Don’t Adam and Eve it? For humanity’s last common male and female ancestors, according to www.popsci.com, Francis Diep, 1 August 2013; “Hundreds of thousands of years ago—when people still lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, when it’s not even clear they were totally anatomically modern (though they probably were)—something happened in the human genome. Somewhere in Africa, a man carried a Y chromosome that would turn out to be the only surviving Y chromosome in humans today. This man lived around plenty of other people, perhaps with their own Y chromosomes, but chance whittled away his peers’ contributions until only his was left. In a totally independent event, a woman carried mitochondria—tiny structures contained inside cells—that would become the only mitochondria people have today. Like the Y-man, she lived around other people, but over thousands of years, luck struck down all others’ mitochondria save her own”.
Editorial Comment: Our Canadian Creation Research correspondent Niels Andersen, comments that if the experts can agree there is only one surviving version of the Y chromosome in humans today, as well as only one surviving version of mitochondria (mitochondrial DNA) in humans today, perhaps it is time for scientists to consider the obvious: there never has been any other version of the Y chromosome, nor any other version of the mitochondria. Perhaps it is also time to admit that these two facts are not “totally independent”, as suggested in the article, but can actually be connected by the scripture record which tells us that … God made the first man Adam from the dust of the ground and He made the first woman from the first man’s side (Gen 1:26-2:7). Having male and female created at the same time, means that successive generations of males would have preserved the unique Y chromosome, just as females have preserved a unique set of mitochondria, so the fact that there is only one known human Y chromosome and one kind of human mitochondria is certainly consistent evidence with the Biblical account that humanity started as one man and one woman. There is no need to make up unobserved “evidence”, and no reason to invoke luck or chance. (Ref. genetics, genealogy, inheritance).
Australian readers please note: due to copyright restrictions some articles in Popular Science, including the one cited above, are not available in the Australian edition of Popular Science and cannot be accessed on the Australian Popular Science website.
Evidence News 7 August 2013