Back on this post, Gordon sought to discredit Mike Huckabee (at least, I think that’s what he was trying to do; correct me if I’m wrong, Gordon) by noting that he has been quoted as saying that Adam and Eve were real people.
OK, I know that we’re building up to a huge food fight between Creationists and Darwinists, with poor ol’ Huck in the middle. But on this point, I’m confused: I thought scientists said Adam and Eve were real people, just that they never actually met…
… which, when you think about it, seems like really going out of your way to gossip about our ancestors. If I hear them right, these science chaps are saying that our honored great-to-the-nth-power grandad Adam wasn’t the daddy of all Eve’s children; that some of us came from somebody we never heard of. Such talk strikes me, as a member of the family, as unseemly after all these years.
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Brad … If quoting a candidate without comment discredits him, how is that my doing?
Anyway, Huckabee’s starting to look like just another political opportunist. It’s a “God thing” when he’s addressing fellow Baptists, then it’s “more complicated” when the forum is a national political campaign. From certainty to doubt, in the blink of an eye.
What are we supposed to believe, what he says as a candidate, or what he says in church?
If I understand it correctly what science has said is that we can trace human genes back to the point where we can identify that one male is now one of the ancestors of all people currently on earth, and that one female is also one of the ancestors on earth. These to ‘people’ must have had whopping positive mutations that ultimately gave their descendants a major leg up.
From Adam and Eve descended Noah, who floated mankind past the great flood so that the 11th chapter of Genesis could report these long-term developments:
Shem lived 600 years, Shem’s son Arphaxad 438, Arphaxad’s son Salah 433, Salah’s son Eber 464, Eber’s son Peleg 239, Peleg’s son Reu 239, Reu’s son Serug 230, and Serug’s son Nahor 148.
According to the fifth chapter of Genesis, prior to Noah, who fathered Shem after reaching the age of 500, Lamech lived 777 years, Mahalalel 895, Jared 962 and Methuselah 969.
So life span decreased at such a rapid rate that Brad would eventually beg for universal health care.
Geneticists, meanwhile, appointed a mitochondrial Adam 80,000 years distant from mitochondrial Eve, probably just to confuse the poor schoolchildren in the United States, some of whom have been taught that man originated in Africa PRIOR to the separation of the continents and that’s how it was settlers from Europe found people already living in the Americas.
That, of course, would mean man and dinosaur broke bread together, a form of cohabitation our forefathers would have found unacceptable, but who cares about a little fraternization between mammals and reptiles these days?
Honestly, what difference does it make what Mike Huckabee believes about Adam and Eve? Genesis, where the “sons of God” married “the daughters of men,” is no more believable nor socially acceptable these days — God said to the woman, whom Adam had not yet named Eve, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you — than the tales of modern science, which would have us believe that something as marvelously complicated as a human being evolved from a one-celled creature mothered by muck and fathered by lightning.
(Responding to Karen:) Or maybe they were just really, really popular.
Actually, our scientific (actually, hypothetical, since he is inferred rather than disinterred) "Adam" is the forefather of all men, and mitochondrial Eve is the ancestor of all people. It’s complicated. Don’t ask me to explain. My head spins just dealing with the fact that even though we each have two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-greats and so forth, the world’s population is growing instead of shrinking. (Just joking, folks; don’t write in to explain it to me.)
And Weldon, it’s "Y-chromosomal Adam," not "mitochondrial." The "mitochondrial" describes Eve. It’s related to women being different from men, which we know to be true in most cases. I saw somebody at Target today I wasn’t sure about, but let’s just call that an anomaly.
It’s interesting to think about all guys being descended from that one guy. You sort of wonder what he was like, but then you look around at us, and you sort of know. While he obviously stayed really busy distributing his Y-chromosomes to all the ladies he met, I suspect this was just his way of sublimating his desire for what he really wanted, but couldn’t have: a 60-inch flat-panel plasma TV with 1080 resolution. And even if he had had one, of course, there were no HD channels to watch, so he was doomed to unhappiness.
And according to the article Brad cites, these are just the earliest “known” male and female on earth. Which means there still could be earlier ancestral remains of homo sapiens lost in the desert somewhere, yet undiscovered.
Which means there’s still a chance Indiana Jones will find the actual Adam and Eve from Genesis.
Which means Huckabee & Co. could be right.
I stand corrected. Never mind.
Gosh, Brad, I give you “mothered by muck and fathered by lightning,” and you give me a terminology quibble.
Personally, I’d rather we call our universal forebears “Big Daddy” and “Big Momma” to give personality for our progeny.
But for the sake of setting an example, let me do something you NEVER do. I admit it. You were right. I used the wrong term.
Thankyou for the information, Brad!
Phentermine.
Phentermine.