Genealogy, genetics

Steve Sailer is reminding us of Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. By way of Brit Nicholson.

A few weeks ago I ran across a somewhat Aspergery book by one Joshua Swamidass, relying upon a genealogical argument for the Biblical Adam-and-Eve duo. He pointed out that genealogy is not genetics. I am the x-th male descendant of "Y Chromosome Adam" and my mother (who bestowed her mitochondria to me) is the y-th female descendant of "Mitochondrial Eve". But there are ancestors in the chain, perhaps from Uzbekistan, whose DNA has been entirely swamped out by the time it got to either of my parents. A man's genome can hold only so much data encoded in DNA strands and, well, I'm using some of it. Those ancestors (if I can track them) remain genealogical ancestors but are no longer genetic.

From that, Swamidass abandoned "Adam" and "Eve" from the two genetic straight-line ancestors; he reserved those labels for the ancestors of everyone currently alive, to whatever degree we partake in that Adam-and-Eve's genome, or even if we don't at all.

Swamidass figured one reason for God's choosing Jesus to be the Christ was that ~5 BCE was the date at which a reasonable number of [Old World] humans could be assumed to descend from a pair of vegetarians in the terminal Palaeolithic. Over some fifteen centuries after that, Adam-and-Eve's descendants have had the opportunity to drift into the New World as well, plus across Sunda Strait.

That legacy of Adam-and-Eve opens up the newer populations to the Christian message. Which, as I've been known to say, makes no sense without the Hebrew Torah; in the same manner as the Quran is nonsense outside Late Antique Syrian Christianity.

I file Swamidass as "arguable, but pointless". I am invested in the Adam-and-Eve story only inasmuch as it grasps toward a myth about the human condition and about the nature of this universe. In this reading, Adam and Eve are symbols - mere plot devices.

Swamidass comes from a Protestant tradition of inerrancy in Torah. His argument is salvaging that. Swamidass is, unlike Josh MacDowell, honest. He seems a good deal more intelligent as well. And he might even succeed at getting his argument into Moody / Schofield Bible commentaries.

However Swamidass should have left his argument as something to be skimmed in blog-posts. It doesn't deserve to be entertained by serious Torah research.