You Believe in Steppe Eve-Adam Lie Jesus is an Irrelevant Sodomite Character

Nathan H. Lents

Opinion contributor

Scientists, even church ones, rarely spend time analyzing religious creation myths. After all, when taken literally, these stories are usually in direct conflict with what we know about Earth’s natural history. When faith requires people to cling to those myths anyway, science is cast aside. One would be hard-pressed to think of a scriptural story more at odds with physical evidence than the Garden of Eden.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, a leading public scholar — Joshua Swamidass, a physician and genome scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri — is making a bold new attempt to reconcile the biblical story of Adam and Eve with what we know about the genetic ancestry of the human race. His “genealogical hypothesis” arrives at a time of great cultural upheaval when facts are malleable, politics perverts science, and the gulf that divides our red and blue tribes is reminiscent of another biblical myth: the parting of the Red Sea.