The True Story of Adam and Eve
What if Adam was a virus and Eve was a bacterium?
That seems to be a growing consensus of the scientific community about the origins of the nucleus. A great article in Discover magazine takes up the issue by examining the recent discovery of the Mimivirus, a virus so atypical that it makes scientists reconsider their understanding of viruses as non-living genetic machines.
Scientists believe that life existed on this planet before the advent of the nucleus, but that it was just basically slime that couldn't go anywhere or do anything because it couldn't change. The nucleus is the cell's command center, directing all change and creating all complexity. It essentially is what separates humans, plants, fish, and other complex forms of life from bacteria; we have it and they don't. The article explains:
The story of Genesis is so basic to our cultural upbringing that it's hard to question. After all, it's the very start of the Bible. If that's wrong, it brings the whole rest of the book into question. Questioning the Good Book, for some people, is like questioning gravity.
Yet no one I know follows the Bible or even believes every part of it literally. It's impossible. As a whole, it is self-contradictory. It asks you to smite foes in one part and love neighbors in the next. We can only find the truth by interpreting what is written.
There are limits to what we know through science, and at those limits is where faith belongs. We know evolution exists; we can observe it at a cellular level. The flu viruses mutate and we continually adapt our defenses to those mutations--that's evolution.
We don't know where viruses and genetic coding came from. That point in the primordial slime, before life took off, is the true story of genesis. The story of Adam and Eve is in many ways the same and a lot easier to understand without the benefit of today's science.
Making all of life from a virus and a bacteria? That sounds like some very intelligent design.
That seems to be a growing consensus of the scientific community about the origins of the nucleus. A great article in Discover magazine takes up the issue by examining the recent discovery of the Mimivirus, a virus so atypical that it makes scientists reconsider their understanding of viruses as non-living genetic machines.
Scientists believe that life existed on this planet before the advent of the nucleus, but that it was just basically slime that couldn't go anywhere or do anything because it couldn't change. The nucleus is the cell's command center, directing all change and creating all complexity. It essentially is what separates humans, plants, fish, and other complex forms of life from bacteria; we have it and they don't. The article explains:
With DNA evidence as solid as that used to convict criminals, researchers can trace the shared genetic lineage of life's different branches back to the very base of the tree, some 4 billion years ago, when the interaction between primordial bacteria and viruses culminated in the "mother cell," the common ancestor of all life on Earth.This article made me think about how, in recent months, I've seen several family members bristle at the notion of evolution. "You think we came from apes!?" they typically say.
The story of Genesis is so basic to our cultural upbringing that it's hard to question. After all, it's the very start of the Bible. If that's wrong, it brings the whole rest of the book into question. Questioning the Good Book, for some people, is like questioning gravity.
Yet no one I know follows the Bible or even believes every part of it literally. It's impossible. As a whole, it is self-contradictory. It asks you to smite foes in one part and love neighbors in the next. We can only find the truth by interpreting what is written.
There are limits to what we know through science, and at those limits is where faith belongs. We know evolution exists; we can observe it at a cellular level. The flu viruses mutate and we continually adapt our defenses to those mutations--that's evolution.
We don't know where viruses and genetic coding came from. That point in the primordial slime, before life took off, is the true story of genesis. The story of Adam and Eve is in many ways the same and a lot easier to understand without the benefit of today's science.
Making all of life from a virus and a bacteria? That sounds like some very intelligent design.
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