23andMe has transformed and democratized our genes



In the year 2000, the draft of the human genome was completed. Scientists were finally ready to tread into what had been the dark matter of human DNA. Even with a single reference map to work with, everything changed, as the age of human genomics was born. Drawing the map of DNA was a decades-long project whose aim was to enable researchers to plunge into terra incognita. But the reason you watch history unveil before you — rather than being confident of its outcome — is that you can’t always predict it.

It is true that mapping the human genome has been a boon for basic research scientists. But unexpectedly it has also allowed for the explosion of a massive consumer genomics market, led by companies such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe, consisting of nearly 50 million Americans in 2021. As the 21st century unfolds, personal genomics will both expose the human past and guide us into the biotechnology waters of the human future.

The methods of genetic inference will spotlight the human family tree, which is actually more like a gnarled tangle of vines, and allow for the next steps in genetic engineering. This will first be geared toward curing a host of medical illnesses but will likely lead to more radical modification of what it means to be human.

The rate of change in genomics has been incredible over the last twenty years. Between 2007 and 2014 it surpassed even the rate of Moore’s law, the famous biannual doubling in computing power. While the first human genome cost $3,000,000,000 in today’s dollars, in 2021 we can obtain a high-quality readout of DNA for $300.

Whereas in 2010 a single Excel spreadsheet could list all the humans who had been whole-genome sequenced by name (a list that would include luminaries like James Watson and Steven Pinker), by 2020 there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of whole-genome sequences. By 2030 there will almost certainly be tens of millions of whole genomes in the United States alone.

A radical shift

This transformation was not driven by basic science and universities but by the economies of scale powered by firms catering to consumer demand. In the year 2000 the field of genetics was dominated by research in “fruit flies,” and our own species was an afterthought. Human genetics usually meant an analysis of pedigrees of families with congenital diseases.

When the geneticist L.L. Cavalli-Sforza published his magnum opus, "The History and Geography of Human Genes," in 1994, he surveyed data on over a thousand humans explored through a few hundred genes. This was the culmination of five decades of research. But by 2021 there were 50 million humans genotyped at hundreds of thousands of genetic positions. What had been a lifetime’s worth of work for a scientist assaying a piddly few hundred genes was transformed through personal genomics into an afterthought of historical interest.

When the National Geographic Society launched its “Genographic Project'' in 2005, the scientist leading it, Spencer Wells, was told that it was unlikely to recoup its costs by his superiors. It was a blue-sky pilot project, and they were skeptical about public interest in citizen science and personal genomics. The reality is that it made back its investment within a week, and the project continued for fifteen years.

In the wake of National Geographic’s success, the Silicon Valley startup 23andMe entered the space and brought a certain marketing panache, transforming what had been a genealogical hobbyist’s enterprise into a sexy Silicon Valley consumer product that provided “news you can use.” While National Geographic and its small privately owned competitor Family Tree DNA focused on genetic genealogy, 23andMe returned medical results as well as ancestral ones. Co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, then married to Google’s Sergey Brin, 23andMe showcased its genetic technology by disclosing that Brin carried a marker associated with Parkinson’s disease.

Though 23andMe has had its ups and downs, including a 2013 FDA decision that made it shut down much of its medical testing results, it kicked down the door first opened by National Geographic and made viable by the sequencing of the human genome. When new results in the scientific literature are published, millions of Americans can check their 23andMe results. Want to know your risk for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and macular degeneration? Check your 23andMe results. If a new risk factor for COVID-19 hospitalization is discovered, check your 23andMe raw data and see if you have it. You have the power to know or to remain ignorant.

Genetics in the 21st century has mutated from a matter of antiseptic laboratories distant from the concerns of the average American to something that injects itself into our daily lives as a matter of course. Most of the sales for consumer genetic kits occur between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the results from these tests are fodder for family discussions during the holidays.

While 23andMe has focused both on medical tests and more “recreational” genomics, its rival Ancestry has been laser-focused on genealogy and ethnicity, and the two companies have totally transformed the self-conceptions of millions of Americans. Though in the abstract most black Americans were aware that they had white ancestry, genetics can now tell them individually their exact proportion.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker now knows he’s 47% African, 45% European, and 7% Native American. Even white Americans, who usually think they know their own genealogy, can be in for a surprise. Fantasy author George R.R. Martin discovered that he is one-fourth Jewish, rather than one-fourth Italian. His paternal grandmother had an affair with a Jewish man, after which her Italian-American husband left her.

More generally, personal genetics problematizes one of the more prominent chestnuts of wisdom promoted by the American intelligentsia in the late 20th century: that race is a “fiction.” In 2003, PBS, that arbiter of elite American culture, showed “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” which argued that the concept has no biological basis.

And yet within ten years, tens of millions of Americans were getting results from DNA kits telling them they were “84% African, 16% European,” and geneticists were documenting that our ancestry is strongly correlated with geography. People in East Asia are more related to each other than they are to people in South Asia, while Brahmins in South India are more closely related to Brahmins in North India.

Understanding who we are

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While Americans wrestle with the semantics of race, which has both a genetic and social basis, the reality is that genomics has transformed our understanding of our past and the statistical patterns that define our present. We now know, for example, that the Khoisan hunters of Southern Africa are more genetically distant from the Yoruba people of Nigeria than the Yoruba are from some living in China.

In other words, genetics has altered our understanding of human variation in surprising ways but also confirmed other intuitions about correlations between regional heritage and physical ancestry and race. But whereas in the 20th century these assertions and analyses were filtered through the intelligentsia in their ivory towers, today consumer genomics companies cater to a customer base fascinated by their own individual heritage and interpreting in whatever way suits their own tastes and preferences. Market demand and interest dictate the outcomes of science.

Spencer Wells, at National Geographic, had a democratizing vision from the get-go. 23andMe and Ancestry were in the game to make money. But all these consumer genomic efforts decentralized the production and dissemination of knowledgeso that in 2022 we are faced with a schizophrenic landscape where elites in academia deny the biological basis of race, while millions of American consumers interpret pie charts and bar graphs that they believe inform them on their racial heritage.

In some ways, this genomic revolution reflects the same dynamics highlighted by Martin Gurri in "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium." Though 20th-century genetics is often viewed as a lab science, it was, and today is, also part of information technology, telescoping into one’s past and interpreting the patterns elucidated by one’s pedigree, just as in Gurri’s telling, the public is revolting against the implausible nostrums promulgated to them by their betters, the scientific elite.

This democratization also applies to medicine and diagnosis. In the near future, a proliferation of applications and tools are likely to be able to interpret whole-genome data and provide interpretations to individuals. This threatens professionals, who in the past few centuries have become the guardians of the health of the public. Consumer genomics allows for a level of disintermediation that threatens their licensing cartels. More concretely, it allows for greater personal ownership of health.

However, its ultimate utility may be in the synergies of genomics with bioengineering. If the 2010s have been the decade of reading the genome, the 2020s will become the decade of writing it. It will begin with medical illnesses, sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, and ALS. A child will be sequenced at birth, and a small minority will be found to have a genetic condition that might benefit from genetic engineering. Sequencing the whole genome not only targets the risk variant but allows for the construction of more effective genetic engineering targeting elements.

Such new technology will initially produce a miraculous revolution in many adult illnesses. Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, and ALS will likely be cured. But what was initially used for medical applications will be leveraged in other contexts. In the 20th and early 21st century, body modification spread across the population, and genetic engineering presents the possibility of early and effective modifications. Want blue skin? That’s possible. How about naturally curly hair? Maybe. These are aesthetic changes that are comprehensible, but who knows what sort of “designer children” wealthy and perverse individuals may wish to engineer? The upcoming decades will give us the opportunity to transform the body and make it a protean reflection of our inner identities. Who wields and regulates these technologies may turn out to be the most vital question of the 21st century.

But we aren’t there yet. In 2023 we see its glimmers and possibilities, just like in 2000 we saw the faint shadows of the coming genomics age. Now that we’re in it, it is time to consider the reality that we are moving beyond it. The genomics age will end when genomics is no longer magic, but routine and basic. Once genomics is interleaved into our lives, from monitoring the bacterial character of our household waste to predicting breast cancer risk, we’ll begin to move to the next stage, the age of genetic engineering. The modern tools of genomics allow us to know ourselves, but the future tools will likely allow us to transform ourselves.

Why do Irish people have red hair? Genes provide some intriguing answers



Out along Europe’s western fringe, Ireland occupies a unique geographical and cultural space, where the continent ends and the vast ocean begins. Separated from Britain by as little as 12 miles (19 km), Ireland’s island history has been inextricably linked to that of its larger fellow island nation throughout the past, despite their deep current political differences. Curiously, due to the capricious winds of history, today it is the more geographically remote Republic of Ireland that shelters in the fold of the European Union, rather than Britain, with its robust record of involvement in the continent’s affairs. Buffered by the seas, Ireland has traditionally been overshadowed by Britain’s geopolitical machinations. In antiquity, when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, Ireland remained a barbarian land of myths, touched by Roman culture and trade but never by Roman politics or armies.

Because of its history, Ireland has become a sui generis creation on Europe’s edge, the farthest bank lapped by a broad stream of Northern European cultures that have flourished since the end of the last Ice Age, its people shaped by its isolation. The Emerald Isle is part of a larger story but comes bearing its own unique plot twists. It is also an island of unique genetic characteristics, most salient among them the highest frequency of red hair in the world, which is probably a legacy of migrations more than 4,000 years in the past.

The last light of the sun

Ireland remained neutral during World War II, and to this day, it stands committed to geopolitical neutrality. But even 2,000 years ago, its remoteness left it uniquely beyond Rome’s reach and geopolitical influence. Christianity did not spread to Ireland through pressure from the Roman Empire, nor did it arrive by winning over a powerful king, as occurred in most of Northern Europe. Rather, Irish Christianity developed organically through contact with Roman Britain (St. Patrick was in fact British), recruiting warlords of the island one by one over several centuries from 400 A.D. onward. Ironically, when Rome fell and Britain was conquered by pagan Saxons, Ireland instead remained a redoubt of Christianity, eventually sending missionaries to mainland Europe in the 500s and 600s who would found monasteries in the borderlands between Italy, France, and Switzerland. These Irish monks were also instrumental in converting the pagan Saxon kings of England to Christianity.

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But Ireland’s remove from the currents of Northwest European history is not an eternal constant. The permanent human occupation of Ireland after the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago began as part of the broader resettlement of Europe’s deglaciated north that defined the early prehistory of Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. The earliest Mesolithic hunter-gatherers relied on fishing and foraging along the maritime fringes after they arrived in Ireland, where the earliest archaeological sites cluster near the ocean. These earliest Irish foragers were genetically identical to their contemporaries in mainland Europe and Britain, and they all descended from small groups of humans who rode out the end of the Ice Age in favorable pockets of Southern Europe. When archaeologists began collaborating with geneticists ten years ago, submitting prehistoric remains to DNA-sequencing technology, they discovered that very little of modern Irish or Northern European heritage more generally derives from these first settlers, the “Western Hunter-Gatherers.” One surprising aspect of these earliest inhabitants of Northern Europe was that they were strikingly physically different from today’s people in the region, with blue eyes but very dark skin.

Six thousand years ago, populous farming societies replaced the few thousand Irish Mesolithic foragers on the island. These people would usher in the Neolithic and eventually build vast passage tombs like Newgrange. A generation ago, there was a live debate as to whether these farmers were actually newcomers from the continent or foragers who adopted the practices of people to their south and east. Today, ancient DNA makes clear that on the whole, these were newcomers from the continent, part of a two-pronged push of agriculturalists from Anatolia that began nearly 10,000 years ago, spreading west across the Mediterranean to become the Iberian Cardial Culture and deep into the heart of Europe, via riverine valleys, to become the German Linear Pottery Culture. These two distinct streams of early agriculturalists eventually merged together in the northwest of the continent. But the Irish Neolithic people seem to have come more from the Iberian Cardial Culture, as the island’s farming societies show more genetic affinity with Iberian Neolithic people who drifted up along the Atlantic fringe than with farmers crossing over from northern Germany via Britain.

While the culture and history of Ireland over the last few thousand years have been marked by their distinctness from other societies, genetics and archaeology both indicate that during the Irish Neolithic, between 4000 and 2500 BC, the island was deeply integrated into the information and trade networks of continental Europe. Vast megalithic constructions, which reached their apogee in massive passage tombs, spread outward from Brittany 6,000 years ago, until they dotted the Atlantic coast of Europe from Denmark to Iberia, even reaching Malta in the Mediterranean. Genetically, we know the megalith builders were all the same people, Neolithic farmers most genetically similar to modern Sardinians. It is likely that they shared cultural affinities and adopted a new ideology during this period that involved the construction of monumental architecture.

Red hair as a trait in our species is not shocking, as many mammals and birds exhibit red pigmentation. The pigment that causes red hair, pheomelanin, is found in copious quantities in most humans. In most cases, we see it overwhelmed by the presence of eumelanin, the dark pigment that results in the majority of humans having black hair. Ultimately, the color of individual human hair is simply a function of the balance of these two pigments.

In Ireland, there are actually individuals buried in the great earth and stone tombs, and many have now been genetically analyzed by archaeologists and geneticists. Some of the results have been surprising. About 5,000 years ago, a high-status male was buried at Newgrange, and his genes suggest that his parents were probably siblings. Anthropologists note that this level of inbreeding is a hallmark of elites in societies that are extremely hierarchical, such as ancient Egypt or pre-contact Hawaii. The archaeologists also noticed that most of the elite males they found in other passage tombs across the island share the same Y chromosome, suggesting that the ruling class was defined by a particular paternal lineage, prefiguring the later Uí Néill (O’Neill) domination of Ireland. Finally, these elite individuals tended to look like most of the other people of Neolithic Europe, with dark eyes and hair and lighter skin, though a few had very dark skin indicative of some holdover ancestry from the earlier forager populations.

But affinities between the ancient and modern Irish only began to be established 4,500 years ago, with the arrival of a group from continental Europe to Britain and Ireland whom we term the “Bell Beakers” for their pottery style. As in Britain, the arrival of Bell Beaker people to Ireland was momentous, as over a few centuries the genetic profile of the island shifted from domination by people who resemble modern Sardinians to those broadly ancestral to the modern Irish. The arrival of these people brought a new paternal lineage: 90% of Irish and British Bell Beaker men seem to have carried Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b-L21.

Today, two-thirds of Irish men bear this lineage, in contrast with 50% in Scotland and Wales and 20% in England. The divergence of Ireland from other regions of Northern Europe today appears to date from the Bronze Age 3,000 years ago, as subsequent waves of migrants and conquerors from the continent seem to have impacted Britain far more than Ireland (swamping out the British proportion of R1b-L21).

And it was with the arrival of the Bell Beaker people 4,500 years ago that the standard physical characteristics of modern Irish people also began to coalesce. It is then that samples from Beaker burial grounds first begin to indicate the presence of individuals with blue eyes, very light skin, and lighter hair. And notably among modern Western Europeans, it is populations from the Celtic fringe, Ireland and Scotland, that have the highest frequencies of red hair.

Seeing red

Oleh_Slobodeniuk/Getty

Pigmentation is one of any organism’s most obvious characteristics, and red hair is notable for its salience and rarity in humans. Celtic populations have very high fractions of red-haired individuals, around 10%, and this small minority often stands in for the whole group. The film "Brave," which centers around a young Scottish woman, predictably depicted the protagonist with a wild mane of red hair.

Red hair as a trait in our species is not shocking, as many mammals and birds exhibit red pigmentation. The pigment that causes red hair, pheomelanin, is found in copious quantities in most humans. In most cases, we see it overwhelmed by the presence of eumelanin, the dark pigment that results in the majority of humans having black hair. Ultimately, the color of individual human hair is simply a function of the balance of these two pigments. Most humans have both pheomelanin and eumelanin in abundance, so their hair is one dark shade or another. The coppery undertones evident in some individuals are simply due to the presence of pheomelanin that in others is more thoroughly dominated by the darker pigment. Those with very little of either variety of melanin may have blond hair. Finally, those individuals with very little eumelanin and copious pheomelanin will have red hair.

The combination of characteristics needed here, a great deal of the red pigment that is normally masked by the dark pigment alongside very little of the latter, illustrates why red hair is not common and often mistakenly perceived as “recessive.” The genetic variants associated with red hair have been localized to the melanocortin 1 receptor or MC1R. A critical regulatory gene in mammals relating to pigmentation, MC1R was the subject of much early work on pigmentation and coat colors in model organisms like mice. Twenty years ago, to explore pigmentation meant to examine MC1R, so its connection to red hair has long been established. In contrast, more recent pigmentation genetic variants discovered since the year 2000 have tended to account for variation in eye and skin color.

In fact, variation in this gene causing red hair probably predates modern humans. Some Neanderthals, who separated from our own lineage more than 600,000 years ago, likely had red hair. Obviously, we lack photographic evidence, but in 2007 geneticists managed to retrieve DNA from Neanderthal remains, and the region around MC1R exhibited all the hallmarks of numerous mutations that broke the function of the gene, resulting in loss of pigmentation. But this was more than just an educated guess. The team actually inserted an MC1R sequence with Neanderthal mutations into a bacterium to see if the gene would express the protein associated with a normally functioning gene, and it did not.

This prompted many to wonder if modern Europeans inherited red hair from Neanderthals. The genomic evidence says no, as modern Europeans have a new cluster of mutations that cause the red hair phenotype, distinct from those seen in their Neanderthal ancestors. In fact, though in mainland Europe red hair is most common in the far northwest, in Ireland and Scotland (the correlation between the R1b-L21 Y chromosome and the frequency of red hair is actually quite high), it is also common on the far northeastern edge of Europe, among tribal Uralic people like the Udmurts.

As the same genes are implicated in pigmentation variation right across species (the gene most responsible for lighter skin in Europeans, SLC24A5, was first discovered in small fish), it is no surprise that MC1R can mutate to produce red hair in separate human lineages in different ways. Not only does MC1R have a major role in pigmentation (as the name would indicate, melanocortin being implicated in the production of melanin), but it is also involved in our inflammatory response and development of cartilage, as well as correlated with different cancer risks.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of red hair in humans is its strong association with the need for greater anesthesia levels due to higher pain sensitivity. Unsurprisingly, both humans and mice with MC1R mutations need higher levels of painkillers to experience the same effect as those with more common genotypes.

Remaining riddles of the Irish

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Today, thanks to ancient DNA and archaeology, we know that the people who brought red hair to Ireland and the related Celtic nations of Wales and Scotland were likely the Bell Beakers, carriers of the Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b-L21. This association is even present in southwestern Norway, where the fraction of red hair and R1b-L21 is higher than in the rest of Scandinavia (this was an area where during the Dark Ages, Vikings brought Irish slaves back with them). Looking at patterns in the ancient DNA, it is now likely that the genetic and cultural differences between Ireland and England only began to accumulate 3,000 years ago, as Ireland remained insulated from migrations and movements that repeatedly overwhelmed its eastern neighbor. The unique character of the modern Irish, then, goes back to the Beaker people 4,500 years ago, as the dark-skinned Mesolithic foragers and the dark-haired builders of Newgrange left little genetic legacy in the modern people.

But mysteries remain to be unpacked. We know that the modern Irish have among the highest frequencies of red hair, but we do not understand the evolutionary adaptation that drove this trait to become somewhat common among the Bell Beakers’ descendants. It is perhaps too coincidental that Neanderthals, Celts, and the Udmurt all occupy very high latitudes in Eurasia, suggesting some possible compensation for limited sunlight. But then again, Scandinavia is dark for much of the year, and red hair there is rather uncommon. The reality that MC1R regulates many characteristics, from pain to cancer risk, points to the possibility that there is an unknown benefit to red hair in certain populations to which we remain oblivious.

Perhaps, then, Ireland’s genetic and cultural isolation for the last 3,000 years can be seen in this light, as a separate and distinct laboratory of evolution from other regions of Northern Europe. This is not to say that Ireland was entirely isolated, as Britons brought Roman Christianity and Vikings founded settlements like Dublin and Cork around the fringe of the island more than 1,000 years ago. But its unique geographic position, facing onto the unbounded Atlantic ocean to its west and insulated even from Britain to the east, has allowed Ireland to slowly careen off on its own idiosyncratic path, buffered from the turbid tides of much of European history since the time of the Greeks and Romans.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on Razib Khan’s substack Unsupervised Learning. He is a geneticist and polymath who writes about history, politics, evolution, and books. You can follow him on X @razibkhan and consider supporting his work at razibkhan.com.

Genetic intervention warping sperm could lead to contraception for men, researchers say



Washington State University researchers have discovered a gene that could lead to a reversible, non-hormonal contraceptive for men that works, in part, by warping the shape of sperm.

"You don’t want to wipe out the ability to ever make sperm — just stop the sperm that are being made from being made correctly," said researcher Jon Oatley, a professor at WSU's School of Molecular Biosciences.

"Then, in theory, you could remove the drug and the sperm would start being built normally again," he added.

When disabled, researchers say expression of a gene called Arrdc5 created infertility in mice by impacting the rodents' sperm count, movement, and shape. They published their findings Monday in the open-access, multidisciplinary journal Nature Communications.

The same gene present in mice is also present in humans. Crucially, the Arrdc5 gene is specific to testicular tissue, WSU's researchers report.

Lack of the gene causes oligoasthenoteratospermia, the most common diagnosis for male infertility in humans. Men with the condition have an overall decrease in sperm production, lowed sperm mobility, and a "distorted" sperm shape that prevents fusion with a woman's egg.

Oatley and Mariana Giassetti, the study's first author, have filed a provisional patent for developing a male contraceptive drug for humans that would work by disrupting a protein encoded by the gene.

The researchers say this disruption would not require interfering with testosterone, which could impact bone mass, muscle strength, and red blood cell production.

Other uses for a yet-to-be-developed drug based on these concepts involve animals, since the gene is found across mammalian species. It could, for example, potentially be used in lieu of castrating livestock or as a means for limiting overpopulation of wildlife species.

"Developing a way to curb population growth and stop unwanted pregnancies is really important for the future of the human race," Oatley said.

"Right now, we don’t really have anything on the male side for contraception other than surgery and only a small percentage of men choose vasectomies. If we can develop this discovery into a solution for contraception, it could have far-ranging impacts."

WSU's study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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Evolutionary science and genetics breakthroughs show Adam and Eve are not incompatible with evolution: Report



Christian scientists say that evolutionary science may very well be "making space" for Adam and Eve, Fox News' Tyler O'Neil reported on Monday.

What are the details?

O'Neil reported that scientists, pointing to "genetics breakthroughs," insist that Adam and Eve may not necessarily contradict the theory of evolution.

Christians — many of whom have rejected the theory of evolution as it previously indicated that there was no room for God's first people, Adam and Eve — have long argued about what some see as an impasse between faith and science.

S. Joshua Swamidass, associate professor at St. Louis' Washington University School of Medicine, told Fox that the "societal conflict" of Christianity versus evolution has been "deep and stubborn."

"Now, in a surprise twist, evolutionary science is making space for Adam and Eve," Swamidass explained. "It turns out that the theological questions are about genealogical ancestry, not genetics. In this paradigm shift, we are finding a better way forward, a better story to tell."

In Swamidass' 2019 book, "The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry," the professor argues that genetics and evolutionary theory can work hand in hand with the existence of Adam and Eve.

"Most readers of Genesis understood Adam and Eve to be (1) ancestors of us all, and (2) miraculously created without parents of their own," Swamidass told the outlet. "In contrast, evolution teaches that (3) we share common ancestors with apes, and (4) we arise from a large population, not a single couple. This conflict of fact only seemed solvable by revising foundational Christian theological beliefs, or by rejecting evolution."

"But now, clearing up some big scientific understandings, we know that all four of these things can be true at the same time," he continued. "Even if Adam and Eve lived as recently as just 6,000 years ago, they would be the genealogical ancestors of everyone across the globe by AD 1. They could even have been created de novo, from the dust and a rib. Of course, at the same time, we would also descend from people outside the Garden, others whom God created by a providentially governed process of evolution."

A person inherits 50 percent of DNA from a mother and 50 percent from a father.

"As you go farther back, you have more genealogical ancestors who each contribute less and less to your DNA," O'Neil explained. "While universal genetic ancestors are rare, universal genealogical ancestors are surprisingly common. ... Each individual has four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on, but population size in past generations tends to get smaller, so overlap is inevitable. [Swamidass] argues that by 1 A.D., every person on Earth was descended from Adam and Eve."

In his GAE model — Genealogical Adam and Eve — Swamidass claimed that biological humans, despite the span of time of between the time at which Adam and Eve existed and modern day, may still share a common ancestor with apes as per the theory of evolution, but that God could have "created Adam and Eve from the dust and a rib, without parents, and these two became the ancestors of all humans by 1 A.D."

"Swamidass claims that Genesis appears to require biological humans outside of Adam and Eve's family line because after Cain murders Abel and leaves his parents, he fears that he will be killed, he acquires a wife, and he builds a city," O'Neil added.

What else is there to know about this?

Christian philosophy professor Michael Murray, who previously taught at Franklin & Marshall College, recently commented on Swamidass' researches and said that he believes "we have arrived at the point where we can confidently affirm that the basic evolutionary story is not the threat to Christian orthodoxy that we once feared, and not because we had to compromise on orthodoxy."

"My view is that recent findings in genetics and paleontology have shown that our best scientific theories and data do not rule out a historical Adam and Eve," Murray told Fox in a statement, adding that new developments show that "for all we know, there might have been a pair that is the ancestor of all extant humans or extant Homo sapiens."

He added that there previously appeared to be an "emerging consensus among both secular scientists and scientists of faith that the relevant empirical data was flatly inconsistent with an ancestral pair."

However, recent developments show that an "ancestral pair is not flatly ruled out as was previously thought."

Biology professor Nathan Lents, who teaches at John Jay College, told the outlet that such developments have made Adam and Eve "more plausible."

"I would not say that there is any evidence, historical or scientific, in favor of the existence of Adam and Eve, as they are presented in the Bible," Lents told Fox. "However, there have been developments in our understanding of ancestry and genetics that allow for the possibility of universal ancestors of the entire human population in the surprisingly recent past."

Swamidass told the outlet that "in making space for Adam and Eve, secular scientists have an opportunity to offer an olive branch to religious communities."

"I'm encouraged to see that many religious leaders ... have been eager to take the olive branch," he wrote. "For those seeking to advance science in a fractured society, this is very good news indeed."

Dark-skinned Early People

Dark-skinned Early People

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