Episode Details

A medical scientist who fully affirms human evolution and common ancestry with the apes shows that science can’t rule out a recent Adam&Eve.

There are many who believe in a historical Adam&Eve as recently as six thousand years ago, based on a direct, surface-level reading of the first couple chapters of Genesis.

And then there are many others who accept that humans evolved over millions of years from an ancestor we share in common with gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans on the one hand, and Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Naledi on the other hand, as per an abundance of paleontological and genetic evidence.

And then there are some who believe both origin stories to be true simultaneously!

Whaaaaat!?

Dr. Joshua Swamidass, an MD with graduate training in biology and information/computer science, has shown that science does NOT rule out the idea of a recent Adam&Eve, contrary to what many might think. The key to doing this is understanding the subtle and yet profound difference between genetics and genealogy.

You see, a scientist will read the genome of an animal …. or a human … and connect it to a genetic Tree of Life that can go back millions of years, showing how a successive accumulation of genetic changes documents the transformation of one species into another, over and over again.

Someone else wanting to research their family tree to find out who they might be related to, on the other hand, will go backward through time and dig up the family connections between children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents …… and so on. Each one of us has two parents, each of whom had two parents, who in turn had two parents … and so on. In other words, the number of ances