In The Twinkling of an Eye

We live in a world of white, black, red, yellow, and numerous variations of skin colored human beings. Aside from color we are all the same, not 'basically' the same, we're all the same, period. DNA research shows that we all come from the same 'thing', but there the story of humanity becomes less clear, open to interpretation, and religious belief and history come into the picture. From a Judeo, Christian, Muslim, belief system, which by the way comprises the majority belief system on the planet, human beings are the creation of a God.

 Man was made in God's image. Adam was the first man. Eve was the first women made from a rib of Adam. But is this true? Well, surprisingly the story in the Bible of the creation of Eve from Adams rib is an accurate accounting of how you would go about cloning human beings. First, the Bible recounts that in making Eve, the female, Adam was put to sleep then a rib was removed from his body. The science we know about this now is that the male of our species has both the Y and X chromosome; the female has only the X. So, only the male of our species can make both a male and a female, the female is only capable of making a copy of herself. Men determine the sex of any human child.

The rib bone comes into play when doing cloning in that bone marrow is needed, specifically the DNA from the marrow, and the only bone in the human body we could fully function without is indeed a rib bone. Now, and granted, there is a lot of science that goes into this and for those of you interested there's a whole chapter at the end of this book devoted to all the science relating to cloning. So, far from being a myth the Bible actually provides a sound scientific basis for the origins of our species. But, does this make everything it says true about the origins of our species? How we came to be? No. And the reason is that the book in the Bible that describes all of this. Genesis, is more likened to the Readers Digest Condensed version of the much longer Sumerian creation epic.

The Epic of Creation is the Sumerian version of how the world began and includes to some degree the formation of the other members of the solar system. The Sumerian tale is also likely the source of the earliest chapters of the Bible's Genesis — the latter, which might be considered to be an Executive Summary of the original. Their similarities are highlighted in Comparative Religions (among other places), but the fact that Genesis was written during the Hebrews' captivity in Babylon, c. 600 BCE (where access to the Babylonian version of the Epic was readily available) is undoubtedly important. The Sumerian Epic of Creation and Genesis both have the interesting feature of being scientifically accurate in terms of what was created first.

In creating a world, you begin with energy (light), form the planet itself, divide the land from the water, grow grass, herbs, fruit (in that order), initiate day/night and seasons, create fish, fowl, cattle, creeping thing and beasts of the earth (again, in that order), until finally you create man. Then you get really clever and create woman. But there is also the distinction between the cosmic creation and the earthly ones. In the Genesis version, the heavens were created separate from the Earth (by the means of a firmament), while the Sun and Moon were specifically mentioned as "two great lights". In the Sumerian version — which is decidedly less ego-earth-centric — all of the other planets may be considered to have been described in various stages of grouping themselves into the current arrangement. It's just that their names were often attributed to gods, instead of gods and planets!

Back to Index