The world has changed a lot this year. How about in the past 250 years? Had I been born in Europe 200 years earlier than I was, I would almost certainly have believed that our planet and the plants, animals and humankind around me were all just as they were created by God, by some estimations a little under 6,000 years earlier.
I would believe this because God had told me so in the words of the world’s prominent religious texts, the Christian Bible, the Muslim Quran and the Jewish Tanakh. This was not a minority viewpoint: currently some 55% of the world’s population adhere to these three faiths.
So, to refresh my memory of these stories of human origins, I took a look at the Book of Genesis which you may recall is Book One in the Christian Bible which starts, appropriately, with the words:
‘In the Beginning’…
‘God created the heavens and the earth.’ And on the first day, he created day, famously declaring:
‘Let there be light’
‘God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness … the first day’.
Five days later, after creating the sky, the oceans, the land, vegetation, animals in the water and on the land (in that order), he created mankind ‘in his own image’.
Turning the page to Chapter 2 of the book of Genesis (meaning ‘Origin’ in Greek) in the Judeo-Christian Bible, there’s rather more detail specifically about the creation of humankind. Here’s how the story goes:
‘The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” …
No suitable ‘helper’ was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and … made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.’
I have to say it has always struck me as strange that God makes no mention of reproduction or perpetuating the species. The emphasis does seem to be on the helping role – cooking and cleaning maybe?
(Side note – this raises an interesting problem about the number of ribs men and women should have. A novel explanation for this potential anomaly in the ‘Biblical Archaeology Review’ is that the translation is ambiguous and that actually Eve was created from Adam’s os baculum or ‘penis bone’, explaining why men and women have the same number of ribs, and human males don’t have a penis bone whereas chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas do!)
Had you been living in the last years of the 18th century, certainly in Europe and its widespread colonies, the Americas, Russia or the Middle East in, say, 1800, this was uniformly how you and almost the whole of your society would believe human beings as we know them today came into existence. Divinely created just as they are today. Two hundred years earlier than that, before what we call the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, to question this version would be to risk your very life.
So this is where I begin my journey through both the story of evolution and our society’s evolving understanding of evolution. But my first question is, ‘Am I starting in the right place?’ If I were born into a different society or religious environment, would my journey have been different? It turns out that, with the one notable exception of Buddhism, more of which later, the starting place for most cultures over the millennia of written history would have been similar…
Next: Humans – Clear as Mud …
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