Posts Tagged ‘Adam’

Adam & Eve vs. Genomes

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 by JEL

If you happen to believe the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, you might be peeved to find those pesky scientists knocking on your door again.

Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it’s clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can’t get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

This comes from a very interesting story on NPR (listen below). I found the comments from Evangelicals particularly fascinating.

Go listen to the story >> (7 min. 44 sec.)