Nathan H. Lents

Opinion contributor

Scientists, even religious ones, rarely spend time analyzing religious creation myths. After all, when taken literally, these stories are usually in direct conflict with what we know about Earth’s natural history. When faith requires people to cling to those myths anyway, science is cast aside. One would be hard-pressed to think of a scriptural story more at odds with physical evidence than the Garden of Eden.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, a leading public scholar — Joshua Swamidass, a physician and genome scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri — is making a bold new attempt to reconcile the biblical story of Adam and Eve with what we know about the genetic ancestry of the human race. His “genealogical hypothesis” arrives at a time of great cultural upheaval when facts are malleable, politics perverts science, and the gulf that divides our red and blue tribes is reminiscent of another biblical myth: the parting of the Red Sea.

What we already know

The scriptural challenge is that Adam and Eve are purported to be the ancestors of everyone “to all the ends of the earth,” by the year 1 BCE. But we know with as much certainty as scientifically possible that our species does not descend from a single couple and instead has its origin in Africa around 300,000 years ago. We have evolved through a long line of ancestry that connects with all other living things going back nearly 4 billion years.

So there’s that.

And yet, in his upcoming book, "The Genealogical Adam & Eve," Swamidass makes an audacious claim: A de novo-created Adam and Eve could very well be universal human ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the last 6,000-10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to reconcile the Garden of Eden story with science, but rarely does someone with Swamidass’ credentials do what most scientists would deem unthinkable: Take the story seriously. However, some atheist scientists are taking Swamidass seriously.

Swamidass is not peddling pseudoscience. Indeed, earlier this year, he and I teamed up on the pages of Science to rebut claims by evolution critics. In addition, "The Genealogical Adam and Eve" went through a rigorous process of open peer review, involving scholars from many diverse disciplines and even some secular scientists, including myself and Alan Templeton, a giant in the field of human population genetics. Invited to find fault in his analysis, we couldn’t, partly because the hypothesis is so narrow, but also because it appears to be correct.

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Surprising though it seems, it is scientifically tenable that, among our billions of other ancestors, we could all be descendant from a single human couple who lived in the past 10,000 years. In fact, as Swamidass carefully explains, this is almost certainly the case according to current estimates of the so-called identical ancestors point, a time in the past when all family trees converge into one common pool of universal ancestors. There are two clear reasons why this astonishing hypothesis is compatible with science.

First, Swamidass acknowledges the undeniable scientific truth that the human population evolved from ancestor ape species and shares common descent with all living things. He is a defender of, not a dissenter from, modern evolutionary theory. Second, according to Swamidass, Adam and Eve could have been a special creation whose progeny slowly interbred with the human population that already existed outside the Garden of Eden — people who had descended through the normal evolutionary process. Some scholars have claimed that the Bible itself hints at the existence of these people when it speaks of the “Nephilim.” As interbreeding between the Nephilim and the offspring of Adam and Even continued, the “seed of Adam” could easily spread to all of humanity over thousands of years, and this universal ancestry would leave no genetic footprints.

Therefore, as long as one reads the book of Genesis in a way that allows that the evolutionary tree of life existed alongside the Garden of Eden, and that humans derive their ancestry from both sources, modern science might actually be silent on the issue of Adam and Eve. The effect of this new realization is that Christians, Jews and Muslims can effectively move the Adam and Eve story from the column of miracles that science has soundly disproved — such as a recent global flood — to the column of miracles that science cannot disprove, like the virgin birth of Jesus.

Possibility, not proof

To be clear, Swamidass’ theory does not prove anything about the Adam and Eve story. It doesn’t even offer positive evidence for it, but that is not the goal. Instead, he provides a bridge for those whose faith insists on the real existence of Adam and Eve. Until now, they have had little choice but to reject evolutionary science, at least partly but often wholly. Classes are taught in some evangelical churches that discount evolutionary science in its entirety, a troublesome prospect, being that 1 in 4 Americans identify as evangelical Christians. But if Adam and Eve could exist within the natural world, we might have a resolution to one of the greatest cultural conflicts of the past two centuries.

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This will not tempt someone like me to believe in the creation story laid out in Genesis. But it just might allow those who do believe to be more open to evolution and, god willing, to science more broadly. For those who take the Adam and Eve story literally, the value of this effort is obvious. But there is value for nonbelievers as well. Widespread suspicion of science weakens our social fabric and undermines the common good. From the urgency of climate change and medical research, to the frontiers of artificial intelligence and space exploration, scientific discovery holds tremendous potential for the betterment of human lives. As such, efforts to bring more people into the scientific mainstream serve not one political party or one particular faith — but all of humanity, to the ends of the Earth.

Nathan H. Lents is a professor of biology at John Jay College, The City University of New York, and author of “Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals” and “Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes.” Follow him on Twitter: @nathanlents