Computational biologist Joshua Swamidass says a literal Adam & Eve could have lived as recently as 6,000 years ago. Tasmania says otherwise.

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Today, I’ll hit “pause” on Adam’s Evolutionary Journey to review a new book by computational biologist S. Joshua Swamidass, The Genealogical Adam and Eve.

What does genealogy have to do with Adam and Eve? Simply, it

allowed them to become everyone’s “parents” without requiring them to be the

first humans. In the “genealogical Adam” scenario, God created Adam from dust

and Eve from his rib and placed them in the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia 6,000

years ago. After being expelled from the garden, Adam and Eve then had children

who interbred with the already existing population, and eventually they became

related to everyone on Earth by lines on a family tree, rather than by Eve – “the

mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20) – giving birth to the human race.

If that sounds needlessly complicated, it is. “It’s a neat

parlour mathematical trick,” population geneticist Graham Coop said on Twitter,

but “saying that this reconciles science with the idea of Adam and Eve sweeps a

lot of stuff under a very patchy, ugly carpet.” Coop is correct. Genealogical Adam and Eve solves none of

the actual problems posed by a literal Adam and Eve.

Since this is a book review, I suppose I should start by mentioning

something about the author’s style before we dive into the substance. His prose

is serviceable, but reading the book felt more like a chore than a pleasure.

Swamidass repeats himself frequently, and he seems determined not to make a

claim without qualifying it six ways from Sunday. On page 10, for example, he

states his “precise and testable hypothesis, consistent with Scripture,” but

immediately we discover that “the details are flexible.” Maybe Adam was directly

created by God, maybe not. Maybe he lived in the Middle East, maybe somewhere

else. Maybe the garden was a supernatural, perfect environment, maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe those “outside the garden” are made in God’s image, maybe they’re not. To

this reviewer, the hypothesis seems designed to make a literal Adam and Eve

unfalsifiable, not “precise and testable.” In science, I believe that’s called

an ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis.

On to the substance. The foundations of Genealogical Adam and Eve rest on a single paper from 2004, “Modelling the Recent Common Ancestry of All Living Humans.”[1] The authors used the genealogical phenomenon of pedigree collapse to estimate the most recent common ancestor for everyone alive today. Since formulas can’t simulate real-world human mating and migration patterns, the authors constructed a simulation program to model the historical world population from 20,000 B.C. to the present. (Think The Sims on steroids.) After running the program countless times and analyzing the “lives” of 1.2 billion sims, the authors concluded that the most recent common ancestor likely lived around 1400 B.C, and by 5400 B.C. everyone alive was either a common ancestor to us all or had no descendants alive today. For religious reasons, Swamidass adds roughly 2,000 years to these dates to arrive at his estimate for Genealogical Adam and Eve, whom he places 6,000 years ago, magically fitting the timetable required by Young-Earth Creationism.

Baptist theologian Kenneth Keathley has said he considers

“genealogical Adam” one of just two available options for Old-Earth Creationists.

He also specified a scientific challenge to the hypothesis – th...