Who were the first two humans then? Do we need two fully healthy complete humans to have started the human race, or is it all a matter of survival. Should they have been complete in terms of spirituality, (in that they did not sin), or are we just part of the journey to perfection as human beings and the story of Adam and Eve depending on how the individual understands it, will either take them to a higher way of living or lower way?
There were 2 human beings, male and female. Whether the names were A&E or how the bodies came to be IS not known.
ICXC NIKA
Adam and Eve were created in sanctifying grace, but they had to merit actual grace. They did not have full beatitude, i.e., they did not “see” God. They failed their test. They let pride get in the way because they wanted to be “as gods.” They wanted to know what God knows. So, they fell, they were stripped of sanctifying grace and cast from the Garden. The two human beings who are the parents of the human race were fallen human beings. That’s why they transmit disease, death, and the tendency to sin to us. We receive sanctifying grace in the sacrament of baptism.
While I can imagine reasonable apologetics for divine creation and meaningful readings of Genesis, this is not the correct path. A single, founding pair cannot account for the genetic diversity of our species.
With the advance of genomics, we can study population bottlenecks in any species today. It’s thought humans went through a bottleneck of
perhaps as few as 1000 breeding pairs after the Toba eruption. There is no evidence for a smaller bottleneck.
And it would appear we all descended from Mitochondrial Eve, one femail ancestor, so in that respect the Genesis story is correct, even though the ancient Israelites knew nothing of genetics, nor the fact humans were to be found all over the world, even in unlikely places like Easter Island (at one point).
science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/female-ancestor.htm
Mitochondrial Eve is a moving target. Every generation, at any one point in time, has one, by mathematical necessity. There is no further implication that any of these mitochondrial Eves was the sole woman alive in her time.
Consider all mothers alive today. All of them had mothers, and there were less of them than today, because some had multiple daughters who became mothers in their turn, and some had only sons. The mothers of the mothers of today’s mothers, and so on, form a strictly decreasing sequence which must end with a single woman. Else the lines go back beyond a speciation boundary, and we have individuals from separate species breeding, which would be a contradiction.
Our mitochondrial Eve’s female cousins are remarkable only because their lines of daughter to daughter eventually failed, much like a monarch’s male line can fail. And again, our mitochodrial Eve and her female cousins had their own mitochondrial Eve, further back in time. And so did their mitochondrial Eve, and so on.
So in a few chapters, the writers of Genesis dealt with the obvious issue of sin, the fact we all have single maternal ancestor, the fact that humans have spread all over the world (although the authors had no way of confirming that) and the immense diversity of languages.
That’s what I call effective journalism. There is no other ancient writing like it.
It’s certainly effective myth.
- a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.
But if the facts don’t check,
it’s not journalism.
If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out — This is a saying popularized by the folks at the Chicago News Service.*
Correction: The organization that originated the saying “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out” was not called the Chicago News Service. It was called the City News Bureau. Here’s a ninth rule for doing accurate journalism: always double-check names. CJR regrets the error.
Sin, in some sense, is endemic in humans, but there is no suggestion it had a beginning. Rather, like consciousness, it is better described as an emergent phenomena.
We have a single female ancestor for our mitochondrial DNA, as it is handed off (almost entirely, but not quite) along the female line in humans, because human sperm doesn’t (except on rare occasions) transport its mitochondria to the egg. The rest of our DNA derives from the full span of female, and male of course, ancestors.
While humans have spread across the world, they were never gathered in the land of Shina (ancient Sumeria, modern Iraq), did not spread out from there, and never experienced a unique language confounding. Multiple lines of evidence, from linguistics to population genetics, show humans, and their languages spreading out from Africa.
Certainly there are other ancient writings like the Bible, and far more ancient in fact. The expansiveness of the Biblical writings has no contemporary peer, however. As such, and owing to the number of modern religious faiths deriving from that region, it is indeed unparalleled. But again, to fully appreciate it as a sacred text, its contemporary and ancestral traditions should not be minimized.
Whatever the basis of the story, the fact is that sin is quite real in this world.
By whatever name we call our failure to live up to our potential, this much is true.
As ever, Jesse
