It’s a perfectly logical explanation for how we’re all descended from Adam’n’Eve ™ yet not inherently and hopelessly inbred, that’s consistent with what is in Genesis. I will, henceforth, restrict my mockery of the utterly offensive idiocy that is Genesis to other matters. Thank you for subscribing to my podcast.
No, there doesn’t. That’s not how evolution works. The plain fact of the matter is that you can’t pinpoint any one being and say they are the first of a new species. And specifically, Mitochondrial Eve is not the first human or first human woman or anything like that. She was human, but so were all the people around at the same time. The same for Y-chromosomal Adam. He wasn’t even living at the same time as Mito-Eve.
This particular explanation has been made hundreds, or thousands, or gazillions of times over history. Fanwanking has been around for much longer than any of us have been alive.
I don’t see how anyone can defend Genesis after the archangel Gabriel left. Can’t stand Phil Collins.
This is a profound misunderstanding of what a species is and how they come about.
Find all the ancestors of humans and stand them in a line stretching from you back to single-celled organisms.
You will be unable to point to the start of any species. Each member of that line-up will be almost indistinguisable from its neighbours and will be capable of interbreeding with both.
There was never a first human. Genesis can be safely disregarded as a nonsensical creation myth with absolutely zero evidence to back up any of the claims it makes.
But it is hilarious, don’t you agree?
Also, I’d insert “preposterous” before “claims.”
That seems to explain it quite well. Cains wife was a Nodian.
As literature and poetry and myth it can be, by turns, beautiful, lyrical, terrifying, ugly and yes, hilarious.
But “truthful”? nah!
You’re assuming that its point or purpose is to make scientific or historical claims. That’s not how creation myths work.
I assume nothing. it is a book, that’s all. No different to me than Harry Potter or Dickens. I’m perfectly happy to consider it as nothing more than mythology. Others may make claims on its accuracy regarding scientific and historical matters. That’s for them to back up. not me.
“And today, my beloved and devoutly credulous brethren and sistren, we will turn to the Holy Book of Creation Myths, Chapter Five, Verse Twelve, in which some truly spectacular whoppers concerning human longevity will be served to you, and which I trust you to gobble up on pain of ex-communication and eternal residence in the bowels of Hellfire…”
Joshua Swamidass has suggested something similar to this in his book “The Genealogical Adam and Eve”.
But then, after the flood Noah and his son’s had to interbreed, yes?
But that is how they are taken by more than a few people.
BTW, the problem created by God creating other peoples for Cain, Abel and the rest of the family to procreate with is solved by The Flood wiping out all lineages except for the one original.
Remember (from the bible) that Lot’s daughters got their dad drunk and had sex with him because they thought the world had ended and they needed to repopulate the human race.
Of course there was a first human. Logically, it’d be impossible for there not to have been. It’s impossible to pin down who that first human was or precisely where or when they lived, but whoever it was, they must have existed. Things can exist without us knowing what they are.
Logically, it’d be totally subjective to decide who or when that first human lived.
Define “human”.
That’s not remotely a neat bright line. It’s an extremely blurry one. And it certainly doesn’t fall neatly between one person and everyone before them.
I’m well aware that some logic systems purely hate blurry lines. They’re how the world works, nevertheless.
Interestingly, the earliest common female human ancestor and her male counterpart seem to have lived at different times, suggesting that there was a lot of mixing going on but not all of it is represented in modern-day populations.
Well, I think that is only because, as humans, we will disagree on where a line is drawn.
But there is a line. You (general “you”) just draw it in a different place than I would.
The blurry lines are of our own making.