Of Adam and Eve and Marrying Cousins

Of Adam and Eve and Marrying Cousins

Disclaimers: I'm not a creationist. Neither am I an expert on the game of life. This is not a paper, just a kind of mental scribbling aka daydreaming.

One of the problems I had with the Adam and Eve story was that of inbreeding, that inbreeding raises the possibility of recessive traits appearing, lowering the average survival ability of the population in general. How do cultures that practice reproduction with relatives survive? Does inbreeding mean that you end up with an inferior culture?

Enter: the game of life.

If you're unfamiliar, the game of life is simulation "board game", formed with a grid like a chessboard, where you place pieces that either "grow" or "die" according to rules as simple as the following set (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life, where "cell" refers to a square on the board):

1. First you start with a starting configuration, where you mark certain cells as "live". All other cells are dead.
2. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
4. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
5. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction. 

That's it. And just depending on the initial squares, the game can keep running for thousands of generations. You might want to try out some configurations on the wiki page at http://www.julianpulgarin.com/canvaslife/and see it for yourself.

What does this mean to me? That while inbreeding is the causes of a lot of genetically-based disability, it is not in itself fatalistic. But rather, whether or not we end up with an end-game where everything dies or everything keeps on growing, or everything is stabilized, depends also on the starting configuration - and that starting configuration, must be instantaneously created or there must be one instant where the starting configuration became true.

That is to say, if the creation theory needs to be true, it is not just the mechanism that needs to be proven, but that the starting configuration needs to be found. So maybe, just maybe, just because God created Adam and Eve, doesn't mean he didn't also create Adam and Steve.