My difficulties with Genesis Chapter 2

I got my head around the evolution of all species, My Husband explained how it worked - it made sense and fit.  I knew and loved horses from my earliest memories.  I rode, learned about them and and the difference between horses and mules.  Most people don't, so I will briefly explain it.  Horses are a different species than donkeys (duh) but closely related.  So closely, in fact, that a mare (female horse) and a male donkey (I am sure there is some name for him, but I am a horse gal, donkeys didn't factor) can breed and have a ... horse? no, a donkey? no, a new species?  No!  a Mule, yep.  Mules are born infertile.  The only way to get yourself a mule farm is to own a few mares and at least one male donkey.  Mules aren't a species, they can't make baby mules (as of this post, who knows what some wacky scientist will do in a lab next).  My Husband explained that this was because horses and donkeys were genetically very similar, but not similar enough to reproduce as members of the same species can (eg. make a population from 2 of that species).

When it came to humans, I started to take Adam and Eve literally - a God miracle, plunked down on an evolved earth.  I felt evolution was OKay  (disclaimer: I knew nothing of human genetics at this time, just that I wanted Adam and Eve to be different, unique and specially made).  Why couldn't God just decide to make a ruler over his creation ( a creation he brought up by evolution)?  Then, once he had Adam, he obviously needed to make a helper for him too, so he could have formed Eve from Adam's rib - I mean, who could make this stuff up and get anyone to believe it, Moses must have believed it in order to write it.

I questioned my husband, discovered a mitochondrial Eve, decided she was the real Eve and asked how they figured out who our ancient mom was and why they didn't have an ancesteral dad to go with her (my Adam).  Then, I began to sense my husband doubted Adam and Eve.  That upset me.  Old earth and  Evolution were fine, but Adam and Eve could not be tampered with without serious faith implications.  I need to explain that up until this point, I had never read or heard about other views on Genesis. 

The Genetic problem with God-made, instant ancesteral parents of us all is the lingering ruins of bygone genetic material lingering in our genome.  I won't go back to India this post, I will go to Europe.  Well, England at least, on a visit with my grade 12 class one rainy October/November.  We took a short detour from our city to city train stops.  Boarding a train for some out-of-the-way line to deepest, darkest (actually one of the sunniest days of our trip) Wales.  Our teacher had to tell the train driver where to stop!  Once we disembarked from the train, we had to walk, in the pitch dark, on a winding country road to the hostel.  The next morning we were told we would not be boarding at the same train stop, but traveling on foot to the next town.  Off we went through sheep fields, being silly, as teenagers do.  At some point we slithered down a hill, probably to get ahead of classmates and in the little valley there was an old abandoned stone cottage.  Our teacher figured it was hundreds of years old, the stones kept the shape, but the roof and door were long gone.  It was cute, I took a picture and off we went.  I remember it because I still have the photo, it still looks like a cottage. ( I don't have a decent scanner, so I can't post it)  That same trip we visited York, Yorkshire on Halloween night, and went on a Ghost Walk.  Very beautiful and the perfect setting for a Ghosty movie (note to Twilight producers).  We walked around the two city walls, one, older, more weathered and built around 600 AD, but still a wall, the second was larger, newer and had places to walk on it, but neither wall was complete, both showed up, then disappeared.  Both were walls, but non-functioning walls.

No, this post is not about ruins in England, I won't bother with my Black Forest trip to Germany either (visits to non-functioning castles, yet definitely castles).  There was a point to this.  The point is, to a geneticist, our genomes (I guess that is what all of our own genes seen at once are) have functional parts, making all our body parts, including our eye colour, blood type and sex, and the "ruins".  The ruins are the genes that we can tell used to do things, such as a Vitamin C making gene, there, visible, but mutated in us (and Chimps) but not in Fido - yeah, I don't need to give my dog orange juice to prevent scurvy in him, he'll just make Vit. C from his dry dog food.

Then there was this specific ruin.  It is what made me discard my literal Eve (who I felt might have been especially made from an evolved Adam's rib - really, who are more Ape-like, men or women?).  The egg-yolk gene.  It is funny how one small rudder can turn the huge ship around.  We are mammals, I learned that we were specifically placental mammals. Kangaroos, Koalas and apparently all mammals in Australia pre-Euro Eco-Terrorists (who dared to bring horses and sheep amongst other non-native species) were not placental.  Kangas and Koalas have pouches, so they are called Marsupials and those Duck-billed Platypuses and along with a few other mammals lay eggs, they are Monotremes.  In evolution, Mammals started as Monotremes, later they evolved into Marsupials, before becoming Placental Mammals.  Placental Mammals out-competed the Marsupials (except for a few pockets in South America), but never got to Australia, the Marsupials in Australia managed to diversify, so there are marsupial mice, wild dogs, kangas, koalas and Tasmanian Devils, but no native Placental Mammals in Australia.  Yet, and this is what got me, we have the ruins of egg yolk genes in us.

I know, if you, like me, aren't a biologist that it seems possible, we do (us females) have eggs.  But the yolk is what grows to feed the egg.  Humans, and other Placental Mammals grow a Placenta to feed our young in-utero.  We never grow yolk.  We do grow a yolk sac for our week-old fetus*, but it never fills with yolk, an umbilical cord to the placenta forms and feeds the fetus instead.  Cool.  Oh, um, we have a yolk making gene lying around?  Now, I am all for conspiracy theories, one just shouldn't trust the experts too much (they brought us WMD in Iraq and other wonders), but it is a little hard to fudge these facts.  Ruins of genes from bygone eras littering our genome.  There are thousands of these defunct, but clearly identifiable gene "ruins" left in us and other species.  Actually, the ruins look similar in closely related species, but different in less related species.  And these aren't the signature marks of one creator for all species either, the genes that are ruins in one species are not in other species and in others they still function.  Yolk genes are not in bacteria, nor any species that is pre-egg yolk making, but they are in post yolk-making mammals (all this was discovered in the past 10 years or so, just driving another nail in the creationist's theory).

After I learned about the egg yolk ruin, I was left with wishing I could believe in a literal Adam and Eve, made especially by the direct hand of God, and the reality that we were just part of a long evolutionary chain of events was unsettling.  This would have been fine if the Bible had let me know previously.  It hadn't, as far as I could tell, so I felt a little suspicious of the book in general.

* I have no clue if the fetus is a week or a day or a month old at this point, I am just taking poetic license here.