Board index ‹ Creation and Evolution

[Dana]

I have two questions:

1. Are we all related to Adam and Eve? If so, then that means I am married to my cousin!

2. If we are all related to Adam and Eve, where did all the different races come from?

[jimwalton]

Thanks for asking. I’ll give you answers, and hopefully that will start a conversation.

1. R we all related to Adam and Eve? and if so then that means i am married to my cousin!

Well, you’re probably not married to your FIRST cousin, or even your second. The odds are great that you and your spouse have traveled so far down the genealogy that you’re not considered related. If you read this wikipedia article on “Cousin Marriage” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_mar ... d_States_2), you’ll see that attitudes about cousin marriage differ from place to place and culture to culture. It even said something that surprised me: “[Cousin marriages] are common in the Middle East, where in some nations they account for over half of all marriages.” I was also surprised to learn that, historically, "According to Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers University, it is likely that 80% of all marriages in history may have been between second cousins or closer. It is generally accepted that the founding population of Homo sapiens was small, anywhere from 700 to 10,000 individuals, and combined with the population dispersal caused by a hunter-gatherer existence, a certain amount of inbreeding would have been inevitable.” In the United States, cousin marriage was legal in all states before the Civil War, and it is still legal in 18 states. (I didn’t know that!)

In a Time Magazine article in 1987 (“Everyone’s Genealogical Mother,” Time, January 26, 1987, p. 66), biologists were reporting their discovery that “a single female living between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago in Africa was an ancestor of everyone on the earth today.” The authors point out that there were other females reproducing at the time who have modern descendants, but [this woman] is the only one who appears in everyone’s genealogy, a conclusion that biologists reached by studying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).” Now, I would expect that this theory has been refined since ’87, but the science is still interesting: that the Bible record could very easily be true, scientifically speaking. Even in the strictly evolutionary model, we are all “related” to each other somehow, far enough back in the genealogical sequence. The Bible and science are not at odds in this matter.

2. If we r all related to Adam and Eve where did all the different races come from?

I believe I’m correct in saying that no one—not anthropologists, sociologists, paleontologists, theologians, or archaeologists—knows the origins of the races. We know that there is genetic differentiation: we have many breeds of dogs, all within the subspecies Canis lupus familiars, and sometimes new breeds pop up. The Morgan Horse, for instance, started in 19th century America. As far as human races, there are many varied opinions about how many there are, and what even qualifies as a “race.” 50 years ago, students were taught there were three races: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Nowadays we look at those categories as primitive and mistaken. Racial distinctions are generally thought of a microevolutionary divergence within homo sapiens sapiens subspecies. Many researchers will tell you that race has no taxonomic significance.

As far as the Bible is concerned, it doesn’t say anything about where the different races came from, but certainly we all understand how microevolution works, and it’s a scientific reality that doesn’t go against anything the Bible teaches. In Genesis 10, the Table of Nations, people groups are listed that have the names of ethnological heritages from Middle Eastern, European, African, and Asian populations.

1. The descendants of Japheth (Gn. 10.2-3) are Russian, Greek (Mediterranean), and European heritage names.
2. The descendants of Ham (Gn. 10.6ff.) are Ethiopian, Egyptian, African, Middle Eastern, and Canaanite heritage names.
3. Genesis 10.17 mentions Sinites, which could possibly be a reference to Asian heritage populations.
4. The descendants of Shem (Gn. 10.22ff.) are Middle Eastern and Arabian heritage names.

While Genesis 10 doesn’t explicitly tell us where the different races come from, there’s nothing in racial categorization or even in racial origins that goes against anything the Bible teaches.

I hope that helps. Feel free to dialogue with me about this stuff, to ask more questions, or to discuss it.