Modern Genetics and Adam & Eve

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edwest2 said:
There are no peer reviewed scientific papers that can confirm that idea.

In Turkey, at Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists have uncovered a site that was assembled 11,600 years ago, complete with five ton pieces of limestone from a nearby quarry. It has upset a few ideas: “Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-acto knife.”

Source: The June 11 issue of National Geographic.

Peace,
Ed
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This place?
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text/1
The Birth of Religion

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

…
Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.
At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the “revolution” was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
 
buffalo said:
Right, Noah was not married to Eve.
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You might as well say that Adam and Eve were Noah’s parents since we are all descended from them.

Anyway, how do you know what Noah’s wife was called? 🙂

rossum
 
razredge said:
So are there any secular theories on why there exists such a huge gap between behavioural and anatomical modernity?

Have we just not found enough archaeological evidence to close the gap?
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What gap? Anatomical behavior and anatomical modernity coincided. As soon as modern pelvic bones were in operating position, the pre-human’s walking upright behavior began. Running in the “Iron Man” may have come a bit later since that requires training.
 
rossum said:
You might as well say that Adam and Eve were Noah’s parents since we are all descended from them.

Anyway, how do you know what Noah’s wife was called? 🙂

rossum
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Good point - there could be two Eve’s as there are two Adam’s. 😉
 
razredge said:
So are there any secular theories on why there exists such a huge gap between behavioural and anatomical modernity? Have we just not found enough archaeological evidence to close the gap?
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Interesting question – I’ll ask our anthropologists this morning.
 
StAnastasia said:
TMC, I assume we are talking about fraternal, rather than identical twins, since it would be hard to conceive of one of a pair of identical twins suddenly taking a genetic turn for the worse. If ensoulment happens at conception, would not both fertilized eggs be ensouled? One becomes a normal zygote/blastocyst/embryo/fetus/baby. The other has its genes for normal development switched off, and ends up as an ensouled cancerous teratoma to be removed. It’s an interesting case study.
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I was actually thinking of identical twins. I am certainly no expert, but I was under the impression that one identical twin could become a parasitic twin in the event of an imperfect rejoining of the twins. In the case of fraternal twins, if ensoulment occurs at conception then the parasitic twin must be ensoulled, certainly.

I think it is more interesting to think of the case of identical twins because of the questions the identical twin case presents about ensoulment. If ensoulment occurs at the moment of fertilization, what happens when the zygote splits into two identical twins? I assume it could be agreed the twins do not share a single soul. So does the soul somehow also “split”? Is the existing soul kept by one twin and a new soul provided to the other by God at that moment? Sometimes monozygotic twins will rejoin in the first week or two of pregnancy and develop as a single normal baby. If both twins are ensoulled when they split, what happens to the “extra” soul? Did one of them die, if so, which one? I don’t have any answers to these questions, and I am not even suggesting there are answers to these questions, but I think they are worth considering and thinking about.
 
TMC said:
I think it is more interesting to think of the case of identical twins because of the questions the identical twin case presents about ensoulment. If ensoulment occurs at the moment of fertilization, what happens when the zygote splits into two identical twins? I assume it could be agreed the twins do not share a single soul. So does the soul somehow also “split”? Is the existing soul kept by one twin and a new soul provided to the other by God at that moment? Sometimes monozygotic twins will rejoin in the first week or two of pregnancy and develop as a single normal baby. If both twins are ensoulled when they split, what happens to the “extra” soul? Did one of them die, if so, which one? I don’t have any answers to these questions, and I am not even suggesting there are answers to these questions, but I think they are worth considering and thinking about.
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I think it is a very interesting question. I would imagine in the case of a split that zygote A dies with its body(soul is the form of the body after all) and then you are left with zygote B and C each with their unique soul. In the case of rejoining you would only have one human body so only one human soul.

Kinda makes me wonder if maybe you should have a little funeral service when you find out you’re going to have monozygotic twins.
 
KostyaJMJ said:
I think it is a very interesting question. I would imagine in the case of a split that zygote A dies with its body(soul is the form of the body after all) and then you are left with zygote B and C each with their unique soul. In the case of rejoining you would only have one human body so only one human soul. Kinda makes me wonder if maybe you should have a little funeral service when you find out you’re going to have monozygotic twins.
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So what’s the theological case then when a zygote doesn’t die but lies dormant as a tumor which then become malignant when its twin is fifteen? Should we have a funeral or memorial service for the tumor, presuming that its soul is still extant?
 
buffalo said:
This from the National Catholic Bioethics Center may help:

Do Embryos Have Souls?
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This is an odd but interesting document. The author makes at least one bizarre claim: “no other entity in the universe can receive this gift [of the immortal soul]”.

He also suggests that “human embryos are inviolable and deserving of unconditional respect at every stage of their existence.” What this doesn’t tell us is how to observe unconditional respect when a person has a cancerous teratoma that is its own undeveloped twin. Which twin is more deserving of unconditional respect? How do we show that respect?

StAnastasia
 
StAnastasia said:
This is an odd but interesting document. The author makes at least one bizarre claim: “no other entity in the universe can receive this gift [of the immortal soul]”.

He also suggests that “human embryos are inviolable and deserving of unconditional respect at every stage of their existence.” What this doesn’t tell us is how to observe unconditional respect when a person has a cancerous teratoma that is its own undeveloped twin. Which twin is more deserving of unconditional respect? How do we show that respect?

StAnastasia
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Email Fr Ted. - I too would be interested in his reply.
 
StAnastasia said:
This is an odd but interesting document. The author makes at least one bizarre claim: “no other entity in the universe can receive this gift [of the immortal soul]”.

He also suggests that “human embryos are inviolable and deserving of unconditional respect at every stage of their existence.” What this doesn’t tell us is how to observe unconditional respect when a person has a cancerous teratoma that is its own undeveloped twin. Which twin is more deserving of unconditional respect? How do we show that respect?

StAnastasia
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I find it interesting that the author admits that the Church does not have a consistent or authoritative teaching on when ensoulment occurs, which I believe is correct. But I find it a bit odd that he goes on to say that “the precise timing of ensoulment/personhood of the human embryo is irrelevant to the question of whether or not we may ever destroy such embryos for research or other purposes.” (emphasis mine). I can understand that the Church’s moral teaching is that for most purposes we should assume that ensoulment happens early so as to err on the side of protecting life, but that doesn’t mean that the moment of ensoulment is “irrelevant”, certainly it could be relevant to the morality of making certain medical decisions. Just because it is a hard or even impossible question to answer, that does not mean that it is an unimportant or irrelevant question.
 
TMC said:
I find it interesting that the author admits that the Church does not have a consistent or authoritative teaching on when ensoulment occurs, which I believe is correct. But I find it a bit odd that he goes on to say that “the precise timing of ensoulment/personhood of the human embryo is irrelevant to the question of whether or not we may ever destroy such embryos for research or other purposes.” (emphasis mine). I can understand that the Church’s moral teaching is that for most purposes we should assume that ensoulment happens early so as to err on the side of protecting life, but that doesn’t mean that the moment of ensoulment is “irrelevant”, certainly it could be relevant to the morality of making certain medical decisions. Just because it is a hard or even impossible question to answer, that does not mean that it is an unimportant or irrelevant question.
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He says this:

That being said, the moral teaching of the Church is that the human embryo must be treated as if it were already ensouled,** even if it might not yet be so. It must be treated* as if* it were a person from the moment of conception, even if there exists the theoretical possibility that it might not yet be so. Why this rather subtle, nuanced position, instead of simply declaring outright that zygotes are ensouled, and therefore are persons? First, because there has never been a unanimous tradition on this point; and second, because the precisetiming of ensoulment/personhood of the human embryo is irrelevant to the question of whether or not we may ever destroy such embryos for research or other purposes.
 
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