LAUNCING A NEW SERIES; HEREDITY IN HUMANS

What follows is not intended to be a pro- religious collection of posts on Wrights Lane. It is merely my humble way of taking a look at how we all got here, the purpose(s) we were created to serve while we are here and in the end, how much alike we all are. I sincerely hope that together we ultimately learn a little something about ourselves and others.

Let's start this "Heredity in Humans" series the only way it could -- from the beginning. 

First there was Adam in the Garden of Eden. Then there was Eve.

According to most English translations of the Bible, Genesis 2:15 says that God took “the human” and “put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it." On this rendering, the first human being is put into the garden to work the soil and care for its produce. 

However, a translation of the Hebrew words for “cultivate” and “keep” would be “worship and obey.” 

Based on the context of Genesis, it’s reasonable to assume that both pairs of meanings are at play: God places Adam in the full-of-nature-packaged garden not only to help the land flourish, but also to maintain worshipful and obedient relationship with the Creator.

The revelation that Adam was the first human to oversee creation and the idea of “cultivating and keeping” the garden dovetails with the notion of worshipping and obeying the Creator of it all. As an act of service, Adam not only cultivated the garden, but he also enriched the bond between himself and God. 

Thus, Adam was tasked with maintaining an environment in the Garden of Eden that was conducive to both his spiritual and physical wellbeing. In other words, both “cultivate and keep” and “worship and obey” are appropriate translations as they reveal the first human’s critical role in developing and maintaining the divine-human fellowship.

We'll come back to this in due course. Hang with me! It is complex and out of necessity will take a while to explore, perhaps in the end two or three follow-up posts. This will be a work in progress -- a slightly different approach, I'm sure you will agree.

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By about 100,000 B.C. a new man of our own present species, Homo sapiens (wise man), had evolved, possibly first in the region of Mesopotamia which is where the Garden of Eden (birthplace of Adam) is supposed to have been located. Adam was so superior to other types of men in brain power and skill that in time he alone survived. He may have killed off the cruder types of men (such as Neanderthalers) or absorbed them by breeding; or they may have died off because of new diseases and conditions. About that we can only speculate or guess.

In the previous paragraph I italicized the word "men" to make allowances for subsequent relative modern-day findings of which I do not intend to dispute.

What we do know, however, from many scientific studies, tests, and observations is this: All human beings in the world today, of all races and in all places, are biologically and genetically so much alike that they must be descendants of the same original original stock of Homo sapiens.

No matter how different we/they may seem to be (height, weight, skin color, body structure) we/they all carry similar 23 pairs of human chromosomes with matching genes -- and can mate and be fertile with one another (impossible with differing species). Thus, science now corroborates what most great religions have long been preaching: Human beings of all races are equal "children of God," descended from the same first man.

Knowing the aforementioned, then how can the many differences among humans in features, coloring, and other physical traits, as well as in behaviour, culture and achievement be explained? For the answer to that obvious question, we have to return to the very beginning of our species and trace the story of racial differentiation as science now sees it.

Starting with the single fruitful Adam and Eve, favorable conditions could have resulted in close to a million descendants in less than a thousand years. But in those early periods, with no fixed habits, large groups would not have held together. So, moving wherever climate and search for food led them, bands of people would have drifted apart, losing contact with one another, and spreading eventually to all habitable places of the earth.

Remember again, ultimately we are talking millions of years.

In time, then, these isolated human groups, multiplying and becoming fixed in different environments for thousands of years, would have developed various special hereditary characteristics through the continuing process of evolution.

It only follows that cultural and behavior differences should be studied in other ways and I will attempt to do just that in posts to follow in the week(s) ahead. Meantime, hold on to this one thought: The more we are different the more we are the same...and the more we get together the happier we'll be!

*Next post: The Main Races.