Why didn't the descendants of Adam and Eve have genetic defects?

[blakerussell]

Alright, I have a good buddy (who's a christian) and he's a biology major. He presented this question to me (and me being an english major, it's something I have never really thought of).

Anyhow, it's been irritating me, mainly because I don't have an answer and I feel like it's a good question.

Adam and Eve are the first two people.
Heck, you could even fast forward to those who survived the flood.
When reproducing happened with just two, or eight people, how in the world wasn't there adverse defects? We know what comes about with inbreeding, and the results are almost never pretty. Why wasn't this the case with say, Adam and Eve and their descendants?

I thought this was a pretty good question.

I do suppose I could always leave it here- "Because, God." That should suffice always, but sometime curiosity gets the better of me.

 

[CharlieJ]

Alright, I have a good buddy (who's a christian) and he's a biology major. He presented this question to me (and me being an english major, it's something I have never really thought of).

Anyhow, it's been irritating me, mainly because I don't have an answer and I feel like it's a good question.

Adam and Eve are the first two people.
Heck, you could even fast forward to those who survived the flood.
When reproducing happened with just two, or eight people, how in the world wasn't there adverse defects? We know what comes about with inbreeding, and the results are almost never pretty. Why wasn't this the case with say, Adam and Eve and their descendants?

I thought this was a pretty good question.

I do suppose I could always leave it here- "Because, God." That should suffice always, but sometime curiosity gets the better of me.

One possible answer - closer to the beginning of creation, there's less junk DNA. A purer genome perhaps could withstand "inbreeding" much better than today. There are some biblical suggestions to this effect. Abraham and Sarah were half-siblings, but such arrangements are prohibited in the Mosaic law ~500 years later.

 

[PuritanCovenanter]

Well, I have heard that the genetic defects have been going up ever since. And since they were the first, the genetic code was not as liable at the same level it is today. Kind of like the immune system starts to fail the older you get. Plus, I am not sure how this works out but I have personally thought the genetic code was changed by God at the tower of Babel and that is where we get different colors of the human race. But that is only a theory. At that point I can see that different types of blood might have been introduced even. Even so at one point there was only two possible blood types with Adam and Eve. Now there are many different kinds and mixes. If Adam and Eves were different than they made a third and possibly a fourth and so on. But that also might have some relation to it.

But that is definitely an unscientific theory. I am not a scientist. Just musings from a person who has had questions also.

 

[jason d]

According to the book of Genesis, God created only two people (Adam and Eve) whom He told to be ‘fruitful and multiply’... This couple were the original and only ancestors of all humans who have ever lived. In fact we are told that the woman was called Eve because she was to be the mother of all living. Genesis chapter 5 informs us that Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters. After this, presumably, their sons married their sisters (or perhaps nieces). In the early days of man the children from the union of a brother and sister would not have been deformed as often happens today, since Adam and Eve were physically perfect in every way. It was only after the fall of man, when sin entered the world and God therefore placed a curse upon it, that everything started to degenerate. As time proceeded, man's body suffered more and more from the effects of the curse, until the time came that God forbade the marrying of brother and sister, since their offspring were now likely to be deformed. (The more closely related you are to someone the more defects you have in common, which may show in your offspring.) The laws of incest were not given until the time of Moses. Abraham, for example, was married to his half sister.

via The Australian Aboriginal

 

[Tim]

These are good answers, and I agree.

But let's remember, even the evolutionist must begin with two (cells or microbes or whatever) as well (or perhaps one, for asexual reproduction). Aren't adverse effects from a small gene pool a problem for the evolutionary model as well, in the 'early stages of life on earth'?

 

[TimV]

You could ask you friend what he thinks the problem would be with taking three breeding pairs of any animals including humans in a situation where:

a: Taking the Bible as history rather than myth and accepting by the fact that the different races fathered by each pair were so different it is obvious that all the alleles of mankind were represented in the three original breeding pairs

b: Taking the Bible as myth, but accepting that most people with sever genetic mutations whether caused by one dominant bad gene (autosomal dominant) or two recessive genes (autosomal recessive) hadn't survived to produce many children during early human history

and asking why he thinks it would be so obvious that those three breeding pairs under either one of those scenarios would have produced descendants that were not "pretty".

 

[Rogerant]

I am not a scientist but this is my understanding. When you breed whole breed dogs together the breed becomes more defined but weaker. Same with humans. Take inbred colonies like the Hutterites. Many adverse affects to inbred relationships. But with Adam and Eve, all of the nations genes were within them. Also, at the point when they "knew" each other, the adverse affects of the fall had not completely corrupted the genes as yet. I understand that current gene science actually supports that all men did come from a single source. We know his name as Adam.

 

[Peairtach]

Interbreeding doesn't necessarily produce bad results. Good genes can be reinforced to produce geniuses. Bad genes on the other hand can be reinforced to produce "runts"

At an early stage in Man's history the faults in the gene pool would be non-existent in the case of Adam and Eve, or low in the case of Noah and his family.

Adam and Eve/Noah and his family contained all the genes necessary in a gene pool to make the various types of human beings/races.

Adam and Eve/Noah and his family, probably didn't/almost certainly didn't look like modern Caucasians or any Caucasians.

Natural selection - to the limited degree which it does happen - would have played a role in the development of race, along with the fact that there would have been a wider variety of types of children with a wider variety of genes born to the early humans, Adam and Noah, etc. Now the various races and families have branched, isolating any of the minor differences.

There are no groups of humans undergoing macro-evolution (e.g. growing flaps of skin under the oxters to develop wings/growing larger or more useful brains) nor any evidence that they ever have, which reminds us that mutations are almost always harmful, and the bigger the mutation the more likely it is to be harmful, which leaves natural selection with little to work on but the non-mutated genes that have already been put in among humanity by God to work on.

Natural selection is a sieve which works on what genes are already there or on any mutations. It can't produce anything new itself.

 

[MMasztal]

Your friend makes some incorrect presumptions which accounts for his confusing questions.

Adam and Eve and all of creation were perfectly created with man having perfect genes. After the fall, all of creation was under the curse, including man's DNA, but the defects had not accumulated to be problematic, so what we now call inbreeding was not a problem back then. The children of Adam and Eve, brother and sister, had children with each other and the population grew.
It wasn't until Leviticus that God commanded the Israelites to not marry close relatives.

-----Added 12/11/2009 at 10:01:08 EST-----

But let's remember, even the evolutionist must begin with two (cells or microbes or whatever) as well (or perhaps one, for asexual reproduction). Aren't adverse effects from a small gene pool a problem for the evolutionary model as well, in the 'early stages of life on earth'?

They are a problem, but the evolutionist would cite natural selection as the way the evolutionary process facilitates advancement of speciation.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

I think we'd have to speculate on the biological reasons but you might want to ask him how, apart from special creation, he accounts for a male and a female of a new evolved species sort of "happened upon" one another to breed with.

Does he believe in punctuated equilibrium and there were a bunch of primates that suddenly, for no apparent reason, gave birth to a whole community of male and female human children by, coincidentally, having the exact same genetic mutation at the exact same moment in history, in the same geographic location.

In other words, even if one accepts a naturalistic view of the origin of man, just how many humans does he believe were produced by the first genetic mutation that led to a male/female pair?

 

[MMasztal]

In other words, even if one accepts a naturalistic view of the origin of man, just how many humans does he believe were produced by the first genetic mutation that led to a male/female pair?

This is a good point. The evolutionist would have to account for:
1) similar mutations creating male and female humans having occurred within a, say, 40 year period to account for the time a female is able to have children;
2) that the male and female would have mutated within a proximity that might allow for them to actually meet each other;
3) that a mating would have occurred producing a viable offspring that survived and then met other offspring from which they would be able to produce; and
4) that genetic defects would have not amniifested themselves.

Oddly, evolutionists are willing to accept highly improbable probability calculations at numerous points of their timeline which a statistician would laugh at.

 

[Paul Trask]

Generations

My gggggggg grand father arrived from Germany in 1710 and he had 12 children. By the 1950s he had over 80,000 descendants. He only lived for 70 years. Adam lived to be 930 years. In Genesis 5:3-4 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether Adam lived 930 years, and then he died. I think by the time their kids and their kids started procreating the inbreeding will have been wiped out.

 

[lynnie]

Some people believe there was a water vapor canopy before the flood ( no rain, just heavy dew) that was destroyed during the flood, and after that we were subject to much more cosmic radiation, hence the long lifespans changing to much shorter ones.

 

[JennyG]

I've been told, though I don't know if it's true, that even today expert racehorse breeders (for eg) can breed closely related animals together without problems....so long as they really know what they're doing in choosing their lines. Back in the dawn of the world perfect human beings would have had no duff genes to produce defective individuals however they interbred.
But if you want more detailed technical info, you're sure to find it on the websites of AiG or Creation Ministries International.

 

[Skyler]

Alright, I have a good buddy (who's a christian) and he's a biology major. He presented this question to me (and me being an english major, it's something I have never really thought of).

Anyhow, it's been irritating me, mainly because I don't have an answer and I feel like it's a good question.

Adam and Eve are the first two people.
Heck, you could even fast forward to those who survived the flood.
When reproducing happened with just two, or eight people, how in the world wasn't there adverse defects? We know what comes about with inbreeding, and the results are almost never pretty. Why wasn't this the case with say, Adam and Eve and their descendants?

I thought this was a pretty good question.

I do suppose I could always leave it here- "Because, God." That should suffice always, but sometime curiosity gets the better of me.

The answer is "There were adverse defects!"

The DNA didn't have enough adverse defects yet to cause a problem, though. As time went on, adverse effects accumulated as DNA became more specialized, and the effects of inbreeding became worse(which is why incest laws were instituted).

Incidentally, this poses a problem for evolution. Since inbreeding causes so many problems, the general trend for genetic mutation is down--even if one in every hundred mutations was beneficial, you're still going down fast.