“Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.” (Genesis 3:20)
In order to find a common ancestor whose genetics have passed on, we need to look for things that are passed down from generation to generation with little or no alteration. Both genders pass along one thing that is unchanged during sexual reproduction. For women, this is the mitochondrial DNA passed on from mother to daughter and son, whereas for men this is the Y chromosome passed on from father to son.
In 1987 population geneticists first demonstrated the existence of a ‘mitochondrial Eve’1. A group of geneticists published a surprising study in the journal Nature. The researchers examined the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) taken from 147 people across all of today’s major racial groups. These researchers concluded that every human being alive today can trace their ancestry back to a single woman now referred to as “Mitochondrial Eve.” Professor Karl Skorecki, an expert on DNA and the discoverer of the “Cohen Gene” states that:
“Analysis of mitochondrial DNA of all contemporary humans sampled today indicates that all of the different variations in the sequence of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) trace back, or converge to an original sequence in a given woman.”
Furthermore, research with Y chromosomes confirmed that every man alive today also descended from a single man whom scientists now refer to as “Y-Chromosomal Adam.”
Thus, while Y-Chromosomal Adam is the ancestor of every living man, Mitochondrial Eve is the mother of all living humans, male and female! This is beautifully consistent with the biblical account of human history.
In addition, unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA has only 16,569 base pairs (DNA’s building blocks) as opposed to over 6 billion base pairs in our nucleus. So mutations are much easier to track. (In fact, the highest number of mutations recorded in the human race is just over 120.) What does this mean? Such a limited number of mutations means that little time has passed for mutations to occur since the first mother passed down her DNA! These results make sense if today’s billions of people are the descendants of only eight people on Noah’s Ark who lived approximately 6,000 years ago according to biblical chronology. However, if there was more time, like the hundreds of thousands of years that the evolutionists claim (in addition to the millions of years since humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor), we would expect to find far more DNA differences. But we don’t.
Two recent major studies of modern humans’ Y chromosomes also suggest that ‘Y-chromosome Adam’ and ‘mitochondrial Eve’ may have lived around the same time after all.2,3Once again consistent with the biblical account.
The dates assigned to mitochondrial Eve (tens to hundreds of thousands of years) by evolutionists don’t match the biblical chronology, however, this is because they are are based upon ‘molecular clock’ assumptions, which were calibrated by evolutionary beliefs about when certain evolutionary events occurred, supposedly millions of years ago. The aforementioned mutation rates directly ‘challenge’ the evolutionary long-age claim, and indicate that mitochondrial Eve lived around 6,000 to 6,500 years ago, right in the ballpark for the true ‘mother of all living’ (Genesis 3:20).
What we can say with fair certainty is that, regardless of time frames and alleged contemporaries, every man alive today descended from one man while every human alive today descended from one woman.Moreover, you cannot say that science doesn’t confirm the Bible. Because it does.
References:
1 Cann, R. L., Stoneking, M. & Wilson, A. C. Nature 325, 31–36 (1987).↩2 Poznik, G. D. et al. Science 341, 562–565 (2013).↩3 Francalacci, P. et al. Science 341, 565–569 (2013).↩
Källa: christianevidence.net