Brad Cooper (@purposenation, https://www.purposenation.org) runs a podcast at Purpose Nation. He recently featured Fazale Rana (colleague of @AJRoberts at Reasons to Believe) in a podcast, where he was asked about the Genealogical Adam. See the transcript here: Fazale “Fuz” Rana PhD - Podcast Transcript — Purpose Nation
@purposenation :
26:09 Well, sort of along those lines, and I don’t want to dive into too many controversies, but I do want to bring up one, which is sort of Adam and Eve…you wrote a whole book on it. There’s another Christian scientist, who I believe I’m going to have on the podcast here soon, Dr. Josh Swamidass, who has proposed is sort of an interesting model. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see it, but it’s sort of, and it’s talking about Adam and Eve and how it still preserves maybe a 10,000 year biblically-mapped timeline for Adam and Eve in the garden. They are both the ancestors of all living people today. …Dr. Rana:
27:16 Yeah. You know, you’re making a very good point, Brad. Things right now to me are probably more so in turmoil than any time that I, that I’ve been doing this in terms of how do we make sense of the idea of a historical Adam and Eve. And our contention is we do see some things that are rather provocative from molecular anthropology, namely this idea that there was a mitochondrial Eve and a Y-chromosome Adam, that we would argue could very well be the biblical Adam and biblical Eve. Yet within evolutionary context, the argument would be, well, while this concept of the mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam seems to be valid, you know, most evolutionary biologists would argue that the genetic variability of humanity is too great to have come from two individuals.
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29:20 Now, Josh Swamidass… I’m not intimately familiar with his model, I’m generally familiar with the model. He’s an evolutionary creationist [@swamidass: I am not EC]. He argues that evolution is a fact in that humanity evolved, but what he argues is that even if there was a population, if you look at the genealogy of humanity, our genealogy will go back two individuals, just simply by necessity by the way genealogies work, to a pair that would have lived a few thousand years ago. And so he would actually argue that those people would be Adam and Eve, and so that Adam and Eve would be genealogical, not genetic. And I think what Josh is doing is very interesting. I think scientifically he’s correct that [genealogically] everybody would go back to a pair of people about several thousand years ago, but I’m uncomfortable calling that pair necessarily Adam and Eve. To me, I think it’s essentially an artifact of how you would construct genealogies. And so I actually prefer the mitochondrial Eve and Y Chromosomal Adam concept more so than the [Genealogical] Adam concept.30:23 You know, part of Josh’s model requires that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are sequential. [@swamidass: This is not required] I view Genesis 1 and the sixth day of creation, as being amplified by Genesis 2. That is, Genesis 2 is an expansion of Genesis 1, it’s not sequential, but it’s an expansion of the Genesis 1 account with respect to the 6th day. Whereas, Josh would argue that it’s sequential where Genesis 1 is referring to all of these people and Genesis 2 is referring to the genealogical Adam and Eve. But, I am uncomfortable with Josh’s interpretation, because I think when you go elsewhere in scripture, for example, Mark 10:6, Jesus seems to be convolving Genesis 1 on the 6th day in Genesis 2 when he talks about the creation of the institution of marriage. You see that convolution in the Genesis 5 genealogies… in Psalm 8. So I think biblically, I’m probably more concerned with Josh’s model than I am scientifically, and I think it does create some theological issues that I think you don’t have when you appeal to a Mitochondrial Eve and a Y Chromosomal Adam as being the first persons…
@purposenation:
31:37 Got it… and our audience is going, “Whoa…”
