If the world started with adam and eve, How many generations do you really think that the human race would have survived??
I don’t see why it couldn’t survive indefinitely, at long as the environment could support human life.
I haven’t read much on DNA and the replication on the same strands of DNA but I thought the reproduction of one family with each other causes defects and disease…
Well, there’s inbreeding to consider. At best you’d end up with a population of near-clones like cheetahs; this version of humanity would be extra vulnerable to plagues.
But that is ‘after’ the fall of man where sin entered the picture - Adam and Eve were ‘perfect’ DNA examples - so initially the inbreeding would not be an issue - after several generations, there would be enough variety to sustain.
Theoretically, of course - the problem is that it all starts over with Noah’s family - which is well after Sin and Corruption were rampant.
In OP’s scenario, Adam and Eve are God-made with only the most perfect of alleles. Inbreeding risks duplicating bad alleles, but Adam and Eve had none.
The present human gene pool does have bad alleles, of course. It is unclear whether these are the work of the Devil, or God’s punishment for our Original Sin.
Well okay, I kinda expected that answer but wasn’t it repopulated with Noah, who was not one of the perfect ones??
There have been studies on this topic, not just on man, but on animals in general. I know it isn’t going to help much not to have a link, but perhaps I can jiggle someone’s memory that knows more about this than me.
This is a minimum population question… Meaning, what’s the least number of xxx that can keep xxx from going extinct, the number is somewhere in the 100’s.
Due to inbreeding, the time it takes to create then raise life, etc… (The next generation), you really can’t have just two animals.
The study included things like natural deaths, births that resulted in death to baby and/or mother and a bunch of other factors in a general population.
As to Adam and Eve, it is never really addressed, is it? I mean, let’s assume that there is no problem with genetics (which is a big assumption). How do they address the issues of incest of both Adam and daughters and Adam and eves sons and daughters? Incest between brothers and sisters and father and daughters? That seems kind of strange to me, but I’ve never heard a real answer to this question by the religious folks. This is just something I’m always told “isn’t meant to take literally” or “this is where faith is required.” I suspect there is an official answer, but it probably won’t work for me, since incest is such a taboo.
If I find one of the studies, I’ll post a link. I think the study I read about was about endangered snow leopards or something similar,
Yeah, but he wasn’t that many generations away. And you still had the diversity of his sons wives, who were not blood related to Noah.
Heck, old tradition was that the descendants of Noah formed the “three races”: White, Black, and Semitic. Heck, Semitic literally means “descendant of Shem.”
And please, for the love of Og, notice the scare quotes around “three races” and the words “old tradition.” I don’t believe that stuff, and I don’t want to have make an “I am not a racist” thread.
They’d still be a race of genetically identical people, which is a defect in its own right. Any virulent disease or parasite that hits them will hit them much worse than us because they’ll have the same immune system. There won’t be any extra resistant people who fight off the disease and breed a new more resistance populace.
How could they not have been blood related to noah, given that they all started with Adam/Eve?
There was no disease or any reason for the immune system - as far as we know - they couldn’t even stub the toe.
Presumably the “magic” aspects of the scenario are turned off or else the answer to the OP is “as long as God wants”, which is boring.
Well, exactly - as the myth has it - and if you believe that we started with adam/eve only - then the OP has no question - since clearly we are “still here”.
The only way the OP ‘works’ is if we shut off what we know about genetics and disease -
The OP question would be better reversed - given the genetic diversity we see today, is it possible that the race was started with only 2 people? What about the restart that reportedly happened with Noah?
It seemed to me that the question being asked was “If the species really started just with an Adam and an Eve, how long would it have lasted?”
In case people ever get curious as to what *actually *happened when homo sapiens sapiens came into existence, science already has a pretty definitive answer to the question.
A new species does not come about because two individuals spontaneously mutated into a whole brand new species and they exclusively bred with each other to form another species. And the “most recent common ancestor” for all modern humans is not the “Eve” of the species, either.
These are misconceptions. Mitochondrial Eve is simply the nearest common ancestor of all mankind, and that is not one individual. Rather, the individual changes depending on which human beings are alive. The “nearest” relative common to all living humans changes when people die off, and there was an individual closer to modern times which matches that description. So even in science, Mitochondrial Eve is not an actual person.
There is no single individual or couple that form a new species, because the changes are not drastic enough from a single generation to make interbreeding between the purported “new” species and the “old” species impossible. Keep in mind that even as gene pools grow divergent, it is possible for those pools to meet back up again and begin interbreeding, before it is no longer possible for a species to mate. This is why it is possible to have domesticated dogs and wolves produce offspring, even though they are not the same sub-species. Felines such as Lions and Tigers can produce infertile offspring, but it is not impossible for them to produce offspring which can reproduce. It has happened before that a Liger mated with a Lion to produce a cub.
It is important to note that species diverge over a very, very long period of time. During which, although they are not mating with one another, they are technically the same species.
And it continues, until the two sub-groups grow so different from one another that, if they encounter one another, they have difficulty breeding at all. The mechanics of the sexual coupling no longer work- the two give off different mating signals and no longer respond to one another, so they no longer desire to mate, even if they’d be genetically compatible. Or, their genitals no longer reach one another. So even if they could mate, genetically, there is a physical barrier preventing that. Such as being on different land masses, or preferring different climates, or simply being too big or too small for one another, until they no longer attract one another as mates.
Eventually, the genetic differences become so great that their offspring become less and less fertile, meaning that even if they could mate and produce offspring, their offspring wouldn’t continue the line, most likely. And even that isn’t a hard line- as mentioned, a lion and tiger can produce viable and fertile offspring, but only VERY rarely. Now the two groups are different species.
But this process takes many thousand generations, or perhaps tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years.
To put it in simple terms, there was no human Eve. There was a tribe of humans that wandered off and no longer mated with others of the homo genus, and the ones that did interbreed all died out.
And in fact, not every one of that tribe survived. Many families of that tribe went on to produce offspring and interbreed with modern humans, but their progeny all died off and are no longer counted among our common ancestors, because everyone related to those homo sapiens has died off.
There was no clear demarcation where modern humans separated from primitive humans and others of the homo genus. A new species did not arrive overnight. tribes and groups separated and stopped mating with one another, or the rare interbreeds died off. Eventually, they could no longer mate and produce much in the way of viable offspring with, say, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Keep in mind, they would have still been genetically compatible with one another for a long time. And in fact, modern humans still contain a very small percentage of neanderthalensis DNA, carried over from the last time our sub-species interbred with one another. This is because, at one time, homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthalensis existed at the same time, and it was possible for them to interbreed, but they simply did not do so very often. Eventually, their entire family died off, leaving only ours.
No adam, no eve. No one mother of all mankind. You see, the mother of all mankind also had a mother, which would make her the mother of all mankind, plus some people who are no longer alive. And she also had a mother. And so on.
Until you have the mother of all homo sapiens sapiens, and all homo sapiens neanderthalensis. That person would be the mother of all mankind, and all neanderthals.
And that person would have a mother, and so on, and it goes back until you have a common mother between us, and modern great apes.
The story of an anthropomorphic Eve is cockamamie nonsense. Even in a scientific sense, there was no single person that fits such a description.
If you are looking for the truest Eve, you look all the way to the primordial cell, which divided. That is Eve. And even modern cells are thought to be symbiotic amalgamations of various microscopic life forms which found it advantageous to exist together within the environment of a cell membrane.
So what we might think of as our common ancestral eukaryotic cell really began as a bunch of prokaryotic life forms co-habitating inside a common cellular membrane, providing a mutually beneficial adaptation. These later became organelles of the cell.
So, “Eve” wasn’t made from Adam’s rib, but she does resemble Frankenstein’s Monster just a little bit in another way, in that she was made from the parts of different life forms put together.
There’s that. Or we can pretend everything arrived all at once from the fairy magic of the invisible sky king, six thousand years ago, and humans rode dinosaurs.
Basically, there’s science, which deals with facts, and there’s the theory of Mario riding Yoshi in the Mushroom Kingdom. Except some people think it’s literally real, not a story written for children.
Just one generation, they had no daughters.
It is my understanding that Cain went off and found a wife.
No word yet on whether that wife was an orangutan or a snapping turtle. But for the true believer, logic doesn’t stand in the way. Any logical contradiction is solved by saying “With God All Things Are Possible”, so maybe Cain ripped out his own rib and began to mate with it, a complicated and highly technical process now known as “playing with your bone(r)”.
Sure, but it doesn’t affect all descendants equally. There will be branches of the family tree that abruptly end because the children were nonviable, while others will carry on, and over time mutations will play a role…
Basically, if a major inbreeding-caused genetic disorder surfaces at the fifth generation, it doesn’t mean every member of the fifth generation will suffer from it.
Yes, I know the entire subject matter is malarkey, but I thought I’d read somewhere that Cain, and possibly Abel, mated with Eve to get the humanity ball rolling so to speak.