At his blog Still Mon­keys, Paul McBride has done yeo­man work exam­in­ing the shod­dy claims of the lat­est book from the Dis­co. ‘tute Press.  This book, bare­ly more than a pam­phlet, real­ly, pur­ports to show that the last cen­tu­ry of research on the roots of the human race are wrong, that evo­lu­tion can’t explain where humans came from, that there was no com­mon ances­try between humans and oth­er pri­mates, and to “debunk claims that the human race could not have start­ed from an orig­i­nal couple.”

Typ­i­cal­ly for the book’s authors – Dis­co. ‘tute staffers Casey Luskin, Dou­glas Axe, and Ann Gauger – the book deliv­ers far less than it promis­es, a fact which McBride demon­strates as thor­ough­ly as any­one should have to.  And as he notes, that last bit about “an orig­i­nal cou­ple” is an intrigu­ing state­ment, an appar­ent defense of the exis­tence of a lit­er­al Adam and Eve which is at odds with the reli­gious­ly-neu­tral image ID advo­cates like the Dis­co. ‘tute gen­er­al­ly try to present. 

McBride explains:

In a sec­tion called “Take home mes­sage”, the sec­ond-last of the book Gauger shifts to sug­gest that per­haps “we began from two intel­li­gent­ly designed first par­ents” and that if this were the case “all this analy­sis of how many ancient hap­lo­types we share with chimps doesn’t real­ly matter”.

Set aside how weak her argu­ment is – and McBride does a nice job of explain­ing that it is very weak indeed – what’s note­wor­thy about this whole chap­ter is just how focused on that “orig­i­nal cou­ple” she is, and how will­ing Gauger is to overt­ly iden­ti­fy that cou­ple with Adam and Eve.  The intro­duc­tion to the chap­ter empha­sizes that her con­cern is research which “direct­ly con­tra­dicts the tra­di­tion­al belief of many Chris­tians that human­i­ty start­ed with an orig­i­nal cou­ple, Adam and Eve.” It takes shots at groups like BioL­o­gos which argue that such belief is nei­ther sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate nor the­o­log­i­cal­ly jus­ti­fied.  She then insists that her goal is not to engage the the­ol­o­gy, but sim­ply to assess the sci­ence.  Based on her faulty attacks on a sin­gle research paper, Gauger’s con­clud­ing sen­tence asserts: “one thing is clear right now: Adam and Eve have not been dis-proven by science.”

This, then, is the pay­off of the book on Sci­ence and Human Ori­gins.  That Adam and Eve may have been real. 

To make that claim requires: a) there was a pop­u­la­tion-genet­ic bot­tle­neck in human ances­try, b) this bot­tle­neck meant that only two indi­vid­u­als left descen­dants (oth­er indi­vid­u­als may have been alive, but did­n’t have off­spring), c) those two indi­vid­u­als were Adam and Eve.

Part a) is true, but it was prob­a­bly a bot­tle­neck of about 100,000 indi­vid­u­als.  Part b) is sil­ly and implau­si­ble, though such bot­tle­necks exist in oth­er species and pop­u­la­tions can poten­tial­ly recov­er from them, so at least could fit into a sci­en­tif­ic research pro­gram.  Part c) sim­ply does­n’t fol­low, and isn’t argued in the chap­ter.  Adam and Eve are not just con­ve­nient names for two indi­vid­u­als who sired all of human­i­ty: they are char­ac­ters in a sto­ry.  And they aren’t even the names giv­en to the prog­en­i­tors of all human­i­ty: the first human is sim­ply called “the human,” and after being split into male and female parts, they are known as Ish and Isha. There’s a Tal­mu­dic tra­di­tion that oth­er ear­ly humans were cre­at­ed, includ­ing Lilith (con­sid­ered Adam’s first wife in some tra­di­tions), and a com­mon theme in old-earth cre­ation­ism is the idea that Adam and Eve were not the first humans, mere­ly the first humans in the bib­li­cal­ly-rel­e­vant lin­eage.

Set­ting aside those ven­er­a­ble alter­na­tive exege­ses with­in Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy, Gauger’s equa­tion between a puta­tive ances­tral cou­ple and Adam and Eve runs into seri­ous Bib­li­cal prob­lems.  Adam and Eve, after all, have prop­er­ties beyond sim­ply being the first humans.  For instance, Gen­e­sis tells us where they lived:

YHWH, God, plant­ed a gar­den in Eden/­Land-of-Plea­sure, in the east,
and there he placed the human whom he had formed.

…

Now a riv­er goes out from Eden, to water the gar­den,
and from there it divides and becomes four stream-heads.
The name of the first is Pishon/Spreader – that is the one that cir­cles through all the land of Hav­i­la…
The name of the sec­ond riv­er is Gihon/Gusher – that is the one that cir­cles through all the land of Cush.
The name of the third riv­er is Hiddekel/Tigris – that is the one that goes to the east of Assyr­ia.
And the fourth riv­er – that is Perat/Euphrates.

Adam and Eve lived in the Mid­dle East.  Any pop­u­la­tion bot­tle­neck that Gauger’s case could pos­si­bly apply to would have tak­en place in Africa, far away from the Tigris and Euphrates, from Assyr­ia to Cush and Hav­i­la.  If Gauger were some­how right that the human lin­eage passed through a two-per­son bot­tle­neck some­time in its his­to­ry, those two could not have been Adam and Eve.  More impor­tant­ly, Adam and Eve lived in the Mid­dle East in rough­ly the sense that Charles Dar­nay lived in France; the his­tor­i­cal evi­dence that the French Rev­o­lu­tion real­ly hap­pened no more proves the exis­tence of Charles Dar­nay than the exis­tence of a two-per­son pop­u­la­tion bot­tle­neck in human his­to­ry would prove the exis­tence of Adam and Eve.

Despite Gauger’s protes­ta­tions, by claim­ing sci­ence jus­ti­fies belief in Adam and Eve, she is mak­ing a the­o­log­i­cal argu­ment.  And it’s a bad one.  Pur­suit of that the­o­log­i­cal argu­ment leads her, along with Axe and Luskin, to abuse sci­ence and sci­en­tists, as McBride so ably summarizes:

I have been left won­der­ing why the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute, or intel­li­gent design advo­cates in gen­er­al, or bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists feel a need to try and accom­mo­date sci­ence when they have a belief in a super­nat­ur­al enti­ty capa­ble of break­ing nat­ur­al laws. In the case of this book, it has left them need­ing to make all kinds of awk­ward crit­i­cisms of fields in which the authors clear­ly lack exper­tise. A lawyer [Luskin] is not the right guy to chal­lenge the world’s palaeoan­thro­pol­o­gists, nor the world’s geneti­cists [as he does in his two chap­ters of the book’s five]. Cer­tain­ly, he should­n’t be try­ing to take them all on at once. It will end with him try­ing to smear the rep­u­ta­tion of sci­en­tists rather than engag­ing with their ideas. Accu­sa­tions that the entire field of palaeoan­thro­pol­o­gy is dri­ven by per­son­al dis­putes and that Fran­cis Collins is a bad Chris­t­ian are sim­ply not com­pelling read­ing in a book that is puta­tive­ly about sci­en­tif­ic argument. 

Such argu­ments would not even come up in the course of a gen­uine­ly sci­en­tif­ic argu­ment, of course.  Nor should such a sci­en­tif­ic argu­ment be pre­sent­ed in a self-pub­lished book/pamphlet.  You can’t do sci­ence by try­ing to reach a the­o­log­i­cal­ly pre­de­ter­mined con­clu­sion (i.e., that the human lin­eage went through a bot­tle­neck in which effec­tive pop­u­la­tion size = 2).

This book exists because of the lack of basic lit­er­a­cy among the authors and the book’s intend­ed audi­ence.  The authors and the read­ers they hope to find are trapped in the absurd belief that the legit­i­ma­cy of the Bible comes from how sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate it is.  They skip past the obvi­ous lit­er­ary flour­ish­es: nam­ing the first human sim­ply “the human,” nam­ing the first cou­ple “Woman” and “Man” and then “Soil” and “Life-giv­er,” the talk­ing ser­pent, nam­ing all the beasts and fowl and fish in a mat­ter of hours, and the exten­sive word­play, rhymes, etc.  They’re so focused on whether Adam had a belly­but­ton that they lose track of what the sto­ry means.  This impov­er­ish­es their the­ol­o­gy, and makes a mock­ery of their attempts at science.