MycroftJones comments on my defense of Genesis 1:
Another thing about the rib; you don’t have to go to the pigs. Humans to this day, have a rib that grows back. If the layer of flesh around the rib is preserved, it grows back. It is the smallest rib at the bottom of the rib cage. When doctors take bone for bone transplants, that bone keeps coming back, so they keep re-using it. So the Bible story of building Eve from the rib makes sense. Adam grew his rib back.
I had never heard this, but he is correct:
During the 5 1/2 months in hospital, and for years afterwards, I had a series of operations to reconstruct various parts of me, particularly the bones of my face.
These operations often required using my own bone for grafting. I noticed that the plastic surgeon would keep going back to the right side of my ribcage, through the same horizontal scar, actually, to get more bone for these procedures.
One day, I asked him why he hadn’t ‘run out of bone’. He looked at me blankly, and then explained that he and his team took the whole rib out, each time. ‘We leave the periosteum intact, so the rib usually just grows right back again.’
Despite having trained and practiced as a family doctor, I was intrigued; I had never realized this before. The periosteum (the literal meaning of this word is ‘around the bone’) is a membrane that covers every bone—it’s the reason you can get things stuck between your teeth while gnawing on a leg of lamb, for instance.
The periosteum contains cells that can manufacture new bone. Particularly in young people, ‘rib periosteum has a remarkable ability to regenerate bone, perhaps more so than any other bone’.
Thoracic (chest) surgeons routinely remove ribs, and these often grow back, in whole or in part. A lot depends on the care with which the rib is removed; it needs to be ‘peeled’ out of its periosteum to leave this membrane as intact as possible.
A major reason why the rib is the ideal situation for such regeneration is that the attached intercostal muscles provide it with a good blood supply. When the surgeon originally told me this, my immediate thought was—’Wow, that’s really neat, Adam didn’t have to walk around with a defect!’ ”
Google “rib periosteum regenerate” to find massive independent verification.
Several implications follow.
First, the moralizing lesson on gender relations is totally false. It does something like this: “God didn’t take the bone from Adam’s head, so that Eve would be above him, or from his foot, so she would be beneath him, but from his rib, so she would be beside him.”
The location of the bone was chosen for regrowth potential, nothing more.
Second, Genesis indicates modern surgical knowledge. There is absolutely no reason for a pre-anaesthetic, pre-antiseptic society to know which bone in the body is best at regenerating for purposes of reconstructive surgery. Such societies do stuff like trepanning and childbirth. Context suggests the significance of the rib was completely lost on those who recorded and transmitted it. It seems to be the casual perfectionist competence of a deity, nothing more.
Third, why did God take a rib instead of a blood sample or a cheek swab? Well, bone marrow has mesenchymal stem cells. This may be obvious to us now, but it sure wasn’t back then.
Fourth, why did make Eve from Adam’s flesh? Does His action make any sort of genetic engineering sense? Answer: Yes it does, in a very non-obvious way.
From the Quora question, “Genetic Engineering: Is it possible to clone an opposite-gender version of yourself?”
Yes, but only for a female version of the male, not the other way around.
A normal male has two sex chromosomes, an X from his mother and a Y from his father; a normal female has two X chromosomes, one from each parent. You can create a female version of a man by replacing the Y chromosome with a second copy of the existing X chromosome. However, note that the resulting woman could not be his genetic “sister”, since the woman has no X component from the original man’s (and, I suppose, her) father, which his sisters would inherit. In other words, the resulting woman cannot be the biological child of the original man’s parents.
The reverse direction doesn’t work at all. If you were to create male version of a particular female individual, you would need to obtain a Y chromosome and its associated DNA, which is missing from the original woman’s genome. A reasonable source would be the woman’s father. Although the result would be, essentially, the male version of the woman, you are still introducing a small amount of new genetic material. Also, by replacing an X with a Y chromosome, you may express phenotypes from the remaining maternal X chromosome that were previously overridden or influenced by the paternal X. For instance, the genes for red and green color receptors in the eye are located on the X chromosomes. If the woman originally inherited faulty color genes from her mother but normal ones from her father, she would have normal color vision. However, by replacing the paternal X with a Y, which has no genes for color receptors, the resulting male “semi-clone” would be red-green colorblind.
Once again we have indication of specialized knowledge unavailable to the pre-technological society that authored the book. The absurd fairy tale suddenly becomes a straightforward factual account. Magic becomes science.
Eve really was “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone”. Adam was no an idiot. His statement, translated: “Hey, it’s me with tits!”
However, this is a VERY strange genetic configuration for the supposed original breeding pair of all humanity. We have taken the original problem – a man and a women have too little genetic diversity to found the human race – and squared it. Now we effectively have one founder instead of two. How is THAT supposed to work?
Giving up is not an answer. “God’s power”, “We see through a glass but darkly.” No. We have sound, sensical explanations for three anomalies now. We should expect more of the same.
It appears that Adam and Eves’ children with each other would be clones? I doubt the transmission is perfect, so maybe some things would get shuffled. Still, it’s basically sexual cloning.
Why would God do such a thing? Only if Adam was a very designer product, with all the debugging already taken care of.
Very strange things were afoot. But this fact set makes sense when placed in the context of macroevolution by hybridization. Perhaps the Adamic race was meant to continue cloning itself whilst hybridizing with the various Earth species, including (exclusively?) hominids.
I don’t even…
Eventually, the DNA payload would spread through the network of the entire ecosystem. Just no snakes.
Once again, we wind up at Narnia. The very adult version. This time with actual, literal, cloned Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve at the top of the fuckpile.
I don’t even LIKE Lewis, dammit. I’m a Tolkein guy!!!
Sigh. I have just invented a subgenre of bestiality/furry porn.