Widely shared intuitions about human origins
Picture me, a normal Muslim, with traditional, down-the-line intuitions about religion. If you happened to ask me about the origin of Adam (peace be upon him) or humanity, I'd want to affirm the following loosely phrased things:
1. Unique properties. Adam and his descendants - the "humans" if you will - have properties that were never had by any other biological creature. Usual candidates of such properties include language or symbolic thought, particular spiritual propensities, perhaps a different physical constitution as well.
2. Unique ancestry. All descendants of Adam trace their lineage uniquely to Adam and Eve, with no interbreeding with non-Adamic creatures. None of us are 95% Adam and 5% something else.
3. Ancient humans are modern humans. All of us - all of Adam's offspring - had and have abilities that made Adam unique - language, advanced cognitive skills, religion, culture, and the human "look". There might be differences between them, but all of his children would be immediately recognizable as human.
4. Recentness. Adam and Eve were ancient, but probably not very ancient - they had some connection with the rest of humanity's history that followed them.
I know these theses are vague, but that's by design, because the intuitions themselves are somewhat vague. I don't have a precise theological intuition about, for example, how recent Adam and Eve would have had to live, or how old would've been too old for comfort. Also, all of this is on top of the explicit facts of scripture, like Adam and Eve having been created miraculously in paradise, sent down to earth, all of us tracing our lineage to them, and Adam and his descendants having a special honor bestowed upon them. Furthermore, if I want to tell a story of Adam and/or humanity's origins, I'd want that to be broadly consistent with the empirical facts. I don't want to account for discrepancies between this story and the data by appealing to ad hoc theory-saving miracles. This forms the fifth item on my list of wants:
5. No ad hoc miracles. An internally and externally coherent story about the origin of humanity through Adam and Eve might contain miracles, but those need to be situated in appropriate theological contexts.
Concepts like "consistency with empirical facts" and "theologically appropriate miracles" are super hard to pin down, and I plan to dedicate essay-length treatments to each of these issues. But for now, let's take these five somewhat ambiguous yet widely shared intuitions as our point of departure in trying to build a model of human origins.
The ideal view of human origins
Let's also interpret the theses as constituting spectra, not binaries. For example, Adam and his descendants have unique properties (intuition #1), but they might have very many or very few of them. On one end, they might represent a completely different species of creatures in terms of their biology and cognitive abilities. On the other, they might be nigh indistinguishable from some of the other extant creatures on earth, except in some subtle but important ways. While both possibilities respect the "unique properties" intuition, the former does so to a greater extent than the latter. Similarly for the rest of the theses. Our ideal Adamic origins model would posit humans as being:
- As different in their properties and abilities from the rest of the biological creatures as possible,
- With as close to zero interbreeding with non-humans as possible,
- With the most ancient members looking and acting as similar to those of us living today as possible,
- Emerging at as recent a date as possible,
- Invoking as few ad hoc miracles as possible.
Of course, empirical research can push against items in this wishlist. For example, people have claimed that given the amount of genetic diversity present among humans alive today, the ancestor to all humanity - without allowing for interbreeding - must have lived more than half a million years ago. Let's say the empirical claim there is accurate, and we really feel strongly about not allowing any interbreeding, so we put Adam and Eve that far back. That scores really high with intuition #2, but kind of complicates intuitions #3 and #4. If humanity started half a million years ago, we must also admit that the earliest children of Adam looked (and possibly acted) considerably different than modern humans that are around today. That difference might be minute enough to not cause any discomfort (maybe their psychology and cognitive capacities were on par with us, with some minor differences), but it might also be huge enough to be a dealbreaker (maybe language, the hallmark characteristic of humans, didn't even emerge that far back. Chomsky et al claim language arose in Homo sapiens in the last couple hundred years at most). The significance of that difference is a matter of empirical research.
On the other hand, let's say we feel really strongly about Adam having to be really similar to behaviorally modern humans, so we want to place him during or after the period where strong archaeological evidence of human culture begins to emerge, say in the past 50,000 years. This respects intuitions #3 and #4, but might cause issues with #2 - since this date is way too recent to accommodate all of the extant genetic diversity (and other population genetic issues, like human-Neandertal interbreeding, geological separation of populations, etc.). On this model, we might have to either accept some degree of interbreeding between Adamic and non-Adamic creatures, or appeal to miracles. It also raises potential problems with intuition #1, since non-Adamic hominins living 50,000 years ago might be said to be pretty similar to modern humans in terms of their cognitive capacities.
I hope this demonstrates how empirical data can, at least potentially, press on where we want to locate a historical Adam. Too recent might mean modern, recognizable humans but with possible interbreeding, but too old means no interbreeding but ambiguously human.
This delineates pretty clearly the ideal model of human origins Muslims would want to defend - one that respects as many of the traditional intuitions as possible. In the process, there might be trade-offs between intuitions, and we'd need to judge which intuitions are more important than others. Personally, for example, I don't think "recentness" is a very important intuition to rescue, so I'd be happy with an old Adamic origin date as long as the rest of the intuitions are respected. Other Muslims might have different intuitions.
Limit scenarios of human origins
For example, recently there's been some discussion on whether some of these traditional intuitions are warranted by a straightforward reading of scripture. The most important contribution on the topic has been from David Solomon Jalajel, whose work (or an earlier version thereof) I've evaluated on this blog (it's due for a major re-write). The idea seems to be the following: when one reads the relevant scriptural excerpts at face value, it doesn't seem to necessitate either the first, second or fourth intuitions. It does suggest that all currently living humans originated from an initial, miraculously created pair, but it doesn't say that we are unique in terms of our ontology or capacities, or that Adamic humans never interbred with non-Adamic creatures. If that's true, that would mean we can get away with a fairly recent origin of humans. As expected, this view has received considerable criticism. As I've mentioned in my previous article on the topic, I am quite hesitant to accept parts of his thesis, especially the idea that Adam is not our exclusive ancestor.
As part of our quest to build the best model of human origins, however, I think it's useful to evaluate scenarios that question such traditional intuitions as well. With that thought in mind, in the next month (or beyond, depending on progress) I'll be attempting to evaluate such non-traditional models of human evolution. Other than Jalajel's essay, at least three other books have been published on the topic by Shoaib Ahmed Malik, Joshua Swamidass, and Andrew Loke. The latter two books are written from a Christian perspective and therefore have details Muslims would consider irrelevant, but they also discuss, and attempt to rescue, at least some of the traditional intuitions mentioned above. I will also include William Lane Craig's recent book as representing a contrary view, which takes all but the recentness intuition as theologically valuable.
It is very important to note at the outset, however, that my evaluation of such models is not an endorsement of them. Rather, this should be the very first step in our explorations (basically, "how much can we get away with", scripturally speaking). Even if these models proves successful, we should attempt to nonetheless rescue the other traditional intuitions to see how many readings of scriptures can be consistently defended in light of the data.
Joshua Swamidass: as recent as you want
With that said, here are my brief thoughts on Joshua Swamidass' book The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry. As mentioned above, the book contains a lot of details that are at best of tangential relevance to the Muslim, like issues of original sin, the fall, or a very recent date of human emergence. My goal here is to extract the points of particular benefit to the Muslim project.
In my opinion, the big coup of Swamidass' work is as follows.
Using pre-published (plus his own) mathematical simulations, he shows that if we allow a sufficiently loose definition of ancestry, then the "common ancestor" of all humans can be located fairly recently in time - as recently as six to fifteen thousand years ago. What is this loose definition of ancestry? According to Swamidass, to say X and Y are my ancestors is simply to say, X and Y contributed to my lineage at some point, or alternatively, I can trace my lineage back to X and Y. On this view, if an offspring of X and Y had babies with someone from a different population Z, then all the resulting offspring themselves can claim to have descended from X and Y, even though they don't have exclusive ancestry from X and Y - there's quite a lot of Z mixed in.
For a more extreme illustration still, let's say an X-Y offspring ends up in a remote island populated by people Z, where they intermarry with the locals and have children. These children themselves mix with the rest of the Z islanders, and eventually after generations have passed, all inhabitants of the island end up having some share of the lineage of the initial X-Y offspring. In this situation, the entire island population can claim to have descended from X and Y, even though the entirety of the ancestral input was just from one X-Y individual. The analogy Swamidass has for this sort of ancestry is that of an explosion - the more it spreads, the more powerful and all-consuming it becomes. On such a view of ancestry, it's not particularly difficult to see how all of humanity living on earth can trace their lineage back to a common ancestor just a few thousand years ago. Even remote, geographically isolated island populations pose no threat to this view, since all it would take for that population to be caught up in the web of ancestry is for one boat from the mainland to make it to the island every once in a while.
Applied to the question of Adamic origins, Swamidass' story is that humans as a group may have evolved independently from ape-like ancestors, but Adam and Eve - also humans - were chosen or created miraculously. They married and produced children, who in turn went on to have children with non-Adamic humans, until eventually all people on earth were tangled in the Adamic ancestry in just a few thousand years. Allowing for such a story, we can envision Adam and Eve living pretty recently.
Importantly, note the propositions that are entailed by his model, and the ones that are not - Swamidass' account does not require Adam and Eve to be recent, or to be exactly like the rest of non-Adamic humans (and therefore not being unique in any way). All he is saying is that both recent or old origins are possible, and if we really do want to locate Adam and Eve at a recent date - we have a significant amount of freedom.
Points of benefit
How can these insights be of benefit to a Muslim? For one, Swamidass feels the need to defend a very, very recent Adam to make sense of certain Biblical passages, while a Muslim is not under such constraints. Even if we want to defend the recentness intuition, we can very well place Adam 50,000 years ago or earlier, and posit the looser definition of ancestry to account for the "too much genetic diversity" problem. This move might have other virtues - for example, we can identify Adam and his children as having unique capacities, like behavioral modernity, which arose upwards of 50,000 years ago. On this model, by sacrificing intuition #2, we are potentially securing #1, #3 and #4.
Of course, all of this is premised on whether his definition of ancestry is one Muslims can accept. We will have occasion to explore this in more detail when I review the other books I referenced above, which are more theologically inclined than that of Swamidass. The unique benefit of the Swamidass' work, again, is that it allows us maximal freedom to place Adam pretty much as recently as needed, and that might be beneficial especially while conjoined to other virtues.
One sticking point for me, however, is that ancestry is kind of treated as a zero-sum thing in the book. For example, a Muslim might be very opposed to the sort of extreme, explosive definition of ancestry proposed by Swamidass, but they might nonetheless accept a more restricted form of interbreeding. Our scholars discussed the possibility of Jinn-human interbreeding, and Arab folk tales mention some tribes deriving their lineage from the Jinn; meaning some limited interbreeding here and there might not be cause for theological concern. Furthermore, I suspect a Muslim might also be accepting of the possibility that limited bestial interbreeding might have occurred between the children of Adam and non-Adamic creatures. As long as such events are rare and/or unintended, just the mere possibility of interbreeding might not raise immediate red flags. Some Christians share this intuition as well. Given this fact, it would've been useful to know if his findings would change if there were limited episodes of interbreeding. Put differently, how would his date estimates change with increasing or decreasing degree of interbreeding? Would it mean the collapse of the entire model, or just require pushing the date back by a few tens of thousands of years? An answer to that question might've led to retrieving ground around the second intuition as well.
Either way, I think Swamidass' book is a good way to start thinking about such "limit scenarios" of human evolution. I'm picking up Andrew Loke's book next.
