How Can 2 People Populate The Earth Without Running Into The Problem of Incest?

[shooshoomanjoe]

It's not Adam and Eve, It is Noah and his family that populated the Earth. And every species alive is the result of incest as well. It's just good they all had both male and female offspring.

Noah's ark still doesn't make sense to me. Does the church really expect me to believe that a boat can be built that carried two of each species of the world?

[seismic-2]

Noah's ark still doesn't make sense to me. Does the church really expect me to believe that a boat can be built that carried two of each species of the world?

The part of the Noah story that seems especially implausible in view of modern knowledge of geography (which of course the writers of Genesis did not have) was how the llamas wound up in South America, the kangaroos wound up in Australia, the giraffes wound up in Africa, the bison in North America, the penguins in Antarctica, the polar bears in the Arctic, etc. Did Noah have to sail to all those places to let each specific species off? And did he have to sail to them before the flood, to pick them up in the first place?

And... where did all the water go?

[Tami]

Noah's ark still doesn't make sense to me. Does the church really expect me to believe that a boat can be built that carried two of each species of the world?

To be fair, it wouldn't have to carry birds, or ocean creatures (even one whale would sink the ship), and probably not insects. Then again, it couldn't carry every kind of plant.

Here is the trick, you don't have to believe what you are told. You can take it as a story, a fable, or, as some people actually do, take it as fact without any serious consideration for logic or reason.

The bible was written simplistically for people with little or no scientific knowledge. We have grown up, grown past that. At least the human species as a whole has, individual humans may vary in their beliefs.

It is possible that the story of Noah's Ark may have been based on an actual flood event that may have seemed, at the time, like the end of the world to those who lived through it. But that was a limited view of a limited area of the planet.

In the evolution of the Earth, it's molten stage was followed by a period in which most of the planet was covered by water (about 4,000 million years ago). But that hasn't happened again since.

[seismic-2]

The Book of Genesis is actually rather vague about how the human race propagated after Adam and Eve started having offspring. It tells us that they had 3 sons named Cain, Abel and Seth. It doesn't mention any other offspring. Cain murdered Abel and fled to Nod, a land east of Eden. Then we are told that Cain and his wife "begat" Enoch, and Cain built a city named after him. The story then goes into a lot of begatting through generation after generation, but it doesn't explain where Cain's wife, and Seth's wife, came from. Were they daughters of Adam and Eve? Or were there in fact other people living at the same time? Was Cain's wife someone he met in the land of Nod? The fact that Cain built a city there seems to imply there must have been enough people in Nod to populate it. So was Eden just one populated place among others? This is just one more quandary for the fundamentalists who insist that everything in the Bible is to be taken literally.

[Scott Taylor]

The whole taboo of incest seems different from the facts of how biological populations function. Incest is 1) gross and 2) circular genetically. No new genes enter your offspring with incest, so it would mean you better have good genes already or you're screwed. See royal family? (apologies, Brits, that was mean)

Wild populations of animals actually do incest a lot (gasp!) and are just fine. They also succeed in isolated populations, although their chances for survival are lowered due to potential for stochastic occurrences. The genetic enemies of lower populations of critters are declining "fitness," lower chances of genetic drift, and reduced diversity.

So from a biology standpoint, the thought is that the higher the population, the higher the gene pool and the better the chances for the population to survive things like natural disasters or mass illnesses. If you had a big population of apes, and half of them had big thumbs while the other half had little thumbs, the big thumb ones might (theoretically) be better climbers and better able to escape certain predators. Eventually the big thumb ones would totally dominate, if that were the case, just due to natural selection. Alternatively, the big thumbers might lack the ability to fight diseases off as well as the small thumbers, just due to the vagaries of genetic drift. Ongoing survival is a constant battle over competing genetic tendencies and lots of other factors. If some event isolated the big thumbers and small thumbers I mentioned above, but eliminated the predator that gave the advantage to the big thumbers, then who knows how the ensuing populations might turn out.

The easiest answer to Adam and Eve is that God gave them the right starting genetic material for their situation. But this is faith stuff, the Bible isn't a scientific treatise on how this all worked out biologically. As to Noah's arc, I've heard different theories on how it all worked. There seem to be a lot of flood myths in ancient history, so something happened.

[Powerboy]

Let's humor the thought for a second, the creationist hypothesis that a single pair of a man and a woman jumpstarted the human race and grew from there was true, wouldn't the effects of inbreeding kick in after a few generations?

Look at human history. Clearly, there was mental deficiency from inbreeding.

The stock answer of Creationists, ignoring the complete lack of evidence for their version of reality and the overwhelming evidence for, well reality, would be the standard "GodDoneIt". In other words, God caused the normal problems of inbreeding to not exist OR they did not apply to Adam and Eve.

We also have to assume a certain number of creations of large populations that the Bible fails to mention. For instance, after the Flood, there's only a passage of something like e century and the world seems well populated again.

As I said, to make this a viable story, we have to assume several omissions of information.

[Powerboy]

It shouldn't be, but many, many people do.

It's even a Science Fiction Trope. A man and a woman are alone on an otherwise depopulated or empty planet and they say something to the effect that they will have to start over and repopulate the world.

It's kind of like the Star Trek version of evolution, as if a person is walking down the street one day and suddenly says, "It's time. I'm eeeeevolving" as opposed to the reality that it happens in the gestation period.

[Powerboy]

What if...on earth human were developing at different places on earth from different sources at the same time?. They wandered around and met other humans from other places and had sex with them.

Wow, that would be like populations evolve and not just individuals. What a concept.

[Jim Kelly]

There's no need to bring creationism into or to make it about the Bible or to scoff at the logic, since this kind of thing happens in nature all the time. After all, if we're a newly evolved type of hominid, we had to start with a single mother (our Eve) and we all come from that one parent.

The biggest risk is really at the first generation where there need to be enough viable offspring for the line to continue. Reproduction causes an exponential growth in numbers at each new generation and pretty soon you're at thousands of offspring all being distant cousins. Survival of the fittest means those with weak genes will die out and random mutations in the genome will result in a wider range of genetic features.

Yes, when numbers decrease in a species we come closer to extinction--which is why so many die out. But if they can just procreate for a few generations, species can come back.

[worstblogever]

By the definition of incest?

Generation 2 would fail.

[Scott Taylor]

There's no need to bring creationism into or to make it about the Bible or to scoff at the logic, since this kind of thing happens in nature all the time. After all, if we're a newly evolved type of hominid, we had to start with a single mother (our Eve) and we all come from that one parent.

The biggest risk is really at the first generation where there need to be enough viable offspring for the line to continue. Reproduction causes an exponential growth in numbers at each new generation and pretty soon you're at thousands of offspring all being distant cousins. Survival of the fittest means those with weak genes will die out and random mutations in the genome will result in a wider range of genetic features.

Yes, when numbers decrease in a species we come closer to extinction--which is why so many die out. But if they can just procreate for a few generations, species can come back.

Well said.

We have the luxury of not having to do incest, and considering it taboo, just because there are so many of us around. Same way most humans have the luxury of not having to go eat grubs and crap like that from under logs.