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Well, unless you're a fundamentalist that is. A literal interpretation of the garden of eden story isn't supported by science, but if you take it loosely or as an allegory the main thrust of it actually is remarkably close to the truth of our origins.
Basically it goes like this - our distant ancestors originally walked on all fours like other primates. One of the evolutionary advancements that made civilization possible was the adaptation to walking on two legs. This may not seem like much, but it is. It freed up our hands to allow us to do things like build and use tools.
To this day this is our greatest advantage as a species - the ability to use technology to adapt our surroundings to ourselves. Rather than having to undergo tens or hundreds of millions of years of natural selection to swim under water we can just devise a breathing apparatus. This gives us the strengths of every species combined and then some, and has served us incredibly well. It is an evolutionary silver bullet if you will, and it has made us essentially omnipotent (powerful in every way and every direction), at least relative to our evolutionary cousins. But this omnipotence came with a price, one all our mothers paid to bring us into the world.
Walking on two legs requires narrow hips, which means a smaller birth canal and a more than usually painful childbirth. Childbirth is painful for many species, not just humans, but humans have perhaps the most agonizing childbirth in the animal kingdom, made worse by the fact that our brains (and therefore infant heads) kept getting bigger as our species became ever more intelligent. Because standing upright was so incredibly advantageous to us as a species, it apparently outweighed the increased risk of death, injury and infection in childbirth. But if our brains were to get as large as they would eventually become childbirth would become literally impossible. So natural selection favored an alternate solution.
The organ that takes the longest to develop in any species is the brain. In fact if you make a chart of how long a species stays in the womb before being born and compare it with their brain volume, there's a direct correlation. A bigger brain means a longer gestation period in the womb. Humans have the biggest brain in the animal kingdom and we ought to have the longest gestation period - but we don't. Human pregnancy should take about twice as long as the longest pregnancy in the animal kingdom, but it doesn't. Why? The reason is that if we stayed in the womb until we're ready to be born our skulls simply wouldn't fit through the birth canal. So all humans are born around a year before we're done cooking. This is why our skulls aren't even hard or even done growing around our brains, and why we can't walk for a full year after we're born, unlike basically any other species of animal that can walk within hours of being born. Because we're basically fetuses outside the womb. The downside of a painful, dangerous, extremely premature birth was outweighed by self-awareness, intelligence, curiosity, creativity and our other mental gifts that our expanding minds allowed for.
So where does this leave the garden of eden story? It is mythical to be sure, our painful child births were not a punishment for anything our ancestors did. But in a deeper, more profound sense it is actually accurate. The danger and pain of childbirth isn't the wrath of a god or a punishment for becoming god-like and understanding right from wrong - but it was the literal price we paid for it as a species. And if you strip away all the literal garb of the story it really is accurate.
And we didn't gain wisdom as a result of eating from an enchanted tree, but if you again strip away the literal meaning it is actually not far from the truth. A part of that evolutionary leap may have been made possible by a significant change in diet. Switching to a partly meat diet and cooking meat to make it softer may have allowed our mouths to get smaller and our jaw muscles to become smaller and more efficient, which is good since those muscles are anchored to the sides of our skulls and apparently pull on our developing skulls causing them to close early in their development. Once our jaws were carrying a lighter load our brains had more room to grow and expand. So no, there was no magic apple. But a change in diet did allow us to gain the wisdom of the gods, and it did directly incur the price of that wisdom.
Heady stuff.
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| | Posted 7/8/2012 11:15 AM - 1417 Views - 56 eProps - 41 comments
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