An Evolutionist Claims Humans are Descended From the Same Ancestor 5,000 years Ago

The claim sounds like it could have originated with young-earth creationists such as ourselves, but it in fact belongs to evolutionary geneticist Steve Jones—who is certainly no friend of creationists. (This is the same Jones who claimed earlier this year that human evolution “is over.”)

"... the numbers become huge and we run out of possible ancestors. The answer is simple: we share them with our spouses."

In his “View from the Lab” column in the Telegraph, Jones writes:

... [L]ike it or not, each of us marries someone from our own family, because we have no choice. It’s arithmetic: if everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on, quite soon the numbers become huge and we run out of possible ancestors. The answer is simple: we share them with our spouses.

Jones is certainly not the first person (not even the first evolutionist) to arrive at such a conclusion, though in evolutionists’ perspective on the matter, we only share one of many ancestors as recently as 5,000 years ago, whereas the Bible teaches that our sole male and female ancestor were alive around 6,000 years ago, and that we all are descended from those two (through Noah’s sons and their wives).

Either way, the conclusion is the same: we’re all related, and “incest” becomes an issue of degree, though the danger now is particularly associated with those closely related, such as first cousins. This is because of the buildup of deleterious mutations in the human genome over time. However, just after God’s perfect creation, Adam and Eve and their offspring wouldn’t have had many, if any, such mutations. That’s why God instituted laws against incest not until the time of Moses, by which point dangerous mutations were more common and posed a threat to the offspring of those closely related.

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