The Darwinian Origin of Humans in Genesis

the Biblical Description of Human Evolution

a reading from the classical Western canon with  the editor

In 1858, the papers of two British scientists—the naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, and illustrator Alfred Russel Wallace and the naturalist, geologist, and biologist Charles Darwin—received a joint public reading.   The topic was one that both of them had been working on for years.   Through their research, each of them had independently discovered what we commonly refer to as the theory of evolution through natural selection.

The following year, Darwin expounded on it in his landmark book On the Origin of Species.   Within a short time, this concept came to also be called Darwinism—a term that is often still used to describe it.   Other scientists had previously proposed the idea of biological evolution—notably the French naturalist, soldier, and biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 1800s.

And we take note of a simple and elegant description specifically of the evolution from a protohuman race into the human race, which appears in one of the best-known and earliest extant works in Western literature—Genesis.   It is the first book in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, and as such, the stories in it are of course told from a perspective focused on the existence, nature, and behavior of an almighty god.   A summary of this story of humankind’s emergence out of an earlier species of mankind goes like this:

There were nonhuman, prehuman, protohuman animals that God had made.

And God told them that they, as nonhumans, would never work and would never die and would never eat the fruit from the tree of the conscience, thereby would never have a conscience—would never have knowledge of goodness and badness.

And they never worked, because nonhuman animals don’t have the capacity to understand the concept of work.   So none of what they have to do to live is work.   They never died, because nonhuman animals don’t have the capacity to understand the concept of death.   So when their physical bodies die, their spirits simply pass on out of interacting with the physical universe.   They never ate the fruit from the tree of the conscience, because nonhuman animals don’t have the capacity to have a conscience—the capacity to understand knowledge of goodness and badness.   So they never have a conscience—never understand knowledge of goodness and badness.

And all nonhumans still never work and still never die and still never have a conscience—never have knowledge of goodness and badness.

And God told them that they never would work and never would die.   And God told them that if they, as nonhumans, ever got a conscience—ever took knowledge of goodness and badness—they then would work and then would die.

And, as nonhumans, they never have gotten a conscience—never have taken knowledge of goodness and badness.   So they never have worked and never have died.

And God made the nonhuman, prehuman animals into human animals.

And by doing so, God gave them the capacity to have a conscience—to understand knowledge of goodness and badness.

And so they, as humans, got a conscience—took knowledge of goodness and badness.

And by doing so, they got the capacity to understand the concept of work.   So now, what they have to do to live is work.   And they got the capacity to understand the concept of death.   So now when their physical bodies die, their spirits do not simply pass on out of interacting with the physical universe.

And God asked them why they had gotten a conscience—had taken knowledge of goodness and badness.

So, clearly in this ancient story, when God asked this, God was asking a rhetorical question.

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