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Incest is sinful yeah?
And it creates children with disabilites yeah?

Well if We all came from Adam and Eve, we would all have to be the result of incest..

So why isn't there some genetic abnormality in us all?
Or is there one and we've just accepted it as normal?

=/

dude, the question is: you actually believe that we all came from adam and eve, and that the whole world was created in 3 days? eek

what? I thought it said 3 in the bible.... maybe my memory is getting a little spotty. sweatdrop

though I never read it(the bible) in its entirety, some of the biblical stories(oversimplified of course) that I HAVE read really don't make sense as you said...

so why are there so many die-hard christians who believe in every word that is printed in the bible? question

The closer the sexual partners are, genetically, the higher the chance for congenital defects, yes. I think that the genes that cause defects are generally recessive genes (otherwise they'd be widespread), so when a person is with someone who's not closely related, even if one of them has the recessive gene there's a decreased probability that the other has it too. Even if both have it, there's a 75% chance (roughly speaking) that their children won't have the recessive trait.

The human DNA strand is shaped like a curvy ladder. I dunno what composes the outside of a ladder, but if I remember right, the steps are made of four different proteins (or amino acids or something...are amino acids proteins? anyway...). I don't remember what they were called, or the letters they started with, but let's call them A, B, C, and D. If I remember correctly (my memory's fairly good, but I learned all this stuff like nine years ago 0.o), A can go with A or B, and C can go with C or D to pair up into the ladder step. Where they are in the ladder, and which combo it is, determines the resulting gene pool. Some combos are more common (or are dominant) for certain gene strands, and these result in the dominant traits; others, less common (or recessive), and these are the recessive genes that result in recessive traits. When two people have a kid, the DNA enzymes unzip their respective strands and combine the two into a new ladder for the kid.

When mapping out genetic patterns for various traits, the dominant gene is capitalized, and the recessive is lower-case (as I was taught). To be very plain about it (as I have to be - I don't remember the details), if a person has a dominant trait, their gene pattern looks like TT (one dominant gene from each parent) or Tt (one dominant gene from one parent and one recessive gene from the other; at least one of their parents was either a Tt - a carrier of the recessive gene - or tt - possessed of the recessive trait).

Let's take hemophilia as an example, because I'm fairly sure that one is recessive, and I know just enough history about the English monarchy (I think it was English) to explain some things. Imagine, if you will, two people who go to have a baby. One person doesn't contain the hemophilia gene at all, so their gene pattern looks like HH, and one person is hemophiliac, thus hh. To see how they combine, just stick them in a grid, like thusly: (I'ma try, anyway)

....H__H
h|__|__|
h|__|__|
(see how it forms a 4-square grid? it's so much easier to do that on paper 0.o)

And then they are combined, like...
....H__H
h|Hh|Hh|
h|Hh|Hh|
So all of their children will be carriers of the trait, but none of them will be hemophiliac themselves.

With one carrier and one non-carrier, it looks like this:
....H__H
H|HH|HH|
h|Hh|Hh|
So none of their kids will be hemophiliac, and the odds are only 50% that they'll even be carriers.

With two carriers, however (like if the kids from the first grid decided to inbreed)...
....H__h
H|HH|Hh|
h|Hh|hh|
...half of the kids (statistically speaking) will be carriers, 25% won't be, but an equal 25% will have hemophilia.

And if two of those kids decided to inbreed...
....H__h
h|Hh|hh|
h|Hh|hh|
Half would be carriers at the least, and the other half would have hemophilia.

And if the two hemophiliac children decided to inbreed, then all of their kids, statistically speaking, will have full-on hemophilia.

So you can see that with continued inbreeding, certain undesirable traits can (and probably will) surface. I used hemophilia as an example because, if I remember rightly, the male English monarchy was rife with it back in the day, when inbreeding was an acceptable way to keep the bloodline pure. My grids hopefully show why. ^.^

These grids can also map out other, less life-or-death traits, like whether a person has straight or curly hair.

The thing is, people (and animals) with recessive traits didn't typically survive long enough to pass on their genes, or (more with animals, and maybe early humans) they couldn't find a mate. This would leave only people with dominant traits to breed (even if they were carriers). That's why recessive genes are called "recessive" - it's an anomaly when they show up, because they're usually negative (like hemophilia, sickle-cell anemia, and other birth defects) or otherwise not desirable (people didn't need tails anymore, so they were bred out of the species). Today, of course, medical technology has advanced to where people with the once-fatal recessive traits can survive and even thrive.

So, with Adam and Eve, accepting that they were real (or Noah and his family, the only survivors after the Flood), they probably would've been okay for a few generations (and maybe longer, with cross-generational inbreeding), but then undesirable genetic traits would've been showing up. In the case of hemophilia, one bad cut and you die, so any hemophiliac sons probably were either highly pampered or died before they could pass on their genes, which would leave mostly "good" genes behind.

So I guess my "thesis statement" is that it is technically possible (but very highly unlikely) that we could have come from Adam and Eve but still not be complete freaks of nature. 3nodding

Of course, the idea of genetic defects or abnormalities is a whole other issue with the Bible, for it states that Man was made in God's image, and God is supposedly perfect, so therefore Man is supposed to be perfect too, and therefore free of things like genetic defects.

(I would at this point like to add that I don't believe in or follow any organized religion, for several personal reasons. I try to generally be a good person, but I don't believe that we came from two people who showed up magically on the earth [I believe in evolution, a different kind of magic wink ]. So, I would hope that my opinion wasn't biased for religious reasons ^.^)

Exactly, the Bible is filled with symbolisms and hidden meanings, just like when Jesus said something to the effect of "Eat my body and you shall have eternal life." He didn't actually mean for us to eat him as he is; sweatdrop he also didn't mean that people who do so will stay alive forever.

I did! (but not enough to look them up myself xD) Thank you ^.^

I<3GhostIII