Patrick's Objections

Dr. Swamidass,
If you are describing a model where Adam and Eve were created in a garden about 6000 years ago in the Middle East and then after the Fall mated with the population at that time, you need some scientific evidence for it to be credible. I just finished reading David Reich’s “Who we are and How we got here”. Since Modern humans as a species is about 300,000 years old, and 6000 years ago there were about 50 million humans lving across the planet. How could an Adam and Eve be the ancestor or in the genealogy of anyone, let alone everyone. It is impossible. There has been about 4000 ancient genomes sequenced.
All of us are an admixture of ancient populations who are an admixture of even more ancient populations . Doesn’t matter where you come from or what your genealogy was, everyone is a mixture of migrating population of migrating populations.

Careful reading of David Reich’s book should be convincing that your model is impossible and that the Genesis story is just a story. If you can get theology from that story -great. But you certainly can’t get anything factual from it. Human history is pretty much figured out for the past few million years. Who we are and how we got here has been answered and the Adam character from the Genesis story is not part of the answer.

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