Considering how most anthropologists, folklorists, and religious studies scholars who address Neanderthals and Denisovans consider them to predate the Adam and Eve story by thousands and thousands of years, I don’t see how the interbreeding you mention necessarily “kills” the Genesis Edenic tradition.
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This is an interesting idea. @AllenWitmerMiller has addressed the question of whether Wilberforce was motivated by fealty to the “Edenic text” but I wonder if his critique missed the point that many believers through history seem specifically repulsed by human shared ancestry with other apes. In fact it seems to me that Agassiz was repulsed by his own shared ancestry with other humans he deemed inferior. Richard Owen is another example of a learned Christian who seems (to me) to have been powerfully driven by a need for things to stay in their place. That kind of caste mentality is clearly taught in the bible, but I don’t think that’s what we mean when we talk of a young earth, YECism, and the Edenic texts.
These are interesting questions about how humans acquire commitments to ideas and ideologies, and all I can say with confidence is that simple answers are rarely adequate.
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Indeed. That’s why “My granddaddy weren’t dang never no blasted monkey!” is such a common trope in numerous contexts.
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Ancient DNA plus millions of whole genome sequencing clear shows the interbreeding of Neanderthal, Denisovans, and Modern Humans multiple times between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago in multiple locations in Eurasia. These are scientific facts. These facts relegate a story where an ancient Hebrew god creates a man from dust (or clay) and then creates his wife from the man’s rib to mythology status where no discussions of its authenticity is no longer of value.
Apples and oranges. The facts of ancient DNA do not rule out various scenarios (such as those described by @swamidass in his Genealogical Adam and Eve books and articles) where a couple is created and their progeny reproduce with the hominins around them.
As to whether discussions of such scenarios have value, I would suggest that if they help lower barriers to the acceptance of evolutionary biology (and the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in America’s public school), they may hold benefits for science literacy and public policy far beyond just biology. Science denialism/distrust is a problem on many fronts, including the aforementioned topic of climate change. (I would add anti-vaccine disinformation campaigns also.). If the unnecessary “culture war” between science and religious traditions among American fundamentalists and some evangelicals can reach a manageable armistice, or even just a cease fire, I consider that to be of great value.
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Are you at all familiar with GAE? Or the various versions in the book at hand?
To paraphrase my friend @Buddy (on FB), the story of Adam & Eve is the vehicle for communicating a message, not the message itself.
And what do you think the message that it is “communicating” is?
On further digging, it seems that the 1860 Oxford Debate is an imperfect exemplar of the viewpoint I was attempting to portray. There seems to be a lack of clarity over exactly who said what, when – made even more murky by the fact that some contemporaneous sources seem to be viewed as unreliable.
Added to this, I have also read the suggestion that resistance to evolution in the US was a byproduct of the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy of the early 20th Century, which might explain how uniformitarian Geology met little resistance a century before.
I still believe that Common Descent with apes was a strong, and potentially core, component of resistance to evolution. I can offer the following as evidence immediately to hand:
This 1870 cartoon:
Edward Humes’ book about the Dover trial, both its epiphet-title itself, Monkey Girl, and the animosity it describes, e.g.:
Children have been ridiculed in the school yard for being open to the concept of evolution, taunted and mocked for being related to monkeys.
[Board member] Napierski says, “and one thing’s for sure, we didn’t come from any monkey. She [his daughter] knows that as well as I do.”
They referred to evolution primarily as “changes over time,” and though the principle of common descent was taught, the teachers avoided getting into the evolution of man. That was a perennial land mine, a virtual invitation for a child to go home and say, “My teacher says we come from monkeys,” and then the phone calls and tension and visits with the principal would begin.
(As I said, this is the evidence I have immediately to hand. I’m fairly sure that a more thorough survey would turn up much more.)
We would seem to have three (not necessarily mutually-exclusive) candidates for the core of resistance to evolution:
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resistance to Common Descent (“we didn’t come from any monkey”);
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narrow resistance to rejection of a historical Adam and Eve; and
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broad resistance to rejection of a historical Genesis account – which would require a far wider harmonisation (e.g. to include 6-day creation, the Flood, biblical genealogies) than merely finding ‘room’ for Adam and Eve within the scientific worldview.
I think an argument can be made for both (1) and (3), I’m less certain that (2) exists independent of (3).
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This thread got started somewhat slowly but has evolved(!) into some very interesting discussions.
For anyone who may have missed them, here is the 1860 review “Darwin on the Origin of Species” by Asa Gray in The Atlantic magazine:
and the 2011 article, “Why The Atlantic’s 1860 Review Was a Key Victory for Darwin”:
Though neither article focuses on the latest subtopic in this thread, both provide more context for the discussion. Asa Gray was a devout Presbyterian and has been described by some as “the father of theistic evolution.” He asserted that God’s designs were apparent in the natural world but saw natural processes like evolution as tools in that design.
It is also noteworthy that Benjamin Warfield, the Princeton theologian who evangelical seminary students learn about as one of the academic champions of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, was in his early years comfortable with the Gray’s stance on evolutionary processes bringing about the diversity of life—but he eventually became increasingly critical of the idea due to the implications for the doctrine of original sin and what he considered its irreconcilability with Adam and Eve’s special creation as described in Genesis.
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Yes, I can well imagine an academic theologian taking this view. I find it more difficult imagining the average ‘parishioner in the pew’ being likewise worked up about it.
Can we imagine a parent or school board member saying:
One thing’s for sure, we must have come from Adam and Eve, or we wouldn’t have Original Sin.
Or a parent getting worked up and complaining because:
a child to goes home and says, “We can’t have Original Sin because my teacher says we didn’t come from Adam and Eve".
I’m sure, if asked, many (most?) Christians would agree with Original Sin. But I’d be surprised if they would connect it, unprompted, to a need for a historical Adam and Eve, or feel sufficiently strongly about it to complain to their school.
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Maybe my circles are not representative, but I don’t have to imagine this. I have heard this sentiment expressed in various church contexts. Adam and Eve are central to teaching on a variety of topics, including original sin, both because of Genesis itself and because of how Jesus and Paul spoke and/or wrote about them. e.g. Romans 5:12 “So then, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because all sinned” (NET2 Translation) So I think lots of folks see the historicity of Adam and Eve as important and necessary.
That said, I also think the difficulty with human descent from apes/monkeys is significant also. Humans seem to have a fairly strong intuition for essentialism. I wonder how much that plays a role not being able to accept common descent of humans, and why for some folks that gets tangled up with difficulties acknowledging transgender people.
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yes very familiar with GAE from the start of Peaceful Science. GAE is purely an unverifiable conjecture. It is none scientific because it can’t be falsified.
yes ancient DNA does rule out that a couple was created and their progeny reproduced with the hominins around them. In this case absence of evidence for GAE does rule out GAE because of the enormous amount of evidence for the true and factual origin of humanity. Each and every person’s DNA carries that story.
GAE and discussions of how contrived scenarios fit with the fictional story in Genesis does nothing to lower the barriers to the acceptance of human evolution. It is only American fundamentalists and evangelicals that try to impugn the science of ancient DNA from advancing. It is time for religion to get out the way of science and put the Adam and Eve story alongside Greek, Egyptian, and Norse mythology.
This is a laugh-out-loud falsehood. Maybe you simply didn’t understand the GAE? Or you don’t understand the English phrase “rule out”?
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Patrick, even as somebody who sees neither factual nor religious/cultural reasons to accept a historical Adam and Eve, I find your denunciation of it to be exaggerated.
A&E, whether GAE, or some YEC version of it, does not (and AFAIR has never) made any sort of ‘top ten reasons for rejecting Christianity’ with me.
It would most certainly not make any list I might make of ‘top ten blatantly false statements cultures and sub-cultures tell themselves today’.
But, in common with the latter top ten, it has the feature that simply telling its adherents that it is false is ineffectual. In order for any debunking to be effective, you first need to understand what cultural/psychological need it fulfills, why it is in some way so essential for their worldview, that people are wedded to it in spite of lack of evidence, or of evidence to the contrary.
With A&E, you might ask yourself why (some) Christians need to believe in Original Sin and need to believe that, in addition to Jesus employing many explicitly fictional stories, in the form of parables, some passing reference he (and Paul) made to Adam were historical claims, rather than merely references to shared cultural symbolism.
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GAE is a made up scenario to give the appearance of matching aspect of biblical folklore about Adam, a fictional character in a creation myth story with assumed worldwide genealogical linkage to all humans before the birth of another fictional person named Jesus. Ancient DNA and every human genome makes GAE to be pure made up Christian psychobabble. Yes GAE could have happened but didn’t. Time to move on to more productive discussions.
Indeed. I was certainly baffled by it.
There may be some good-natured Patrick-brand leg-pulling going on here. (??)
Or perhaps ancient DNA also rules out Cain killing Abel?
(Many Young Earth Creationists assert that ancient DNA was “pre-programmed/front-loaded” in advance for all sorts of future scenarios. Perhaps there is a portion of code in there which “rules out” later de novo creatures interbreeding with hominins—and Patrick found that code. I look forward to the peer-reviewed publication.)
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Who said anything about science?
Notwithstanding the fact that science has no grasp on what was going on before the Big Bang, how on earth does your claim here answers the issue of whether science affirms a universe coming into existence on its own?