Coming from only Adam and Eve?

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Also, genetic Adam would have lived over 200,000 years ago (that male-only thing makes it a lot harder), not 6,000 years ago as genesis literalists would need to believe.
 
I doubt that? I’m pretty sure it’s legal to marry second cousins in most places. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would determine whether a random person was my third cousin. For second cousins alone I have hundreds…

Under canon law, second cousins is licit.

First cousins share grandparents. Second cousins share great-grandparents. Third cousins would share great-great-grandparents. That’s getting tough to track if you consider all the branches of a family tree.
 
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Atreju said:
Just as a point of clarification, when biologists and geneticists talk about a “genetic adam” or “genetic eve”, they are talking about a most recent common patrilineal or matrilineal ancestor. Meaning the most recent person for whom everyone could claim ancestry through their father’s father’s father’s… father or mother’s mother’s mother’s… mother. They do not mean that these are the first people, they had parents. And there are other people existing at the same time who were the ancestors of almost everyone.

People are a lot more interrelated than I think people realize. Mathematically, everyone has 2^n lines of ancestry, where n is the number of generations. Supposing a 25 year generation that means everyone living now has over a trillion lines of ancestry going back just a thousand years. This is why basically everyone with even a bit of European ancestry can trace their ancestry to Charlemagne, just a matter of documentation.
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Exactly. If the whole population of the earth had been wiped out leaving just Noah and his sons as the only men alive, Noah would have been the “genetic Adam.” If one of his sons were left as the only one of them who had an unbroken line of male descendants, that son would take the mantle. It is a term that has nothing to do with the Genesis account, except as a kind of whimsical reference.
 
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buffalo said:
This dating is done by assuming the mitochondrial clock rate.

http://www.dnai.org/teacherguide/pdf/reference_romanovs.pdf
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Which has been complicated by the recent evidence that it is possible for some human males to pass on mitochondrial DNA to their offspring.

www.pbs.org

Not your mom’s genes: Mitochondrial DNA can come from Dad | NOVA | PBS

A new study provides compelling evidence that children can inherit mitochondrial DNA from both their parents.
www.pbs.org

This kind of finding is why science should be treated as a body of knowledge that can have some surprises in store. We will undoubtedly still be unraveling the the order Providence has seen fit to instill into the universe until the Second Coming, regardless of how far off that is.
 
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Startingcatholic said:
Thanks everyone for answering my question about incest but what about my question about Cain?
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If you take Genesis 1–11 more literally and assume that Adam and Eve lived for hundreds of years having many more children besides Cain, Abel and Seth (see Genesis 5:4), then we could see how Adam and Eve could have had literally hundreds of children. And these children would have, in turn, married and had hundreds of children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, etc. of their own—even within Adam and Eve’s (and Cain’s and Seth’s) own lifetime.

So even by the time Adam and Eve died, there could have been hundreds of thousands of people. There would have been plenty of room for Cain to be lost in the crowd.
 
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Sorry if my question was bad as I’m sure you saw I’m a starting Catholic and and just starting to actually read the Bible and ask questions I really didn’t expect this post to get thisany answers to be honest. So sorry if u did a bad job with my questions.
 
edwest said:
That’s not an acceptable idea according to Church teaching.
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Cite your source, please. (You’re either misinterpreting a Church document, or making an unsupportable claim. 😉 )
Startingcatholic said:
Sorry if my question was bad as I’m sure you saw I’m a starting Catholic and and just starting to actually read the Bible and ask questions
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LOL… no worries! 👍

I was just pointing out the hidden assumption in your question. Once you see that it’s there, it might lead to an “a-ha!” moment for you. Keep asking questions – they’re good ones!!!
 
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Humani Generis

“37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]”
 
Homo Sapien Sapien

There were other Homo Sapiens alive on the earth that could interbreed with Homo Sapien Sapien
 
They were homo sapiens, but, they were not modern man.

That is what I said, there were other homo sapiens who interbred.
 
edwest said:
Humani Generis
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Yeah. That’s where I thought you were gonna go. :roll_eyes:
"37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism
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The suggestion in question isn’t ‘polygenism’. Let’s take a look at it…
the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all
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Think about this part for a minute. Think real hard. The suggestion isn’t that an unensouled hominin – whether he lived before or after ‘Adam’ – is a “true human”, which is what Humani generis is talking about. Rather, the only “true humans” are hominins who also had human souls. That would only apply to Adam, Eve, and the children of their lineage. So, on this account, I’m sticking to my assertion: you’re misinterpreting a Church document.
, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.
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Nope. The assertion in question doesn’t assert this, either.

So, we’re firmly in the realm of “you’re pointing to a Church document and attempting to make it apply to something that’s not being asserted.” 👍
 
Gorgias said:
Nope. The assertion in question doesn’t assert this, either.

So, we’re firmly in the realm of “you’re pointing to a Church document and attempting to make it apply to something that’s not being asserted.”
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Pay attention to this footnote the Pope put in Humani Generis.

11 Cfr. Allocut. Pont. To the members of the Academy of Science, November 30, 1941: A.A.S., vol. XXXIII, p. 506

That day in which God formed man and crowned his head with His own image and likeness, making of him the ruler of all living things in the sea, in the sky and on earth ( Gen 1:26), the Omniscient Lord God became his teacher. He taught him agriculture, to cultivate and look after the delightful garden in which he had been placed ( Gen 2: 15); He drew to man all the animals from the field and all the birds of the air to see what he would call them and so man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds, all the wild beasts ( Gen 2: 19-20); but, despite being in the midst of so many living things, man felt sad and lonely and attempted in vain to find a face which looked like him and which would contain a ray of that Divine Image which shines out of the eyes of every son of Adam. Only from man could there come another man who would then call him father and ancestor; and the helpmate given by God to the first man came from man himself and is flesh from his flesh, made into a woman and called such because she came from man ( Gen 2:23). At the summit of the ladder of all that lives, man, endowed with a spiritual soul, was made by God to be a prince and sovereign over the animal kingdom. The multiple research, be it palaeontology or of biology and morphology, on the problems concerning the origins of man have not, as yet, ascertained anything with great clarity and certainty. We must leave it to the future to answer the question, if indeed science will one day be able, enlightened and guided by revelation, to give certain and definitive results concerning a topic of such importance.
 
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