If one is to consider the idea of the species coming from two people, and only two people... one wonders where all the brides came from. But even from a scientific standpoint; how does a new species of human being evolve from apes? The answer is, in both cases: They don't; not without magic. So unless we caught us some lucky charms, or some really cute looking babes slid down the rainbow out of the sky, we needed a larger gene pool.
In nature, as we have observed so far, what doesn't seem to happen is that a male and a female example of a new species just pops out of thin air. What happens is that minor changes, mutations, and adaptations emerge from the random and natural process of passing on one's genes and replicating DNA over and over again a trillion times, and then those minor changes get passed on to the next generation. Sure, sometimes a minor change in genes results in, say, a totally different color pigment in the animal, or a major deformity in a limb, let's say. However, the change itself is not usually enough to cause the animal itself to be unable to pass on its genes to its own species. A butterfly with new, different colors doesn't yet have other examples of itself to reproduce with. So it reproduces with its own species, differently colored than itself, and those new color genes get passed on. And then we have a bunch more of those new colors. And if those creatures survive long enough to pass on their genes... now you have a new branch of the overall family tree.
If you consider tribes of proto-humans were already commonplace everywhere, then minor changes and adaptations took place to create what we would consider homo sapiens, and at the time, the changes were so minor you probably couldn't tell the difference. Case in point; the process didn't begin or end there. Even after humans evolved, they continued to change and adapt and now we have different color hair and skin and eyes and we live in different parts of the world and are more suited to some parts than others. And yet, we are all human beings still.
If a virus wiped out the "Caucasian" gene pool, humans would continue to evolve and look nothing like Caucasians, and one day, distant hyper-evolved scientists might observe the changes in humans from now until then and conclude they are so different, they might have been different species altogether. But even with radical changes to the gene pool by parts of the family tree dying off or new adaptations becoming quite popular, you're not really looking at a single "Adam" or a single "Eve" which turned apes into humans. You're looking at many different "Adams" passing on, over the course of millions of years, new and different genes which turned out to be better suited to the environment, like larger brains and less body hair, and more attractive faces. There was no single "Eve" because she had a mother as well, and by that logic, you could call her "Eve". And so on and so on until you get to our great-great-great-(times a hundred billion)-great grandmother, who was a single cell and totally unique, formed from phospholipid bilayers forming naturally around a mass of proteins which were highly reactive and created reactions which allowed self-replication, using the fuel of the natural environment of the planet itself. Not unlike fire spreading or crystal formation, it was a natural chemical reaction... much more highly complicated, but still based upon chemistry and physics.
In the end, that first cell was "Eve" and there was no "Adam" until the adaptation of having two sexes evolved. I guess Eve got lonely or decided she wanted some help spreading her particular DNA in a world filled with competing DNA.
Re: Evolution v Creationism
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Originally Posted by Kadagar_AV
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