New scientific discovery supports Bible's Adam and Eve story, science writer says
A "provocative and misunderstood" scientific study published this year supports the Bible's Adam and Eve story by demonstrating that all humans are descended from a common mother and father, a prominent science writer and public speaker claims.
Author Michael Guillen, president of Spectacular Science Productions, who has taught physics at Harvard and was a science editor for ABC News, commented on the scientific discovery from May regarding human ancestors in a Saturday op-ed for Fox News.
Summarizing the discovery, announced by a team of U.S. and Swiss scientists, Guillen wrote that "all humans alive today are the offspring of a common father and mother — an Adam and Eve — who walked the planet 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, which by evolutionary standards is like yesterday."
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"Moreover, the same is true of nine out of every 10 animal species, meaning that nearly all of Earth’s creatures living today sprang into being recently from some seminal, Big Bang-like event," he added.
As Mark Stoeckle at Rockefeller University and David Thaler at the University of Basel explained back in May, they based their findings on analysis of DNA “bar codes” of 5 million animals from 100,000 different species.
“Experts have interpreted low genetic variation among living humans as a result of our recent expansion from a small population in which a sequence from one mother became the ancestor for all modern human mitochondrial sequences,” Thaler said back them.
“Our paper strengthens the argument that the low variation in the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans also explains the similar low variation found in over 90 percent of living animal species — we all likely originated by similar processes and most animal species are likely young.”
Thaler later added: “Scholars have previously argued that 99 percent of all animal species that ever lived are now extinct. Our work suggests that most species of animals alive today are like humans, descendants of ancestors who emerged from small populations possibly with near-extinction events within the last few hundred thousand years.”
Responding to the resurfacing of the study, Franklin Graham, who heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, affirmed that when God spoke, there was a “big bang,” which he said was Creation itself.
“This is really just science confirming what the Word of God tells us,” Graham said on Facebook in response to the research.
“Even though science points to the truth of Scripture, they still want to give it an evolutionary spin. God created the first man and the first woman — Adam and Eve. He created the Heavens and the Earth, and everything in it. God’s Word is true from cover to cover!” he added.
Ken Ham, a Young Earth Creationist who heads Answers in Genesis, meanwhile urged scientists to accept that the Genesis account of Creation is true.
“To find out the truth about speciation and how observational science confirms the Bible's account of created kinds as per the biblical timeline, people need to read some up-to-date research that devastates the millions of years/evolutionary account,” he added on Facebook, before linking to an AiG article from July, providing an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA tests.
In his Fox News op-ed, Guillen suggested that there are two main ways in which Stoeckle and Thaler’s study lines up with the Bible.
“First, it affirms that we and our fellow creatures on Earth arose from a recent and profound Creation event, orchestrated by some unknown mechanism. And second, the DNA bar codes reveal that species are quantized,” he said.
“Instead of there being a continuum of animal varieties, as one might expect from millions of years of gradual evolution, creatures fall into very distinct, widely separated populations — what the Bible describes as ‘kinds,’ from the Hebrew word min.”
