene consists of thousands of "letters"). The difference between one individual person and another amount to about one “letter” in a thousand in the DNA “alphabet.” The difference between Man and Chimpanzee is less than one percent as genes go; and one percent of 30,000 genes are 300.
So, 223 genes is more than two thirds of the difference between me, you and a chimpanzee!
An analysis of the functions of these genes through the proteins that they spell out, conducted by the Public Consortium team and published in the journal Nature, shows that they include not only proteins involved in important physiological but also psychiatric functions. Moreover, they are responsible for important neurological enzymes that stem only from the mitochondrial portion of the DNA – the so-called “Eve” DNA that humankind inherited only through the mother-line, all the way back to a single “Eve.” That finding alone raises doubt regarding that the "bacterial insertion" explanation.
How sure are the scientists that such important and complex genes, such an immense human advantage, were obtained by us, “rather recently”, through the courtesy of infecting bacteria?
“It is a jump that does not follow current evolutionary theories,” said Steven Scherer, director of mapping of the Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine.
“We did not identify a strongly preferred bacterial source for the putative horizontally transferred genes,” states the report in Nature. The Public Consortium team, conducting a detailed search, found that some 113 genes (out of the 223) “are widespread among bacteria” – though they are entirely absent even in invertebrates. An analysis of the proteins, which the enigmatic genes express, showed that out of 35 identified, only ten had counterparts in vertebrates (ranging from cows to rodents to fish); 25 of the 35 were unique to humans.
“It is not clear whether the transfer was from bacteria to human or from human to bacteria,” Science quoted Robert Waterson, co-director of Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center, as saying.
However, if Man gave those genes to bacteria, where did Man acquire those genes to begin with?
So far, everything mentioned here is fact. Now, the theory of where man came from is based on the writhing of a man named “Zacharia Sitchin”. He has studies the ancient Sumerian writings and history for a very long time. For more detail you can read his first book “The 12th Planet”. His theory goes something like this:
» +/- 450,000 ago an alien race (humanoid) visited our planet in need of gold and other raw materials.
» +/- 300,000 years ago they needed workers to help them, so they started to genetically altered Hominid Apes by adding some of their genes. Thus creating humans, as we know them today.
» This alien race was called the “Nephilim”.
Is this story true? I do not know. However, it does sound more plausible than the biblical story. Maybe the biblical story is only myth left over from a more distant past…
