1. Islamic Models of Human Origin: A Gentle Introduction (Part 1)

2. Islamic Models of Human Origin: A Gentle Introduction (Part 2)

3. Islamic Models of Human Origin: A Gentle Introduction (Part 3)

4. On the Great Antiquity of Man]

1. Futureproofing

1.1. The specter of scientific falsification

Up to this point in the series, we’ve been attempting to construct a model of human origins which is consistent with both science and scripture. And in our last post, we seemed to have succeeded in this endeavor. We described and defended a scenario of Adamic origin that, as best as we could tell, looked both scripturally and scientifically uncontroversial.

Does that bring our project to a close? Not really.

See the thing about scientific falsification is it’s anchored to the data we have at hand. If you were convinced by my arguments in the last post, all that demonstrates is that no scientific fact at the point of writing contradicts the model. Future dates continue to bring new data, and with that fresh prospects of falsification.

This might seem like an abstract worry, so let’s consider the specific ways in which this might happen.

Recall that throughout the series, we’ve been invoking a set of claims about human origins most Muslims would generally accept (the “Conventional View”):

1. Genetic isolation. After Adam and Eve were sent on earth, their children reproduced among themselves and in the process eventually filled the earth with humans. The Adamic progeny, as a whole, forms a genetically isolated group.

2. Primordial two-person founding. In addition to being genetically isolated, Banu Adam as a group was founded by exactly two individuals. All present human genetic diversity ultimately traces back to the genomes of Adam and Eve.

3. Discontinuity. Since Banu Adam—as a genus—arose via this initial, separate act of Divine Creation, we should expect a sharp disconnect between us and all other creatures—living or extinct—in terms of their characteristics and abilities. This disconnect is precisely what sets humanity apart. In other words, there are/were no humans outside the lineage of the Children of Adam. “Humankind” and “Children of Adam” are synonymous, as are H₂O and water. There might be creatures that look and act similar to us, but we won’t confuse them for humans.

4. Primordial Sophistication. Even the earliest members of humanity had advanced cognitive abilities—they were smart enough to use language, worshiped God and had associated religious concepts. We would never look at the earliest members of humanity and wonder whether they were “half-man” or “ape-man”—they would be just as recognizably human as the rest of us, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

In the last article on this series, we posited that in addition to Homo sapiens (or “Anatomically Modern Humans”), Neandertals, Denisovans, and the last common ancestor of these populations should also be considered among the progeny of Adam. This pushes the the origin of humanity back to around a million years ago, and I demonstrated that this shouldn’t be theologically controversial. This conceptualization of humanity, when joined with the premises of the Conventional View, are nonetheless consonant with the relevant scientific findings.

But let’s now take a contrary view and see how, even on this successful model, the premises might come under attack as new scientific evidence accumulates.

1.2. Many roads to falsification

1.2.1. Falsifying genetic isolation

Our model requires that the progeny of Adam be completely genetically isolated. That is to say, there must not have been any gene flow between this group and the myriad other hominin populations occupying the earth at the same time: Homo erectus or Homo naledi, for instance.

How could this be scientifically falsified? Well, in our last post we mentioned there being a steady trickle of modeling work indicating that an ancient (“superarchaic”) ghost population living ~1.5 million years ago—presumably Homo erectus—have mixed genes with us (exhibit 1, 2, 3, 4; many others. The most recent paper came out since my last post). We noted, however, that the evidential basis for this inference is kind of shaky. Until we actually sequence the DNA of a Homo erectus specimen and compare our genomes with theirs, inferences about gene flow between the groups must remain tentative.

The answer might not be entirely convincing, as it involves making judgment calls about what constitutes weak vs. strong evidence, and reasonable people might disagree about that. But an even greater concern for this model has been raised by a paper that’s come out since the publication of my last post.

We just mentioned that a strong inference to gene flow requires comparing our genome with Homo erectus DNA. Well, a group of scientists have managed to pull protein sequences from six fossilized teeth found in China, specimens which have been assigned to Homo erectus.

These protein sequences otherwise look similar to ours—as we’d expect—with two differences (highlighted in the figure below). One of those differences actually matches up with the sequence in a Denisovan genomes. Notice below how the “V” at the end of the sequence is shared between Denisovans and these Chinese teeth, but differs from us or Neanderthals:

Why is this amino acid only found in Denisovans and these new Chinese specimens? Scientists infer that this is because of gene flow between these two groups. Assuming that is correct, and assuming that the teeth indeed belong to Homo erectus, this represents the first concrete evidence of gene flow between Denisovans and Homo erectus. And since, per our model, Denisovans are included among the children of Adam but Homo erectus is not, this seems like a straightforward disproof of the genetic isolation premise.

Things aren’t as simple, however, as other scientists have called the paper’s findings into question. For one, the inference is made on the basis of just one shared amino acid letter, and such a low degree of similarity can occur by processes other than gene flow (or a coincidence).

But more importantly, the anthropologist John Hawks has argued that there’s no reason to assume the fossilized teeth belonged to Homo erectus—rather, they might’ve more likely been the remnants of local Denisovan populations. If that’s the case, what we have is not gene flow between humans and non-humans, but only between different populations of humans.

So it seems like this paper is far from a knock-down rebuttal of our model. That being said, studies like this will only become more common in the days to come. More recently, yet another group of scientists working on the Homo naledi specimens have extracted more protein sequences from their teeth. While those sequences didn’t lead to any gene flow inference, such papers will only continue to accumulate in the days to come, and we might soon be in possession of rock-solid genomic evidence that our supposed ancestors interbred with Homo erectus or other such non-human groups. That possibility cannot be written off.

Leaving this future possibility aside, there’s also the issue of the increasing number of papers that posit “superarchaic” flow of genes into human genomes based on modeling-based evidence that I brought up previously. This work is tentative as I said, but that doesn’t mean it has no evidential value—especially since the stack of papers reporting this phenomenon keeps growing taller.

This issue is indeed a substantive one, and I plan to dedicate the next essay on this blog to this literature. But the interim conclusion for now is this: the Science of the Day presents perhaps a weak challenge to the genetic isolation premise, but the Science of Tomorrow might present a stronger one.

I think the strongest risk of falsification is raised by the genetic isolation premise, but for the sake of completeness, let’s also discuss how the other premises of the Conventional View might likewise be contradicted by accumulating data.

1.2.2. Falsifying two-person founding

Any model that posits the origin of humanity from two original individuals must be able to explain how all of human diversity could have emerged from such a small initial pool.

This problem has received considerable attention in the creation-evolution discourse. The handful of scientists who have looked at the issue closely seems to have concluded that about half a million years is required to generate the amount of diversity seen in current humans (example 1, 2, 3, 4). As discussed briefly in the last post, since our model situates humanity’s origin around a million years ago, this is not a problem we have to worry about.

However, as some comments under the post suggested, there might be some unanswered questions such analyses have yet to address. As with the genetic isolation issue above, I plan to look at these objections more closely in a future post.

For now though, I want to state that these issues aren’t debilitating for our model. The analyses I’ve alluded to above all assume that Adam and Eve had a biology similar to ours, except their genomes might have carried a very high level of genetic diversity. However, that assumption might be unnecessarily restrictive. Adam and Eve were miraculously created beings, and it’s not implausible that their biology might’ve been different—for example, they might’ve had a form of genetic mosaicism which allowed them to harbor different genomes in different germ cells, thereby allowing the accommodation of a massive amount of diversity. On such a scenario, getting current levels of genetic diversity from two founding persons become trivially easy.

In short: risk of falsification seems to be low, but this is an issue that needs to be explored in greater depth. (And so we shall. Follow the Substack if you haven’t already!)

1.2.3. Falsifying discontinuity

Our Adamic origin model included Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans (plus their common ancestor) among the children of Adam, on grounds that these groups all showed unmistakable signs of cognitive sophistication. It’s this sophistication, we argued, that set this group apart from other non-human hominins like Homo erectus, who might’ve been more intelligent than other animals but didn’t approach the smarts of a modern human. We expect this sort of human-nonhuman discontinuity on the Conventional View.

However, it might be the case that with more progress, we’ll find similar signs of cognitive sophistication associated with these putatively non-human hominins as well, making the human-nonhuman cognitive disconnect ambiguous. Indeed, some influential scholars have argued that Homo naledi, the South African hominin with a very small brain, might have mastered the use of fire and engaged in burial practices.

Now this evidence is extremely controversial and have led to a huge amount of back-and-forth between opinionated voices—you can check the initial paper, response, counter-response, and counter-counter-response for yourself—so not really rock-solid evidence. But regardless, if the Science of Tomorrow does end up providing more concrete evidence, that could disprove the criterion of discontinuity. We can’t solve this problem by expanding our definition of humanity to include these other hominins in the group as well, because having too inclusive a definition comes with its own problems, as we saw in part 2 of this series.

With that said, I should mention that the prospects of falsification here are weak. This is because inferring cognitive sophistication from very ancient archaeological remains is complicated and often don’t have strong evidential basis—an issue we discussed in detail in our part 3. Even if we find evidence of non-human hominins like H. naledi or H. erectus manipulating fire, there might still be room to argue that fire use alone isn’t evidence for the remarkable cognitive sophistication seen in modern humans—the sort required to use complex language, for instance.

Which brings us to the last potential avenue for falsification.

1.2.4. Falsifying primordial sophistication

I think every Muslim would agree that Adam and his immediate children—the primordial humans on earth—would have cognitively sophisticated humans.

In part 3, I made an extended effort to demonstrate that it’s nigh impossible to falsify this premise, even if we place Adam a million years ago. The only way one could conclusively state that ancient hominins (like Ancestor X) weren’t cognitively complex is by analyzing their brains. To this day, however, we don’t really have a lot of good paleoneurological data from very ancient hominins (e.g., Homo antecessor) that can settle the question either way.

But again, that’s the state of the Science of the Day. A time may come when we’d be able to gather better evidence, leading scientists to argue about whether a hominin with a brain size of 1000-1160 cubic centimeters could’ve used complex language. This might, in turn, lead us to the embarrassing conclusion that our putative “human” ancestor can hardly be called human at all.

1.3. A model resistant to falsification

To reiterate, this entire discussion has been about what ifs (or what I consider to be weak evidence), and as far as the Science of the Day is concerned, our Adamic origin model is still safe from falsification. Regardless, it would still be nice if we could have models that are futureproof: Models that not only remain unfalsified by the Science of the Day, but are unfalsifiable in principle. This is an attractive quality for any solution in the science-and-religion space.

Over the past decade, Muslim and Christian thinkers alike have gestured at Adamic Origin models that fit this bill. These models aren’t just safe from falsification today, but they don’t generate any testable scientific predictions at all.

Proponents of these views argue that two premises of the Conventional View—genetic isolation and discontinuity—are in fact not strictly required by scripture. Once these two criteria are relaxed, our models of Adamic Origin ceases to leave any mark on the genetic or paleoanthropological record—the other two premises notwithstanding.

This is the rabbit hole we’ll be exploring in this article.

This is a different sort of exercise than the one we’ve been undertaking in the series. As you’ll note, thus far in the series, we have engaged in very little actual theology. Instead, we started with the four premises about human origins (the “Conventional View”) that potentially any Muslim would agree with, and explored the scientific consequences following from them.

On the other hand, the views we’ll be discussing today might strike the Muslim on the street as strange to downright heretical—in fact, some Islamic scholars have already declared them heretical. This is why it’s essential to first discuss whether these views are kosher to begin with—and that theological discussion is going to keep us preoccupied today. A surprising amount of ink has been spilled on this question over the past half a decade, and we’ll need to closely examine the scholarly objections to these views.

Once that debate is settled, however, the rest of the path becomes easy. We can then explore the consequences of loosening the genetic isolation and discontinuity premises to see what other models emerge, and how precisely they guarantee a lack of falsifiability.

The Conventional View is theologically uncontroversial, but scientifically controversial. The novel views we’ll be discussing today are the opposite.

2. Novel views about human origins

2.1. Where it all started

This entire discussion started over half a decade ago with David Solomon Jalajel’s influential essay, Tawaqquf and the Acceptance of Human Evolution. Boiled down to its bare essentials, Jalajel makes two novel claims here about human origins:

1. The possibility of non-Adamic humans: The Islamic scriptures don’t claim that Adam or his children were created with completely unique features or capacities, only that God bestowed His special honor on them. This implies that there’s nothing in Islam to suggest that there’s any difference (“discontinuity”, to use our term) between the children of Adam, who were specially created via a miraculous act; and some creatures that lived on earth prior, who could’ve been brought about via a process of evolution. Put differently, it’s entirely possible that the earth was populated by humans—in the strictest sense of the word, anatomically and behaviorally modern humans—when Adam was sent down. Adam and his progeny, therefore, could’ve encountered creatures that resembled them exactly, both in terms of their physical and cognitive abilities. According to Jalajel, this possibility is not disallowed by Islamic scriptures.

Note that the suggestion here isn’t just that there were creatures on earth that looked similar to humans—like some species of extinct hominins—which is something we’ve considered in the previous posts. Rather, Jalajel is saying that there could’ve been non-Adamic humans, who might’ve shared a common ancestor with non-human apes. There might not have been any ontological difference between the miraculous children of Adam and these naturally evolved non-Adamic creatures whatsoever. That’s what makes this suggestion truly radical.

Incidentally, this is why Jalajel claims that Islam isn’t necessarily opposed to human evolution—after all, if his view is correct, there could’ve been non-Adamic humans that evolved from non-human animals. What Islam denies, according to Jalajel, is the evolution of a subset of humans—Adam and his children—not all humans.

2. The possibility of interbreeding between Adamic and non-Adamic creatures: There’s nothing in the Islamic scriptures to suggest that the children of Adam did not interbreed with other creatures and produce offspring, who in turn would also become a part of Adam’s progeny. Not much to explain here, this is just a straightforward rejection of the genetic isolation premise.

What are we to make of these suggestions? Thankfully, we don’t have to do much original thinking. Since the publication of Jalajel’s essay in 2018, there’s been a flurry of scholarly publications focusing on these questions, unpacking and scrutinizing their various aspects. In what follows, I’ll be evaluating what I consider to be the strongest arguments against Jalajel’s proposals, and see whether a version thereof can withstand such criticisms.

2.2. Disclaimer: “Adamic Exceptionalism”?

What I’ve been calling “Jalajel’s views” often goes by a fancier title, Adamic Exceptionalism. This term was first used by Shoaib Ahmed Malik in his book Islam and Biological Evolution to refer to the position that everything evolved except Adam and his children. This is often contrasted with Human Exceptionalism: everything evolved except humans.

Although AE and HE have become widely accepted categories in this discourse, I’m not a fan of this terminology for a number of reasons.

For one, as we saw in the last posts in the series—it’s sometimes hard to know which hominin populations the term human refers to, meaning there’s no agreed upon demarcation where “human” ends and where “Adamic” begins. In fact, I think some people would describe the model I defended in part 3 as Adamic Exceptionalism, even though that’s very different from what Jalajel is proposing.

For two, and perhaps more importantly, Jalajel’s proposal contains not one, but two distinct views. As we’ll explore in the rest of the essay, these two claims don’t stand or fall together—one could accept the first claim and reject the other or vice versa, or make even finer distinctions. “Adamic exceptionalism” is too coarse a label to slap on all of these possibilities.

For three, maybe not very important but a pet peeve of mine—“human exceptionalism” already has a well-established meaning in the field—it refers to Anthropocentrism, something we’ll be exploring in this blog. I know it’s not uncommon to have the same term mean different things in different fields: the word “induction” has at least three different meanings across physics, biology, and philosophy of science, for example. But in this case, both meanings of “human exceptionalism” are relevant to the same field—the evolution and religion discourse.

For these and other reasons, I won’t be using the HE vs. AE terminology in this post. To my mind, the more useful heuristic to categorize models of human origins is to ask whether they accept the Conventional View or not. The models we discussed in the first three parts of this series accept all premises of the Conventional View, while the ones we’ll be discussing at the end of today’s post do not.

3. Non-Adamic humans

3.1. Jalajel’s first volley

Jalajel’s original essay doesn’t really provide detailed scriptural justifications for his novel claims. Instead, the author adopts an innocent until proven guilty approach: he places the onus on his interlocutors to prove why the suggestions are unacceptable.

To meet this standard, his critics must identify scriptural prooftexts (or other evidence, such as scholarly consensus) that go against his proposed interpretations. Thankfully, we’ve had a number of scholarly responses to his arguments—this entire section is an attempt at synthesizing this back-and-forth.

Take first Jalajel’s claim that Adam might not have been the first human on earth—it’s possible that other humans (again, not “hominins”, humans—behaviorally modern humans) existed on earth when he was sent down. On the face of it, this view seems nigh impossible to maintain—if for nothing else than this famous Qur’anic prooftext:

People, be mindful of your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the pair of them spread countless men and women far and wide… [Qur’an, 4:1]

In response, Jalajel would say that the “mankind” address is not for all humans but only for the audience of the Qur’an, i.e., the members of humanity who were alive during the revelation:

[Muslims would accept] that Adam was specially and miraculously created by God for reasons best known to Him, and that He is a forefather to all people living today. [Tawaqquf, p. 21. Emphasis mine]

So on Jalajel’s view, at some point in history—definitely prior to the revelation of the Qur’an, and perhaps in far more ancient times—there could’ve been two types of humans living on earth: a type derived from the stock of Adam, and an entirely separate category of humans that naturally emerged in the course of evolution. The latter group either went extinct or were assimilated into Adamic humans via intermarriage (see later sections of this article) when the Qur’an was revealed. So as a matter of historical contingency, the Qur’an’s human addressees are all born of Adam.

To reiterate, Jalajel doesn’t endorse this view—just posits that scriptural evidence doesn’t contradict this.

Does this view hold any theological water?

3.2. Objections and responses

3.2.1. Response: father of all humans, not just those present

Of the very many scholarly responses to Jalajel’s views, the two most notable ones are Exploring Tawaqquf in Islamic Theology: Navigating belief obligations, Adamic Exceptionalism, and application challenges by Rafaqat Rashid, and Human origins and evolution in light of revealed truths: Theological anthropology, scholarly consensus, and similarity by Omar Qureshi . Both of them have thought carefully about the issue and concluded that the idea of non-Adamic humans is theologically problematic. This section borrows heavily from both of these essays, but I’ll use my own voice to present a synthesis of their best objections so we don’t have to get into who said what exactly.

The most straightforward objection to Jalajel’s position is that there are clear prooftexts that state Adam is the father of all mankind—not just those present in the audience, not those found at a particular point of time—but all mankind. Notable among such prooftexts is the Prophetic saying:

All mankind is from Adam, and Adam is from dust. [Source 1, 2]

…Or the hadith about how people on the Day of Judgment would address Adam:

You are the father of all mankind, Allah created you with His Own Hands, and breathed into you from His spirit… [Source]

It’s also important to note the context of these quotes. In the first hadith, the Prophet is making a point about how baseless tribalism is, seeing we all derive from the same stock and none of our lineages are superior or inferior to any other; while in the second one, the congregation of humans on the Day of Judgment invoke Adam’s honor as the “father of mankind” to coax him to intercede with God. Clearly, in both cases, Adam’s identity as the progenitor of all mankind is essential to the point being made, not just an incidental reference that one can skirt around.

These and other prooftexts really don’t leave a lot of room for doubt: contra Jalajel, Adam was the father of all of humanity, not just those present.

3.2.2. Jalajel’s rejoinder: Defining humans as Adam’s children

Central to Jalajel’s project is the idea that the Islamic sources don’t really define what it means when it says “human”—no set of necessary and sufficient conditions are listed either in the Qur’an or the Prophetic hadiths that cleanly pick out this category from all others. Sure, humans can use complex language, but so do angels and jinn—what’s there to suggest that another biological creature couldn’t, either?

This observation leads Jalajel to stipulate a very thin definition of “human” or insān:

If someone were to define human beings as “the children of Adam,” then, by that definition, it would follow that “human beings” could not exist before Adam’s appearance. [Tawaqquf, p. 14]

This is interesting. If, for the Qur’an, the word “human” is semantically identical to the phrase Adam and his children, then our earlier worry against Jalajel’s interpretation disappears. Adam is indeed the first human, in that he is the first member of the group Adam and his children, and that’s all humans are. So Rashid and Qureshi’s worries about Adam not being the first humans on Jalajel’s model are misplaced.

On this view, when Adam is sent down to earth, there’s already a population of creatures that we would absolutely recognize as humans. If they lived among us today, we would never think twice before including them as our brethren. There’s no ontological difference—either in their physical or cognitive makeup, in their features or their capacities, in their bodies or their souls—between these non-Adamic creatures and Adam (and his children).

However, the Qur’anic usage of the term “human” would still exclude those creatures, as the title of humanity only attaches to Adam and his progeny. “Humanity”, for the Qur’an, is a relational property—it denotes being honored by God in the way Adam was. That’s all. Human ontology isn’t unique, our relation with God through Adam is. If you weren’t born of Adam, doesn’t matter what your physical or psychological form is—you’re not a human.

3.2.2.1. Tangent: humans as a nation, not a genus

It’s useful to note that this discussion closely mirrors a similar one among Christian theologians. The Bible says Man was created in the Image of God (Genesis 1:27), and it is this feature that defines humanity and separates us from everything else. However, exactly what this “image” entails has been a topic of much controversy. Christian philosophers often cite Richard Middleton’s The Liberating Image in this connection, where he distinguishes between three ways of defining the Image of God (and therefore, what it means to be human):

1. Substantialistic: humans have a unique set of features or capacities given to them by God;

2. Functional: humans have a unique function, role or responsibility;

3. Relational: humans are placed in a unique relationship with God and the rest of creation.

For recent evaluations of this view, see, for example, chapter 13 in William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam and chapter 5 in Andrew Loke’s The Origin of Humanity and Evolution.

Per this typology, Jalajel would be saying that in the Qur’an, “humanity” is a functional and relational concept—but not necessarily a substantialistic one. We have been given a unique function, to act as God’s vicegerents on earth; and we are in a unique relationship with God, having been brought about through Adam who, in turn, was created supernaturally. This is all that the Qur’an requires. A creature could be identical to us in form and substance, but if they’re not related to God in that particular way or doesn’t have the responsibilities God placed on us, they wouldn’t be human in the Qur’an’s eyes.

It seems to me that Jalajel’s concept of humanity—Banu Adam—might be closer to that of a nation than a genus. Think about how the Qur’an describes the Children of Israel, for instance: it’s a nation privileged by God, in the form of the countless Prophets and miracles sent to them. Clearly, this nation had a unique relationship with God, as well as a unique set of responsibilities bestowed on them. However, there was nothing substantially different between a member of this group and the rest of humanity.

Similarly, Adam’s children might be said to comprise a nation amid nations, except his nation was uniquely created and had unique roles. It might be that nothing is substantially different between this nation and the non-Adamic populations in their biological makeup, cognitive or even spiritual capacities.

To reiterate, Jalajel doesn’t claim that this is what the Qur’an demands us to believe, just that it doesn’t rule it out. It’s theologically permissible.

So, what are we to make of this conception of humanity?

3.2.3. Response: Humans represent a unique genus

I see at least three compelling responses to this view.

First, as Qureshi points out, the use of the determinative particle Al- in Al-insān denotes a genus with its own unique essence. As such, scriptures’ repeated use of The Mankind is most straightforwardly understood as referring to a group of creatures with a unique build or form (“ontology”).

This is because functional or relational properties can’t be essential to something. Clearly, God can supernaturally create a new human being today from scratch. This human wouldn’t have any relationship with Adam (due to his de novo creation), but he would still be a “human”. Taking away their relationship with Adam and his lineage wouldn’t detract from the human essence. Therefore, if The Mankind entails a unique essence, and that essence cannot be relational or functional, it must be substantive—there’s something about the human form or ontology that’s unique.

The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig makes this observation in response to defining humanity only in terms of their function:

God could have created a human being without giving him that function, just as he could have created the firmament or the heavenly luminaries without giving them the functions that he has assigned to them. [In Quest of the Historical Adam, p. 276 in the Epub version]

Secondly, if humans don’t have a unique ontology that sets us apart from the rest of creation, it’s hard to make sense of the Qur’an’s insistence on humans being created “in the best of forms” [Qur’an, 95:4]. After all, per Jalajel’s suggestion, if there could’ve been other creatures with the exact same form as ours, wouldn’t that make such an expressions seem awkward?

Finally, and I don’t think Qureshi or Rashid explicitly take note of this but, defining “humans” as nothing other than “Children of Adam” completely empties out the relevant Islamic pronouncements on the topic.

To see this, replace “mankind” with “children of Adam” in the hadiths we quoted earlier, and see how they read:

All mankind is from Adam, and Adam is from dust.

becomes

All children of Adam are from Adam, and Adam is from dust.

Similarly,

[Adam], You are the father of all mankind

becomes

[Adam], You are the father of all children of Adam

These statements are now entirely meaningless, as a consequence of equivocating between “humans/humanity” and “Children of Adam”.

To my mind, these problems—especially that last one—are devastating: Islamic scriptures force the idea that humanity is an ontologically unique genus of creaturesm not just a nation with special roles and relationships.

It seems like Qureshi and Rashid win this round, and that too pretty convincingly.

3.3. Salvaging Jalajel

3.3.1. Why does no one salvage anymore?

At this juncture, I want to point out a curious thing about this discourse.

All the responses I’ve seen against Jalajel (including those of Rashid and Qureshi) have one thing in common—they take Jalajel’s claims at face value, respond to them, and stop there. This project is entirely destructive. Most philosophical treatises, in addition to just shooting down an argument, also offers a salvage operation—if we can’t accept the argument in their own terms, maybe there’s some core insight that can be extracted and built upon. Sure, Jalajel might’ve gone too far with his equivocations, but he can’t have gotten everything wrong. Is there nothing to salvage?

I haven’t really seen that question asked in a meaningful way, and I suspect that’s because folks writing on the issue haven’t formed a clear idea about where Jalajel’s contributions are meant to fit within the broader Islam-evolution discourse. In order to salvage his argument, we first need to understand what its utility is—what epistemic goods it’s meant to secure. Only then can we ask whether there’s a version of Jalajel’s argument that can secure those goods.

Let’s undertake that project now.

3.3.2. Discontinuity exists, but it’s not falsifiable

To take stock, Jalajel proposes that the third premise of the Conventional View—discontinuity between humans and non-humans—isn’t scripturally enforced. One can posit, argues Jalajel, that the population comprised by Adam and his progeny are distinct from the rest of creation only in terms of their unique relation to God and the set of responsibilities bestowed on them, but not necessarily in terms of their form or substance.

If Jalajel’s argument is successful, our models of human origins can escape scientific falsifiability in an important way: we no longer need to defend the existence of a “discontinuity” between the populations of humans and other hominins. The worries that briefly preoccupied us about the cognitive sophisication of Homo naledi, for instance?—They evaporate. After all, no empirical investigation can prove or disprove the claim that a group of humans existed who looked exactly like other creatures, but they had a Divinely bestowed honor and sense of responsibility.

However, if the goal is to defend a model that isn’t subject to scientific falsification, is it really necessary to go as far as Jalajel has gone?

Our problem isn’t with discontinuity itself, but only scientifically falsifiable discontinuity—a notion of discontinuity that generates testable predictions. Surely, humans can be different—even in terms of their capacities, form and substance—from other creatures, but in a way that doesn’t leave a mark in genes and bones.

This is where a core aspect of Jalajel’s argument becomes relevant: the idea that the Islamic sources never quite spell out what the necessary and sufficient properties of humans are. As we saw above, this doesn’t mean humans have no distinctive features—à la Jalajel—just that scripture doesn’t give us a precise list. For their parts, Qureshi and Rashid list core Islamic beliefs about the origin of humanity, but these lists don’t supply the criteria for a creature’s inclusion into humanity.

Scripture does mention lots of things humans can do—Adam worshipped God and used complex language for instance—but is that something only humans can do among biological organisms? Scripture doesn’t say.

Incidentally, some people cite God’s teaching “the names” to Adam [Qur’an 2:31] to suggest that complex language is a miraculous, divinely bestowed capacity unique to humans. As Saqib Hussain demonstrates in his essay on this passage, however, “the names” is better interpreted as the characteristics of Adam’s offspring, not language.

It might be that the progeny of Adam did differ substantially from other hominins in their cognitive capacities, but this difference can’t be discerned by empirical investigation. Recall from part 3 that picking out cognitive differences between populations from the paleoarchaeological record is incredibly difficult, primarily due to preservation issues in deep time. This is why the question of whether hominin populations living a million years ago or more had complex language remains a vexed issue among scientists today. If the data at hand can’t even decide on such a “thick” capacity like the ability to use complex thought, rationality or language—the key marker presumed to set humanity apart—what would the prospects of falsifiability be for thinner, more subtle differences?

This is the door Jalajel’s model opens: we can posit that Adam and his progeny did differ from other hominins existing on earth, but to an extent that might not be scientifically falsifiable. Perhaps those hominins looked similar to us, maybe even had the ability to use complex language, but they nonetheless had a significant difference in cognitive capacity.

Just so we have something more concrete to chew on, here’s an example of what such subtle but significant (but ultimately unfalsifiable) distinctiveness can mean. The Christian theologian Andrew Loke speculates that the uniqueness of Adam and his children might represent

…the capacity for a unique kind of dominion that could extend to the whole world and over all kinds of creatures, and the capacity for a sense of personal responsibility towards God the Creator for this kind of dominion. [The Origin of Humanity and Evolution, p. 98, emphasis in original]

Clearly, this is a significant spiritual distinction, and a package of these abilities require a heightened degree of cognitive and spiritual capacity. At the same time, it’s hard to see how empirical investigation can ever detect something like this from the data we have at hand. After all, how could we ask whether a certain hominin felt “a personal responsibility towards God the creator for a kind of dominion that extends to the whole world”? Can we meaningfully predict how a hominin with such an ability would act—compared to a hominin lacking such an ability? Even if we could, would such subtle behavioral differences even fossilize? Are there brain regions that can be taken to study the presence and absence of something so wispy? Probably not.

Loke proposes his view based on the unique role granted to humans in the pages of Genesis, and I think a similar reasoning applies to the relevant Qur’anic passages as well. To be human is to have that unique set of abilities required to be God’s vicegerent on earth, which might include the capacities Loke is suggesting and more.

3.3.3. Additional support from the tafsir literature

It seems like there’s something to Jalajel’s observations, and we can defend models that don’t make testable predictions about human-nonhuman discontinuity.

So far, we’ve been on the defense: trying to demonstrate that such a suggestion doesn’t contradict scripture. But perhaps it’s possible to go further and argue that some parts of scripture—or at least, classical interpretations thereof—actually provide positive support for this view.

A similar case is made by Ismail Lala in his his recent paper, Evolution in traditional Sunni exegesis.

So, which piece of scripture might offer support for such a view? The most commonly cited verse is Qur’an 2:30:

[Y[our Lord told the angels, ‘I am putting a successor on earth,’ they said, ‘How can You put someone there who will cause damage and bloodshed, when we celebrate Your praise and proclaim Your holiness?’

This is interesting: how can the angels anticipate that the creature to be placed on earth “will cause damage and bloodshed”? One way to read their response is that they’ve seen this play out before. Maybe prior to the creation of humans, God placed creatures on earth who did human-like things, like causing bloodshed.

In his paper, Lala adduces support for this view by looking at pre-modern tafsir literature. He first makes the general observation that verses of the Qur’an (e.g., 33:72, 6:38) can suggest that non-human animals can not only be sentient but also have moral responsibility (p. 49-52).

He then cites Qurtubi’s interpretation of the angels’ response:

The angels had seen and knew the havoc that jinn had wrought and how they spilled blood. This is because jinn lived on earth before Adam was created and they spread sedition and spilled blood… [p. 53]

Likewise, Ibn Kathīr explains the angels’ reaction by saying “they were analogising them from those who had gone before him”, while Al-Iṣfahānī states that the population of jinn immediately preceding Adam “were the closest (aqrab) to humankind”. Finally, as Al-Rāzī comments, the Qur’an’s use of the term “successor” in 2:30 implies that humans were following an earlier group of creation who were placed on earth for similar ends [p. 54].

The upshot of this discussion is that classical exegetes were prepared to believe that human-like creatures—species of jinn—existed on earth before Adam made his entrance. These creatures not only had moral responsibility, but they engaged in activities similar to humans (“shedding blood”), to the extent that the angels thought humans would just be a repeat of what had gone before.

Here’s Lala’s summary of his case:

The possibility that Adam was the next [manifestation] of jinn who were rational beings and “were the closest to humankind” in their physical form, thus, cannot be ruled out based on the textual evidence from Sunni commentaries. The Sunni exegetical tradition is clear that pre-Adamic creatures, imbued with consciousness, who were subject to moral law, and similar to humans, existed long before the creation of Adam. These could have been hominids, and it is this idea of which David Solomon Jalajel is a strong proponent. [Evolution in traditional Sunni exegesis, p. 54. The original text said “evolutionary manifestation” in the first line for reasons unclear to me, I modified the phrase to preserve the original point]

Note that Lala isn’t saying the pre-Adamic hominins were jinn, but only stating the more general exegetical belief that there might’ve been pre-Adamic creatures on earth that resembled us to a great extent.

3.3.4. Other concerns with the view

In the final analysis, I think the weaker version of Jalajel’s claim is theologically defensible. No explicit prooftext rules out the possibility of pre-Adamic hominins that only differed from Adam in subtle but significant ways, if anything, the tafsir literature seems to lend plausibility to it.

Before we end this section, I want to raise some concerns that might be potentially worrying—just so we have a complete evaluation.

First, defending a “softer” form of human-nonhuman discontinuity relies on the premise that Islamic scriptures don’t provide a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for humanity. I haven’t seen good scriptural arguments to the contrary, but if one can produce such a list—that would warrant a reconsideration.

A more subtle worry has to do with definitions. Up to the last post in this series, we were defining humanity using an I know it when I see it approach: whenever we observe a human being or population, we immediately recognize them as such—we won’t confuse an animal for a human or vice versa. Put differently, the term “human” isn’t conceptually problematic. We might struggle to produce the exact list of features that delineate humans from animals, but that’s an academic more than a practical concern. Humans are instantly recognizable, even if we can’t exactly lay out what makes us recognizable.

The modified view we’re exploring in this essay, however, denies this intuition. Humans are different from the rest of creation, including those that look very similar to us, but this might be confined to subtle differences in cognitive capacities. There is, therefore, a man’s-eye view and a God’s-eye view of humanity: we might think a group of people living in the Paleolithic are humans, but they’re not actually humans. This view, therefore, problematizes the concept of humanity.

Why might this be a problem? Well, the fact that Islamic sources don’t lay out necessary and sufficient conditions for humanity, for instance, might simply suggest that these characteristics are obvious, not subtle. The scripture’s silence on this topic can be taken to mean that the concept of humanity isn’t meant to be problematic in this way.

I don’t know how valid this worry is, but I want to briefly note that the reason this concern might not have been addressed in the Qur’an is because it’s not relevant to its time. There might’ve been a situation in the distant past when some populations of hominins could’ve been mistaken as humans, but that worry doesn’t exist anymore.

Perhaps more pertinently, our intuitions about who is or isn’t a human misfires all the time. Leaving aside the grotesque stories about African peoples once being considered pre-Adamite sub-humans by Europeans, small-bodied humans are often thought to be not-quite-humans by their neighboring tribes. Here’s anthropologist Gregory Forth:

“[Some] describe their smaller, forest-dwelling neighbors as apes or as related to apes. Taller Africans, for example, have classified pygmies not as humans but as “ ‘man apes’ like chimpanzees.” Similarly, Malays consider the negritos of West Malaysia as descendants of gibbons or, more specifically, siamangs—the largest of the gibbons—and the negritos apparently see themselves in the same way.” [Between Ape and Human, p. 172 in Epub version]

This is humans being confused as animals, but early hominins—who are likely not humans, to my mind—get called “humans” in the press all the time. This suggests that the man’s-eye view of humanity might not always align with the God’s-eye view, even outside the scope of the revisions that we’re suggesting.

That’s all I had to say about revising the Discontinuity premise in the Conventional View. Let’s now move on to Jalajel’s take on Genetic Isolation.

4. Interbreeding with non-Adamic creatures

4.1. Jalajel’s first volley

Jalajel’s other novel idea is that in order to be included among the children of Adam, it’s not necessary for a human to have descended exclusively from his lineage—rather, some of our ancestors might have interbred with non-Adamic humanoid creatures. As long as your genealogy contains some Adamic blood, that qualifies you as Banu Adam. This essentially entails a reconsideration of the “genetic isolation” premise of the Conventional View.

Unlike the earlier suggestions about non-Adamic “humans”, I think this proposal is more subtle and not readily refuted by any explicit scriptural prooftext. In response, Jalajel’s critics argue that while these issues haven’t been discussed in exactly these terms, our scholars have nonetheless dealt with analogous scenarios and ruled them out; and those conclusions can be extrapolated to the novel case as well.

Once again, Rafaqat Rashid’s essay presents a detailed discussion on the topic, and this section is essentially an evaluation of his arguments.

4.2. Scriptural objections and responses

4.2.1. Nafsin wāḥidah: A single soul

The first reason to be skeptical of this scenario has to do with the standard prooftext on human origins:

People, be mindful of your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the pair of them spread countless men and women far and wide… [Qur’an, 4:1]

The fact that it mentions we were created from a single soul—nafsin wāḥidah—as opposed to just a soul, seems to imply that Adam is the exclusive stock of all subsequent human lineages. Rashid gives a helpful analogy to make this intuition clear:

[C]onsider the analogy of inheriting from [a single] person: it explicitly denotes that the inheritance stems solely from that individual, excluding any other sources. Otherwise, why specify “single”? [Exploring Tawaqquf in Islamic Theology, p. 56]

In other words: to say I inherited from a person, without the “single” qualifier, doesn’t immediately rule out that I inherited from someone else. By parity of reasoning, the fact that the Qur’an adds in “single soul” provides evidence for the fact that all of us go back to Adam and only Adam—not Adam and a secondary non-Adamic source.

This reasoning makes intuitive sense to me, but instead of just focusing on the verse in the abstract, let’s also look at how this expression was used by scholars of tafsir.

In the same verse, God mentions the creation of Eve—“from it created its mate”. The it in from it is usually taken to be the single soul, which led most exegetes to suggest that Eve was made from Adam himself.

Abu Muslim al-Asfahani proposed a different reading: the expression from it doesn’t mean literally from Adam, but rather from the same genus as Adam; but most exegetes disagreed with him. The reason behind this disagreement is instructive in this context.

According to most scholars of tafsir, al-Asfahani’s reading is wrong because it specifically contradicts the aforementioned “single soul” proposition. If Eve were created de novo—from the same genus as Adam, but de novo regardless—this would mean that humanity is derived from two original progenitors. Two souls, not one.

The fact that the nafsin wāḥidah or “single soul” phrase was deployed by our scholars to rule out humanity having more than one originating souls, therefore, provides evidence that the verse is indeed best understood to suggest we are exclusively derived from the stock of Adam.

I’m sold: all (other) human souls are derived exclusively from Nafsin wāḥidah—a single soul—that of Adam. The Qur’an doesn’t seem to leave any two ways about it.

But does a single soul imply a single lineage?

4.2.2. Response: Souls =/= lineages

To step back, the point of contention is whether the human genealogy could’ve had contributions from non-Adamic creatures: whether all of our lineages exclusively go back to a single, self-contained lineage, or we can admit some external gene flow. Note, however, that thus far we haven’t really been talking about lineages. We’ve been talking about souls.

Is this a significant distinction? One might not think so, because souls are thought to get passed down lineages.

But this is not accurate. According to Islamic theology, souls don’t get “passed down” at all.

As we’ll see, this consideration is what exposes the dis-analogy between all of us being derived from a single soul, vs. from a single lineage—and eventually makes room for Jalajel’s proposition.

I think the folk understanding of newborns inheriting souls is analogous to biological inheritance, the same way the baby’s DNA is a mixture of mom’s and dad’s. Prophetic hadiths on the topic suggest a very different process:

(The matter of the Creation of) a human being is put together in the womb of the mother in forty days, and then he becomes a عَلَقَةً for a similar period, and then a مُضْغَةً for a similar period. Then Allah sends an angel who is ordered to write four things. He is ordered to write down his (i.e. the new creature's) deeds, his livelihood, his (date of) death, and whether he will be blessed or wretched (in religion). Then the soul is breathed into him. [Source, retaining some words in the original Arabic because of their contested translation]

Contrary to popular understanding, therefore, the soul is bequeathed to the developing human by an angel—it’s not “passed down” from the parents like genetic material. Sure, ensoulment always happens in association with biological inheritance, but the processes are independent.

This view is also supported by what we’ll be calling the “Covenant” hadith:

Allah took the covenant from the loins of Adam at Arafat, bringing forth from his backbone every seed that he would sow. He scattered them before him and then He spoke to them as they stood before Him, saying: Am I not your Lord? [Source]

This suggests that God created all of our souls after the creation of Adam. Meaning, even prior to our parents ever meeting each other, God already has a stash of souls to be assigned to each human being. During development in the womb, His angel comes down and attaches the soul to the respective body.

This distinction indicates that all of us being created from a single soul might not imply that all of were created from a single lineage—at least, there’s a conceptual distinction.

Consider this scenario: an Adamic father and a non-Adamic mother produces a child. When the child is developing in the mother’s womb, the angel comes down and assigns its soul. Despite the mother’s lineage being non-Adamic, the soul might nonetheless have been derived from Adam those countless eons ago in the fields of Arafat, when we made the Covenant with God. On this scenario, a child with a non-Adamic lineage might nonetheless have a soul ultimately derived from a single, primordial one—Nafsin wāḥidah.

4.2.2.1. Tangent: Creationism vs. Traducianism

As with our discussion of the uniqueness of Adam, there’s a parallel discussion on ensoulment in Christian theology as well.

In answering the question of how souls get assigned to newborn humans, Christian theologians fall into two large groups:

1. Creationism _{(not to be confused with the other form of Creationism)}: Each child gets a newly minted soul assigned to them at or soon after conception.

2. Traducianism: The child’s soul is generated from the souls of its parents, similar to biological inheritance.

(For a brief discussion on the comparative merits of these views, see Loke’s The Origin of Humanity and Evolution, pp. 108-110).

The description of ensoulment in the hadith seems to mirror Creationism, with an important difference. According to Islam, God doesn’t create new souls during the child’s conception or development, rather—all human souls were created and made to participate in the Covenant after the creation of Adam.

Writing about the question of how a child with a non-Adamic parent can still have an Adamic soul, Loke writes the following:

[I]f one prefers the Creationism view of the generation of human souls, one might suggest that God keeps track of the human lineage and creates a human soul whenever reproduction involving Adam’s descendants and non-human Homo occurs. [The Origin of Humanity and Evolution, p. 111]

We would probably replace the “creates a human soul” phrase with “assigns a pre-existing human soul”.

I present this tangential discussion to suggest that a commitment to all of us having Adam-derived souls doesn’t exclude making room for non-Adamic genetic contributions to our ancestry. People outside our tradition also understand this point—meaning this idea isn’t particularly contrived, only a natural consequence of understanding the distinction between genetic ancestry and ensoulment.

It seems like Jalajel’s suggestion can escape the Nafsin wāḥidah objection. However, Rashid has another argument based on a different set of prooftexts.

4.2.3. Verse of the Covenant

Rashid furnishes the aforementioned Covenant hadith and the corresponding Qur’anic verse as evidence against Jalajel. The verse in question:

[W]hen your Lord took out the offspring from the loins of the Children of Adam and made them bear witness about themselves, He said, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ and they replied, ‘Yes, we bear witness.’ [Qur’an, 7:172]

And let’s look at the hadith once again, with fresh eyes:

Allah took the covenant from the loins of Adam at Arafat, bringing forth from his backbone every seed that he would sow. He scattered them before him and then He spoke to them as they stood before Him, saying: Am I not your Lord? [Source]

Rashid argues that this episode depicts God drawing out the essence of every human being— both their body and soul—from Adam, and reconstituting them into fully formed beings when we made the Covenant. The face value reading of the hadith similarly suggests that both the soul as well as the genetic material for each human was stored in the body of Adam.

For Rashid, this shows that the entirety of the determinants of our lineage—our “seed” or genetic material—came from the body of Adam, thereby ruling out the possibility of any external source.

I don’t have much to say about this, except that I don’t find this interpretation particularly convincing. The language of the verse and hadith is minimal: all it suggests is something about the human constitution was taken from the body of Adam. Jalajel would agree that each human does trace their ancestry to Adam, meaning some component of Adam’s genes—seeds, to use the hadith’s language—must be present in all of us. But does that conclusively rule out non-Adamic lineages contributing to our genes? I don’t think so—that strikes me as pressing the text beyond what’s apparent.

This is all there is to the explicit scriptural arguments against the possibility of non-Adamic interbreeding, and Jalajel seems to be faring well. However, even absent explicit prooftexts, there might be inferential reasons to be doubtful of such a view.

In the next section, we survey four such objections that I think are worth taking seriously.

4.3. Other objections and responses

4.3.1. Scholarly opinions

In his paper Evolution in Traditional Sunni Exegesis, Ismail Lala discusses the exegete Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s interpretation of the Nafsin wāḥidah verse. It’s very clear that the great scholar saw the verse as excluding not just our creation from more than one souls, but any hint of a non-Adamic descent. The discussion in this section (including the quotes) relies almost exclusively on Lala’s essay.

Rāzī, for example, raises a pre-modern version of the “genetic bottleneck” problem: how is it that the range and breadth of human diversity can result from just two individuals? He reasons, if the propagation of humanity from Adam was left up to the natural order of the world, we’d never get the vast range of phenotypes seen among humans. “[I]f the matter was left to nature and his [i.e. Adam’s] characteristics”, the exegete says, “those descended from one human would only ever resemble him in attributes” [p. 59] The fact that this does not happen, and we instead see people who are “white, black, red, tanned, beautiful, ugly, tall, and short”—suggests that God’s special provision was operational in arranging this matter.

This discussion clearly implies that for Rāzī, all human features has a singular fount—Adam—not just our soul, but our genes. The entire breadth of human diversity has arisen exclusively via Adam’s children reproducing with each other, forming a genetically isolated population.

Rāzī readily acknowledges that this is a strange proposition. Looking at humanity at large, we wouldn’t think that our source is one—“There is no proof for the intellect that the creation [of all humankind] has to be from one soul; rather, that is known from revealed proofs.” [p. 60]

For Rāzī, this is such an extraordinary display of God’s power and providence that he turns this into an a fortiori argument for the resurrection: if God can bring forth so much diversity from just a single soul, surely He can bring us back from the death on the Day of Resurrection?

Rāzī could hardly be more explicit in stating that Adam is the exclusive source of our genes, seen especially in his grappling with the consequences of this mode of human propagation. He isn’t alone in this view by any means, other prominent exegetes like Ibn Kathīr [p. 60] and Ṭabarī [p. 57] made comments to the same effect.

This discussion suggests that while scriptural prooftexts to rule out non-Adamic interbreeding might be in short supply, some of the best exegetes of the Qur’an clearly held opinions that rule out such a possibility. In fact, Rāzī considers the explicit possibility of a non-Adamic lineage contributing to our ancestry and rules it out:

I saw that some shaykhs [said] that God would send the ḥūr from Paradise to marry Adam’s sons. But this is far-fetched, because if the wives of his sons and the husbands of his daughters were among the inhabitants of Paradise, then the human lineage would not descend solely from Adam. Yet there is consensus that this is false. [Quoted in Arabic in Rashid’s Exploring Tawaqquf in Islamic Theology, p. 70. LLM translation. Emphasis mine]

Doesn’t get more clear-cut than this! We don’t even have to analogize—the Imam is almost reaching through the page to refute Jalajel’s specific suggestion.

What are we to make of all this?

Seeing that there’s no doubt that much of the tafsir literature explicitly denies such a possibility, the only remaining question is how theologically binding these opinions are. And absent explicit scriptural proof, I don’t think they’re binding.

This is a separate topic of discussion, however, and I direct my readers to this article as a brief reference on the question of how ijma’ or scholarly consensus is achieved in tafsir—and when it’s not.

4.3.2. Argument from scholarly silence

This objection lies in a similar vein to the one we just discussed.

There’s something immediately objectionable about our descent from just one original parent: the first few generations would have to commit incest. The idea that brothers and sisters would have to marry each other to get the population going is gross, so one would think scholars would look for ways to avoid such a consequence. Intermarriage with non-Adamic creatures provides just such a possibility, and yet, no exegete seems to reach for it.

In other words, faced with a choice between accepting that the earliest generations of humans—the children of an honorable Prophet at that—literally committed incest, vs. positing that there might’ve been some non-Adamic interbreeding—our exegetes consistently went with the former. Such a pattern of avoidance suggests that non-Adamic interbreeding is strictly disallowed by scripture. The silence of our exegetes, in this case, speaks louder than words.

There are at least two reasons why I don’t find this concerning.

First, I think the inference here is too quick: we’d need to know whether non-Adamic interbreeding was indeed presented as a live possibility to many exegetes. As seen in the previous section, Rāzī did consider this possibility and squarely reject it, but we don’t know whether this was the case with others. In fact, the reason Rāzī is even addressing the issue is because he saw “some shaykhs” endorsing this view—meaning it might not have been as starkly absent from the history of our scholarship.

In this connection, Ismail Lala invokes and warns against the concept of implicit anachronism (p. 63). In order to argue that scholars rejected a concept, we need to first make sure that the concept was available to them—otherwise their silence means little. I don’t think an adequate case to that effect has been made.

But secondly, and this is speculative but, incest among early humans might not have caused a strong revulsion because our scholars re-defined the concept. For the first generation of humans, incest was still religiously prohibited—just that it meant something else. As Lala would explain it:

[S]ome scholars, like Ibn Kathīr, maintain that whenever Ḥawwā’ (Eve) was pregnant, she would give birth to twins (a boy and a girl). These twins were not allowed to marry one another because that was incest. Brothers and sisters who were not twins were allowed to marry because that was not regarded as incest. Indeed, this was the very reason Qābil (Cain) murdered Hābil (Abel): he wanted to marry his twin sister but was not permitted to do so. [p. 55]

Apparently, “this opinion has wide support in the Sunni exegetical tradition”, per Lala. [p. 56]

I think this furnishes a ready explanation for why the concept of incest might not have been as repulsive to our scholars: they had an explanation that re-formulated the concept. “Brothers” and “sisters” meant two different things for the immediate children of Adam, and so did incest, and so did its moral implications.

Speaking of which…

4.3.3. Moral implications

These discussions on what Adamic lineage does or doesn’t entail might seem abstract, as if its only relevance is in this particular slice of science-religion discourse.

This isn’t the case. The scripture’s emphasis on our exclusive descent from Adam isn’t incidental—rather, it carries moral weight, as apparent from reading the rest of the “single soul” verse:

People, be mindful of your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and from it a created its mate, and from the pair of them spread countless men and women far and wide; be mindful of God, in whose name you make requests of one another. Beware of severing the ties of kinship: God is always watching over you. [4:1]

The exhortation to be “mindful of God” and the other moral counsel that follow is premised on our being derived from the stock of Adam. Lala quotes Rāzī as making the same point:

It is the creation of all of humankind from one soul, says Al-Rāzī, that should galvanise us to look after orphans, women, and the weak, which is why God mentions them, for our descent from a single soul is “a reason for the increase in compassion between us” and why we should forsake pride and arrogance on account of our lineage. [p. 60]

Or consider this climactic event from the life of the Prophet when he was addressing the people of Makkah:

[T]he Messenger of Allah gave a Khutbah to the people on the day of the conquest of Makkah, and he said:

O you people! Verily Allah has removed the slogans of Jahiliyyah from you, and its reverence of its forefathers.

So, now there are two types of men: A man who is righteous, has Taqwa and is honorable before Allah, and a wicked man, who is miserable and insignificant to Allah. People are children of Adam and Allah created Adam from the dust. [Source]

He then recited a verse from the Qur’an:

People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware. [49:13]

Notice how closely our descent from Adam is tied to egalitarian moral exhortations. God could’ve created humans in any way He wanted, but He made Adam our exclusive parent so there would be no objective basis for racism or tribalism.

This belief is echoed in non-religious contexts as well. Think of the anti-racist undertones of the slogan We are all Africans, which became popular after the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins gained ascendance. The fact that all modern humans are derived from a population in Africa suggests there’s no scientific basis for racism. All the more so if all of us are derived from one parent!

The success of this moral argument for egalitarianism, however, seems to require our exclusive descent from Adam. If our genealogy has both Adamic and non-Adamic ancestors, that means some of us are more “Adamic” than others. That immediately creates room to argue for racial/tribal superiority.

One can imagine a believer in non-Adamic interbreeding standing among the audience of the Prophet’s sermon and responding—Well it’s true that we’re all derived from Adam, but some of us are more Adamic than others. My tribe is 80% Adamic, while the other tribe is just 65%.

What are we to make of this moral challenge to non-Adamic interbreeding?

I think this concern over-interprets the prooftexts. Clearly, scripture is saying that our creation from Adam endows us with honor, and that’s the basis for human equality. But is it our exclusive descent from Adam that provides this basis, or is it the bare fact of our creation from Adam?

Scripture is very explicit in stating that all of our souls are made from the soul of Adam, and even Jalajel would agree that all of us have at least some share of Adam’s lineage. Perhaps these two facts alone are enough to ground human egalitarianism. Even if my tribe has more “Adamic blood” than the next, we all have a soul made from his and a part of his lineage. And that’s enough. Having any share of Adam’s lineage is equally significant, because that’s all it takes to have an Adamic soul bestowed on us.

So maybe an exclusive descent from Adam isn’t necessary in retaining the moral basis of human equality.

4.3.4. Banu Adam or Banu ape?

There’s one aspect of the non-Adamic interbreeding concept that has gone largely unexplored. Proponents try to demonstrate that interbreeding is theologically allowed, but they never comment on whether there’s any limit. I think there’s a meaningful difference between only some of our ancestors being non-Adamic, vs. the vast majority of them.

Imagine this scenario. There’s an island occupied exclusively by non-Adamic populations. Now let’s say an enterprising descendant of Adam makes his way into the island. He marries a non-Adamic woman and produces offspring, who in turn marry into the rest of the island tribe, and this continues for many generations. At one point, every individual in the tribe ends up having a share, however small, of Adamic ancestry—all from that one individual that migrated to the island centuries ago. One drop of blood diffused into a huge bucket of water, turning the entire thing an imperceptibly light shade of red. Are all of these island inhabitants now Adamic? I think at least some people would object.

The most forceful version of this objection comes from an online response to Jalajel’s essay:

It would be a more logical approach. . . to consider the hybrid children of Banī Ādam and Banī Apes as Banī Apes, than to force hundreds of thousands of pre-existing hominids and their descendants into the lineage of Adam. [Source]

How convincing is this objection?

One way to respond to is by appealing to the idea that any share of Adam’s ancestry is equal in effect. After all, as I argued above, any offspring from the reproduction between an Adamic and non-Adamic individual would nonetheless have an Adamic soul.

But we might also simply concede the point. Yes, Adamic-non-Adamic interbreeding may have happened, but only to a certain extent. The vast majority of ancestors in our genealogy (post-Adam) are Adamic, while non-Adamic ones contribute a small part of the whole. Whether this exposes the model to the risk of falsification is a concern we’ll have to revisit in a future post of the series.

4.4. Additional support: Human-jinn interbreeding

In the last two sections, we’ve been trying to defend the non-Adamic interbreeding concept against myriad objections. However, some of it’s proponents claim that we can go further than that.

The existence of non-human hominins was only discovered recently, so the prospect of whether we could interbreed with them hadn’t arisen. However, Islamic scriptures mention other rational beings co-existing with humans, the jinn being foremost among them. Classical Islamic scholarship also discusses the prospects of humans interbreeding with Jinn, with at least some scholars deeming it possible.

Well, if at least some of our scholars thought it’s possible for humans to marry with jinn—a supernatural, non-biological creature with no similarity to the human constitution—what’s wrong with accepting the possibility of humans marrying non-Adamic/non-human biological creatures? Aren’t they even more compatible in terms of their biology?

Before we say anything more on the topic, two disclaimers are in order.

First, the issue we’re debating isn’t whether human-jinn marriages are halal—i.e., legally permissible—but whether, according to scripture and subsequent classical scholarship, they can happen at all—i.e., theologically permissible.

Second, this reasoning doesn’t require us to believe that human-jinn interbreeding can actually happen—or happened at any point in the past—but only that the possibility isn’t theologically disallowed for the Muslim (compare: nothing in the Qur’an rules out the existence of a solid gold sphere with a 50-meter diameter, regardless of whether it actually exists or not). The fact that many from classical Islamic scholarship believed in the phenomenon suggests that they did not consider this theologically impossible, and that’s enough for us.

While this idea has been floating around for a while, it was first explored in detail by Massoud Vahedi in his talk presented at an online conference, where he reviewed a range of Muslim scholarly opinions that accepted the possibility of human-jinn intermarriage. No paper has since resulted from the talk, so the only extant documentation we have is the abstract. Here’s his argument in a sentence:

The main theoretical observation of this paper is the following: if Muslim theologians could accept cases of mixed breeding with metaphysical beings like the jinn, then it can a fortiori be applied and considered in the case of other humanoid-like beings. [Source, p. 13]

Thankfully, Yousef Wahb has recently published an in-depth essay which explores this question in useful detail. The focus of the paper has nothing to do with evolution—he’s exploring juristic theorizing using jinn-human interactions as a case study. However, the paper has enough material on non-Adamic (jinn) interbreeding to inform this discussion.

Before we get into this, it’s important to understand why exactly this concept might be useful. The possibility we’re trying to establish is this: a child of Adam can produce offspring with a non-human individual, and that offspring would be considered a member of the progeny of Adam.

In order for the argument from human-jinn unions to take off, it’s not enough to show the possibility of marriage or sexual union between the two. If that were the case, our task would be pretty easy—many classical scholars believed that such unions were possible (see pp. 9-10 in Between Law and the Unseen for some references). The pertinent question is whether such unions resulted in offspring. And if they did, were those offspring considered to be human (i.e., among the progeny of Adam), or were they thought to be jinn or some hybrid of the two?

Unfortunately, this is exactly where the scholarly literature runs thin.

After reviewing several early Islamic scholarly opinions that considered the possibility of human-jinn unions, Wahb writes:

Yet even scholars who allowed the possibility of marriage between humans and jinn often denied the likelihood of offspring, citing differences in material constitution. [Between Law and the Unseen, p. 10]

The author also cites the 19th century exegete Al-Ālūsī’s arguments to the effect that production of offspring from such unions is impossible (p. 10, footnote 40).

This is not to say that no scholar ever accepted the possibility, however, and Wahb’s essay itself gives reason to think otherwise. Ibn Taymiyya, for instance, had the following to say on the matter:

Humans and jinn may even intermarry and have children; this is a common and well-known phenomenon, and scholars have mentioned and discussed it, though most scholars disapprove of it. [Majmūʿ al-fatāwā, 19:39. Translated using LLM]

Wahb also alludes to scholars who believed that the Queen of Sheba mentioned in the Qur’an [e.g., 27:44] having had hybrid ancestry. Similarly, for both good and bad reasons, humans were sometimes speculated to have had a jinn parent—e.g., effeminate men or those of exceptional talent. In their exegesis of the Qur’anic expression of Satan having a “share” in human children, “commentators offer explicit accounts of human-satanic co-penetration during intercourse” [p. 7]. This suggests that non-human agents can, directly or indirectly, contribute to the lineage of human children.

Taking these strands together, it does seem to suggest the following: some scholars believed that human-jinn unions can produce offspring. Whether such offspring can be considered human or Adamic isn’t explicitly discussed in Wahb’s essay, however, but some of the hints can be taken to suggest that this was indeed the case.

It seems like the classical scholarly literature on human-jinn interbreeding can indeed produce a modest amount of support for the idea of non-Adamic interbreeding.

5. Futureproof models of Adamic origin

5.1. Jalajel’s dividends

In the final analysis, it seems like some version of Jalajel’s views has indeed eked out a victory.

But in hindsight, this shouldn’t have been too surprising. Consider how subtle Jalajel’s suggestions (or the modified versions) are: there might’ve been creatures on earth who are almost exactly identical to humans but not quite, or that an Adamic-non-Adamic offspring would still have an Adamic soul. Why would we expect scripture to go out of its way to rule out such niche possibilities?

Be that as it may, Jalajel’s main contribution has been to relax the strictures of the Conventional View. Let’s now look at the Conventional View with fresh eyes.

1. Genetic isolation. After Adam and Eve were sent on earth, their children reproduced among themselves and in the process eventually filled the earth with humans. The Adamic progeny, as a whole, forms a genetically isolated group.

2. Primordial two-person founding. In addition to being genetically isolated, Banu Adam as a group was founded by exactly two individuals. All present human genetic diversity ultimately traces back to the genomes of Adam and Eve.

3. Discontinuity. Since Banu Adam—as a genus—arose via this initial, separate act of Divine Creation, we should expect a sharp disconnect between us and all other creatures—living or extinct—in terms of their characteristics and abilities. This disconnect is precisely what sets humanity apart. In other words, there are/were no humans outside the lineage of the Children of Adam. “Humankind” and “Children of Adam” are synonymous, as are H₂O and water. There might be creatures that look and act similar to us, but we won’t confuse them for humans.

4. Primordial Sophistication. Even the earliest members of humanity had advanced cognitive abilities—they were smart enough to use language, worshiped God and had associated religious concepts. We would never look at the earliest members of humanity and wonder whether they were “half-man” or “ape-man”—they would be just as recognizably human as the rest of us, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

In this post, we’ve demonstrated that the Genetic Isolation and Discontinuity premises might not be theologically binding. Let’s now bring this conversation full circle to see how Adamic Origin models look in light of these adjustments.

5.2. “Unconventional” models

5.2.1. Adam as Ancestor X

In part 3, we discussed a model of human origins which placed the origin of humanity about a million years ago. According to this view, not only Homo sapiens, but Neanderthals, Denisovans, as well as our last common ancestor—presumably close to a population like Homo antecessor—would be included within the progeny of Adam.

As we discussed in the beginning of this post, there are some as-of-yet inconclusive sticking points for the model. Those concerns are due for a re-evaluation now.

If, per Jalajel, Genetic isolation is not theologically binding, the main challenge for the model evaporates. We can accept, for instance, that some members of humanity may have interbred with non-human populations like Homo erectus, and our genealogy contains some contribution from them. Since we can admit gene flow from non-human populations, the Two-person founding premise doesn’t lead to any predictions for population genetics either.

Likewise, if we can accept a weaker form of Discontinuity between humans and non-humans, we shouldn’t be concerned if it turns out that Homo erectus or Homo naledi could, for instance, make and use fire. Adam and his children possess a unique degree of cognitive sophistication on this view, even though it’s hard to pin down precisely what such capacities were.

The premise that still generates falsifiable scientific predictions for this model is Primoridial sophistication, or the question of whether the earliest members of humanity had complex language or other markers of high cognition. While we argued that the paleoarchaoelogical evidence at hand doesn’t give us any reason to think this premise is under threat, this is the only possible avenue which threatens the model to any significant degree.

In brief, it seems like the adjustments we’ve made to the Conventional View do away with the vast majority of worries we had about our model. These are the dividends of Jalajel’s work.

Let’s now see how other models might fare with these adjustments.

5.2.2. Adam as Homo sapiens

In part 1, we briefly considered a model of Adamic origins according to which all and only Homo sapiens—that is, the population of Anatomically Modern Humans that arose over 300,000 years ago—comprise the progeny of Adam.

We quickly dispatched the model, however, since it seemed to violate both the genetic isolation and discontinuity premises. As we saw in part 3, we have pretty strong evidence of the cognitive sophistication of non-sapiens hominins like Neanderthals, as well as the fact that we interbred with them and the Denisovans.

With these two premises now suspect, the model stands another chance for re-evaluation.

If we posit that Adam and his progeny represented Homo sapiens only, we can explain the gene sharing with Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominin groups as instances of non-Adamic interbreeding.

As regards the question of what set this group of Adamic hominins—Homo sapiens—apart from others, we could certainly appeal to them having a unique capacity that’s hard to pin down or falsify; but perhaps—we can go even further. A peculiar fact about the Homo sapiens is that we are the ones who survived. Of the myriad other hominin populations sharing the earth with us—Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis, and perhaps other distinct populations occupying eastern Asia—sapiens are the only ones that made it through.

Whether this was because of a coincidence, demography, or our enhanced cognitive capacity remains hotly debated. As we explored in our last post, while Neanderthals did display remarkable signs of cognitive sophistication, Homo sapiens might’ve been a notch above. Scientists have argued back-and-forth about whether our brains are different in a way that affects intelligence, but it’s clear that Homo sapiens managed to achieve things that contemporary Neanderthals never could. We invented the bow and arrow, for instance, which relied on abstract engineering concepts that weren’t associated with any of Neanderthal tech. Furthermore, the fact that Homo sapiens lived in larger groups meant our social intelligence was probably greater than that of Neanderthals

We don’t need to settle the question of what exactly made Homo sapiens evade extinction while no other hominin population did, if anything at all. But maybe we can posit that God equipped this species with a special suite of cognitive capacities that led to our success—being the children of Adam and all.

If genetic isolation (and by extension, two-person founding) and discontinuity aren’t issues, what about primordial sophistication? If our case for the cognitive sophistication of Neanderthals in part 3 convinced you, then a fortiori you should also accept the sophistication of all Homo sapiens—including its earliest members. I should note that there are some folks who are reticent to ascribe modern-level intelligence to early Homo sapiens—but to definitively show that these individuals weren’t sophisticated is very hard.

Of course, the way to take care of this worry entirely is to place Adam even later still.

5.2.3. Adam as a subset of Homo sapiens

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but up to this point in the series, we’ve been trying to fit Adam’s progeny with a distinct biological category—either Homo sapiens, or the larger lineage leading to it, or even the entire genus Homo. This is because we’ve been assuming a strong version of discontinuity, according to which the progeny of Adam represented a clean break from those that came before. We expect this break or discontinuity to manifest in our biological forms, which would lead to our categorization as a distinct taxonomic group.

Now that we’ve demonstrated that such a strong version of discontinuity might not be theologically binding, this way of constructing Adamic Origin models needs to be revisited. We don’t need to posit that all and only Homo sapiens comprised humanity—we can make finer cuts. Perhaps Adam’s progeny only consists of a subset of Homo sapiens, only its later members.

The key motivation for such a move is the primordial sophistication premise. The closer Adam is to our time, the easier it is to believe that his earliest children were our cognitive equals.

To put the motivation in more concrete terms, there’s a time lag between when Homo sapiens first appears in the fossil record and when they start doing truly complex stuff—like making musical instruments, cave paintings or figurines.

It seems like Homo sapiens culture and technology progressed slowly for the first 250,000+ years of their time on earth. Indeed, one could make the argument that the Homo sapiens culture in their early days was hardly any different from contemporary Neanderthals.

But then—around ~40,000 years ago—we almost suddenly started making extremely complex representational art (see figure above). These examples also came in the heels of our migrations out of Africa to Europe and further East. Prior to that point, it seemed like Homo sapiens populations were content just hanging out in Africa (notwithstanding some excursions in the Near East, and other ultimately unsuccessful waves of migration).

How do we explain this lag between Anatomical modernity—i.e., modern-looking humans showing up on earth—and Behavioral modernity—i.e., humans capable of making complex tools or representational art?

Scientists remain divided on this question. The existence of the leap in technology doesn’t automatically mean a leap in cognition—it might be that sophisticated technology and culture requires large population sizes to facilitate the exchange of ideas, something that only became possible about fifty thousand years ago or so.

Alternatively, one could speculate that this leap corresponded to the coming of Adam.

On this view of Adamic origin, Adam and his children might’ve looked the same as the pre-existing African Homo sapiens population, but they had a unique cognitive capacity which facilitated their move out of Africa to eventually populate the entire world. For the same reason, these humans were remarkably adept at technology and art, something that’s never been seen in hominin culture before. As this population expanded, they met other Homo sapiens in Africa, as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans in Europe and Asia—with whom they interbred and produced offspring.

Note that this model remains largely agnostic about exactly when Adam came about. The technological leap is seen some ~40,000 years ago, but that doesn’t mean this coincides precisely with the birth of humanity. Indeed, Adam and his children might’ve dwelled on earth for quite a while until they started shaping the world in their image. Nor is this model specific about exactly which suite of cognitive capacity made us unique. It could be something like the use of complex language—which, based on genomic evidence, dates back to at least 135,000 years ago—or it could be something more subtle.

5.2.3.1. Tangent: but how far can we stretch this?

Before we wrap up this section, I also wanted to briefly—briefly—explore the limits of this approach.

In my conversations with lay Muslims and Islamic scholars alike, I’ve come to realize that folks are generally reticent to place Adam very far back in the past—even fifty thousand years strike some as being too much. I personally think these worries are baseless, but let’s see whether we can have a very, very recent Adam.

When we consider the child born from an Adamic mom and a non-Adamic dad a child of Adam—as Jalajel does—it becomes easy to put Adam in the fairly recent past, and still have him be the universal ancestor of all humans. This idea has been thoroughly explored in Joshua Swamidass’ book The Genealogical Adam and Eve. Without going into any detail about this, Swamidass suggests that Adam and Eve could’ve lived as early as 15,000 years ago and still have been the universal ancestors of all humans.

Models that place Adam and the origin of humanity so close to the present really stretch Jalajel’s ideas to their absolute limit. On such a view, Adam and his children would find themselves in a world populated by humans just as complex and sophisticated as they are. In order to claim Adamic fatherhood over subsequent generations of humans, we have to accommodate a huge amount of non-Adamic ancestry into our genealogies. Furthermore, it’s hard to know what the “discontinuity” between Adamic and 15,000-year old non-Adamic humans would be—perhaps something very subtle, far thinner than linguistic ability or the wherewithal to populate the world.

Technically speaking, if you buy Jalajel’s arguments, such a view still doesn’t violate any rules. But I personally find such a high degree of non-Adamic ancestry coupled with such a thin definition of human uniqueness theologically unpalatable.

6. Conclusion—or something like it

Bottomline: we are now in possession of at least three distinct models of Adamic Origin that’s consistent with theology and science alike. If you’re convinced by Jalajel’s arguments—or at least, in the form I defended them—you are allowed to accept any of them. If you’re not, there’s always the model we discussed in part 3. As long as even one of these models “work”, the Islamic view of human origin is safe from falsification.

I don’t want to draw a big conclusion right now, because our work isn’t quite done. I promised earlier in the post that I’ll dedicate a standalone essay to discussing the challenges to (a Conventional, non-Jalajel understanding of) the genetic isolation premise.

So let’s take up that challenge in our next essay. Once that’s squared away, we’ll have the chance to do a big series retrospective, and recount all the models we’ve explored along the way.

A few days ago, I was having a discussion about evolution with a renowned Islamic scholar. In the course of our conversation, I brought up the possibility that Adam, peace be upon him, might’ve lived an unfathomably long time ago—perhaps between 700,000 to a million years in the past.

The Shaykh didn’t seem to like this suggestion.

The idea that Adam lived such a long time ago doesn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the natural consequence of the model we discussed in the last post on this blog. This model starts with a rather mundane proposition: Neanderthals, those extinct hominins occupying parts of Europe and the Middle East, were probably children of Adam. Based on genomics and paleoarchaeological data, not only did Neanderthals substantially resemble Homo sapiens, they also had all the hallmarks of modern human behavior, and the two populations produced offspring as well—justifying their inclusion among humanity. But if that’s the case—if Neanderthals and modern humans represent two populations of humanity—two tribes, if you will—then the common ancestor of these tribes must also have been Adam’s progeny. So, when did this ancestor live? The scientific dust on this question is yet to settle, but estimates range from between 700,000 to one million years ago.

The Shaykh later admitted that nothing in the Qur’an itself seems to explicitly contradict such a suggestion. Indeed, the Qur’an and authentic Hadith corpus really don’t provide any information about the timeline of when humans came about. A saying attributed to the Prophet states that there were ten generations between Adam and Noah, and ten more between Noah and Abraham—but the narration’s authenticity is suspect. Similarly, the Qur’anic verses describing the people of Noah don’t mention anything about their subsistence strategies or ways of life, except that they had the concept of private property (“wealth”, 71:21).

However, it was clear that the concept of Man’s great antiquity still made the Shaykh uncomfortable, and I don’t think this reaction is unique to him. Most Muslims would probably bristle at the idea of locating Adam and the origin of humanity so far back.

In this post, I want to explore this question in some detail.

I can think of three reasons why people find the concept of very ancient humans problematic. First, one might think that the Qur’an and/or Prophetic Hadiths endorse a human history that’s at best a few millennia old. Secondly, one might question whether humans living in such deep time shared any cultural or behavioral commonalties with us. Finally, some people worry about whether the “look” of these ancient humans befit humanity, especially those of its first members.

Let’s explore these concerns in turn.

Sacred history is only a few millennia

The objection

Most figures in our sacred history—stretching through Jesus, Moses, culminating in Abraham—can be dated within the past few millennia, with the only pre-Abrahamic Prophets to receive mentions being Idris, Noah and Adam (and Hud and Salih, but they too lived within the past few thousand years).

Perhaps this suggests to the reader that the distance between Adam and Abraham couldn’t have been unfathomably vast. Because after all, isn’t it implausible that there’s only a few episodes worth mentioning in the Qur’an within such a massive timeframe? From the origin of humanity that took place eons ago, to Abraham who lived just a handful of millennia ago, nothing noteworthy happened except Noah and the great flood?

On its face, this seems implausible. Consider the fact that the Abrahamic Prophets were sent within just a few hundreds of years of each other. If that’s any indication of the frequency of events that God considers noteworthy enough to mention in His book, we should clearly expect a lot more to happen between Adam and Abraham—assuming they lived a long time apart. The upshot of this line of reasoning is that humanity’s origin must go back to a few thousand years ago.

I think this objection misses its mark. To see why, it would be useful to look at a similar argument: why did God seemingly send all of His Prophets to the Middle East?

Why this objection fails

All Prophets mentioned in the Abrahamic tradition lived in the broader Middle East—no verse in the Bible or Qur’an mentions any Prophet or community living in the vast expanses of East or South Asia, Europe, Oceania or the Americas. Such an degree of concentration on the Middle East has been the subject of skeptic caricature: religion is supposed to be universal, but God only seems to care about just a handful of communities located in one part of the world.

Here’s a comment from the forum r/DebateReligion that expresses this objection:

[I]ts interesting how god doesn’t care about the region outside of the middle east

Isnt it funny how the revelations, prophets, holy books, and any other holy divine things and materials only show up in one specific region of the earth ? And how prophets or revelations referencing each other, some that come from older time but alas the same region who share similiar [sic] culture and practice.

In response, a Muslim would say that while God sent His Prophets to all peoples, the Qur’an only mentions the stories that were relevant to the milieu of its primary audience. For the Muslim, the Qur’an is God’s eternal wisdom expressed in the cultural and linguistic context of seventh-century Arabia. This is why it not only uses the language of its audience, but also their broader phenomenology of the world. The metaphors and the stories used by the Qur’an to deliver its message are all part of that phenomenology, a reality its Arab audience were at least somewhat familiar with.

Thought this way, the reason the Qur’an doesn’t mention a Norse Prophet is the same reason it doesn’t mention icy terrains or longboats: none of those things are very relevant to the phenomenology or world-experience of its audience.

This seems to be a general practice of how God communicates with people: “We have never sent a messenger who did not use his own people’s language to make things clear for them”, the Qur’an declares (14:4). If God in His wisdom saw it fit to send His final revelation to China, for instance, that scripture would not only have been in Chinese, but it would also similarly speak in a way that accommodates Chinese phenomenology. God’s message is always shaped by the context in which it’s communicated.

This is also what makes the message all the more effective. Every story worth telling needs to be told in the language and experience of some human culture or other. A message without such bindings would be too diffuse and sterile. Imagine the immortal story of Moses’ courage with the Egyptian army behind his back, or David’s slingshot against the imposing Goliath. Now imagine no Egypt, no parting sea, no slingshot, no Israelites escaping with their lives, just the message: “always trust God”. Do you think the message, bereft its context, would have a similar impact?

What we learn from this discussion is, the Qur’an’s account doesn’t represent an unbiased sampling of human history, or even Prophetic history. The Qur’an doesn’t mention any of the countless Prophets sent to the peoples outside the Middle East because it’s only concerned with the phenomenology of its Arab audience. In its messaging, the Qur’an exclusively spotlights the figures and events that aid in making its case to that audience.

I think this lesson can be carried over to the question we started with: if there were indeed many Prophets sent between Adam and Noah (or Noah and Abraham), why does the Qur’an not mention them? Well, because the Qur’an is not interested in those time periods, for the same reason it’s not interested in Norse or Chinese Prophets. Countless Prophets could’ve been sent in the tens of millennia between Adam and Abraham—the Qur’an just doesn’t bother to tell us their stories.

Would humans living so far back be culturally continuous with us?

Another worry people might have with placing humanity in deep antiquity, I suspect, has to do with the rate of cultural transmission. Just a few hundred years ago, people’s lives were completely different from the lives we lead today. Turn back the calendar a few more millennia and it becomes even more different, and we can barely recognize the minds of humans who drew the cave paintings several tens of thousands of years ago. The further back we travel in the past, the more different humanity looks from us in terms of their behavior. If a fifty-thousand year old human seems so starkly different, then how would a million-year old human look? Would their behavior bear any similarity to ours?

There are two layers of response to this. As different as the lives of Bronze Age peoples might’ve been from us, their lives are unmistakably similar to ours. As my favorite example to demonstrate this point, consider this Akkadian administrative complaint lodged some four thousand years ago:

I am not getting water for my sesame field. The sesame will die. Don’t tell me later, ‘You did not write to me.’ The sesame is visibly dying. Ibbi-Ilabrat saw it. That sesame will die, and I have warned you.

“One of those moments where you absolutely feel the kinship of all human beings everywhere and at all times”, a commenter quips in response.

More generally, the pace of cultural change slows down the further back we go in the past. Industrialization speeds up the rate at which human culture evolves, while pre-industrial societies may retain the same lifestyle over thousands of years. There’s the old chestnut about how it took us more time to get from the bronze sword to a steel sword than it took us to go from steel to nuclear weapons.

As slow as pre-industrial societies are, pre-agricultural societies—those that subsist on hunting and foraging and live in small communities—change even more slowly. This is why in the deep paleoarchaeological record, we often see the same stone tool culture persisting for hundreds of thousands of years. Thousands of generations of humans were transmitting and faithfully reproducing similar toolkits.

So while it’s true that a great number of calendar years may have passed since the beginning of humanity, for a long period—not a lot changed. Not many quantum leaps or similar large-scale events that changes the face of humanity took place.

This might be a different take on the earlier question as well: God sends Prophets not at pace of calendar years, but at the pace at which cultural shifts happen. Perhaps this means the frequency of sending Prophets increased in times closer to ours? Maybe in the deep recesses of humanity’s past, hundreds if not thousands of generations of humans lived with the teachings of the same Prophet.

Ancient humans looked weird

Based on reconstructions of very early humans—especially those preceding the advent of Homo sapiens—some people worry that the earliest humans didn’t even look human. Clearly, the definition of humanity has a behavioral and an anatomical component—a creature that looks distinctly non-human is right to cause concern on our part.

The first thing to note here is that facial reconstructions of extinct humans are unreliable. At a very basic level, we have no idea what the grooming practices of ancient humans looked like. Neanderthals, for instance, wore clothing—and not just loose fur draped around their shoulders either; some evidence suggests they wore tailored, tight-fitting clothing to deal with the cold as well. Similarly, they could make cords and had cutting tools. And yet in museum displays, they’re always depicted with unkempt hair and beard and little to no clothing (see our last post for a detailed description of Neanderthal anatomy and behavior).

With that said, let’s grant that Neanderthals and other such hominins did look unconventional from a modern human perspective. Is that a point of concern? Should we let that consideration exclude them from humanity?

Strange-looking humans: Early vs. late

Consider an example from the dark science fiction All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man. At the beginning of the story, the author imagines a group of humans settling on Mars, and due to the planet’s unique environment, adopting a lithe physic.

Now say we encounter these Mars-adapted people: would we still call them humans? I’d think so. After all, they resemble us in every other important way, except having a more elongated face.

This is an extreme thought experiment: the hominin populations that interbred with modern humans did not look as different from us as these Martians did. A fortiori, therefore, we shouldn’t hesitate in considering non-sapiens hominins humans either.

Interestingly, I’ve noticed that Muslims often readily grant this premise—sure, human populations that came later might’ve looked different, even strange. However, they’re much more reticent to extend this reasoning to the earliest humans: Adam was a Prophet, so him and his immediate offspring must’ve looked similar to modern humans, the reasoning goes.

This reminds me of a small anecdote: A friend of mine was teaching a class on Islam and evolution, and at one point he brought up the possibility that Adam could’ve looked like a hominin assigned to the taxon Homo heidelbergensis. His students reacted negatively to such a suggestion, because to their minds, such a description doesn’t befit the honor of a Prophet.

I have two things to say in response to such a reaction. For one, scientists believe that the earliest human face near 800,000 to a million years ago looked considerably modern. This argument is partially based on the facial reconstruction of Homo antecessor, a group of humans postulated to have lived very close to the origin of humanity. This hominin had a flat, modern-looking face, unlike many populations that came after.

If this view is correct, that would imply that, in line with the common Muslim expectation, earliest humans did indeed look “normal”—with the strange Heidelbergensian or Neanderthal look emerging later in our history.

But more to the point, “handsomeness” is not a human universal, it’s culture-specific. Each human culture has its own conception of what is to be considered handsome or attractive, and no group of humans as a whole can be considered more or less handsome than any other. So our judgment of what type of human we consider appealing or acceptable should have little sway in determining our expectations of what Adam or his children might’ve looked like.

TL;DR: I don’t really any problem in accepting a very ancient origin of humanity.

1.1. Previously

In the last posts on this series (part 1, part 2), we explored models of human origins that are popular, but ultimately unsuccessful. The underlying problem with both of these attempts was that none of them had a principled, evidential basis for defining “humanity”—which hominins to include among the ranks of humans. The first model naively equated the modern technical term “Homo sapiens” with humanity, while the second did the same with virtually the entire genus of “Homo”.

In this post, we’ll finally explore what I think is a successful model of human origins—one that respects the strictures of the Conventional View, while also not contradicting any well-established scientific fact.

1.2. An evidential approach to defining humanity

Here’s the task that faces us. We now know that as recently as 50,000 years ago, there were a large number of extinct hominins living all across the world—we had the familiar Homo sapiens in Africa, of course, but also the Neanderthals in Eurasia, the Denisovans further east; the diminutive Homo floresiensis in the forests of Borneo, the small-brained Homo naledi near the Southern tip of Africa. Going even further back in time, there were Homo erectus populations living across different parts of Africa, and a number of hard-to-classify fossil specimens living across the past million years: Homo heidelbergensis, Homo bodoensis, Homo antecessor. The history of the genus Homo—comprising the bipedal, largely hairless hominins that kind of look like the humans currently living today—stretches back some 3 million years.

According to Islamic belief, at least some of these populations had their origins in Adam. In the last two posts, we argued that constraining Adam’s progeny to just anatomically modern humans (or Homo sapiens) raises a number of problems: for one, this population was not genetically isolated; while on the other hand, some of the earliest members of Homo (and their descendants) had too small a brain to accommodate the cognitive sophistication shared by all humans.

But then, where’s the line? Which of these hominin populations came from Adam, and which didn’t—and were merely non-human creatures that looked similar to us? If we can answer this question, we can place something of a timeline of when Adam—and with him the humanity—originated, and see if that story of human origins can survive various scientific challenges.

In this post, we’ll be taking an evidential approach to addressing this issue. We’ll look at each of these extinct populations, one at a time, and ask—does the evidence suggest that this creature was a human? You’ll note that even if we can answer this question for one or two of the extinct hominins, the model of human origin would emerge as a natural corollary. Once we have the model, we can then ask whether it faces any potential objection and address them in turn.

One thing that needs to be said: in this as well as the last two articles, we’ve been placing humanity’s origin in the distant past—at least as far back as 300,000 years (according to the “Homo sapiens” model we discussed). As we’ll discover in this post, humanity’s origin could be placed even further back—around a million years ago. Some people find this problematic on two grounds: one, scripture doesn’t suggest (maybe even contradicts) such a long history of humanity, and two, the hominins that existed so far back look…strange, not like the humans we’re familiar with.

This is a substantial enough concern to deserve a standalone discussion. In the next post of this series, we’ll explore the consequences of accepting the great antiquity of humankind, and whether that leads to any significant problems.

With all of that said, we can now start our exploration by looking at the most well-studied extinct hominin to date: the Neanderthals.

2. Neanderthals

2.1. How to recognize humanity in the fossil record

As discussed previously, the way we recognize humans can be summarized with this dictum—I know it when I see it. If we could time travel back to Late Pleistocene France, for example, and observed how Neanderthal communities looked and behaved, we would’ve been able to immediately settle the question of their humanity.

Since we’re denied that privilege, the best we can do is observe the fossil and archaeological remains left by these hominins to reconstruct their ways of life. As it happens, Neanderthals are the easiest group of hominins to do this with: they lived in Europe, which for historical reasons, has received the highest amount of archaeological attention; plus they went extinct relatively recently. As a result, we have a massive cache of stones, bones and other artifacts left behind by these hominins to analyze.

The best way to form an opinion about Neanderthal humanity is to read a book about them, particularly ones that attempt to comprehensively analyze every aspect of their biology and behavior. I can very highly suggest Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by the archaeologist Rebecca Wragg-Sykes. If reading books isn’t your thing, consider watching this beautiful amateur documentary A Neanderthal Odyssey: Everything We Know about the Neanderthals on YouTube (it’s on Spotify as well).

For shorter treatments, you might consider reading one of the several book chapters or review papers that do sweeping surveys of Neanderthal life and behavior, for example:

1. On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences by Dediu and Levinson (2013), and the 2018 follow-up: Neanderthal language revisited: not only us.

2. Behavioral Modernity, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens: a Case for Concept Retirement by Anton Killin (2026)

3. Beyond reasonable doubt: reconsidering Neanderthal aesthetic capacity by Meneganzin and Killin (2024)

4. For a tertiary account by a non-scientist, you might also consider reading chapters 10 and 11 from the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig’s book In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021).

These and other, similar accounts try to build a picture of Neanderthal intelligence and behavioral sophistication by recounting different examples of their lifeways: how they made tools, used fire, what sort of clothing they wore, if they had symbolic culture, and so on. Here’s an example from Killin (2026):

The Neanderthal record implicates mortuary treatment of the dead, complex stone tool technology including blades and bladelets, once taken to define the H. sapiens-produced Upper Paleolithic material culture, wooden spear/javelin technology, bone tools of various kinds, stone projectile tips, fiber-based technologies including rope-making, complex adhesives/hafting substances, tooth-picking including cases of habitual use, the use of painkillers, the construction of complex underground ring-like structures—remarkable circular arrangements of broken stalagmite pieces—containing traces of burning, and artefacts with artistic or aesthetic qualities. [Source, I removed all the in-text citations for easier reading]

By compiling and recounting these details of Neanderthal life, the author hopes the reader will form their own opinion about how cognitively advanced these hominins were. For the purposes of this blog post, I think that’s the best I can do as well.

In what follows, I’ll recount five snippets of Neanderthal technology and behavior—having to do with how they made complex tools, how they hunted, how they processed food, and how they engaged in symbolic or ritualistic behavior. To my mind, these examples represent the best of Neanderthal abilities as evidenced by the archaeological record. It’s my hope that by reading through this section, you’ll agree that Neanderthals definitely deserve the title of humans. No creature that have the intellectual wherewithal to pull of these feats should be denied their humanity.

But first…

2.2. Neanderthals: The Cliffnotes version

Neanderthals are a type of hominin that existed between around half a million years to some 40,000 years ago across a wide expanse of Europe and the Levant. Their fossil remains suggest they definitely looked human—although with their deep-set eyes, pulled-forward faces, flatter heads, weak (really, non-existent) chins, and large noses—they were humans of an unconventional sort. I still think Neanderthals would pass the subway test, however—if you dressed a Neanderthal in modern clothes and put him on a subway, I don’t think many people would notice.

Wynn and Coolidge in their How to Think Like a Neanderthal make this point in the following way:

[W]ould it even be possible to recognize one if he or she were dressed in modern clothing, sitting or standing at a bus stop? The answer is yes, but you might have to look closely, risking a socially awkward moment. [p. 2]

Contrary to old portrayals of these hominins, Neanderthals walked upright and wore clothing—often loose-fitted, but sometimes tailored as well. They knew how to control and use fire, made complex stone tools, and probably buried their dead.

2.3. Archaeological evidence of Neanderthal humanity

With that basic picture out of the way, here are some snapshots of Neanderthal ways of life. As you read through each of these examples, I want you to ask yourself: if you saw a human-like creature engaging in these activities, would you consider them a human, or a non-human animal?

2.3.1. Processing tar and other adhesives to make composite tools

Not only did Neanderthals make complex stone tools, they also knew the art of making composite items by joining different tools together. A small stone flake, for example, has a sharp cutting edge, so it can be used for processing meats during fine-scale butchery. But recognizing that such a cutting weapon can be hafted on to a piece of wood to make a penetrating weapon represents an even higher level of cognitive sophistication. Indeed, an influential model of intelligence suggests that being able to make hafted items incorporates all elements of technical cognition.

But I don’t want to talk about tools—I want to talk about the exact way in which these tools were being put together. In joining a stone point to a wooden handle, Neanderthals made use of a wide range of adhesives like tar, bitumen, or animal fat remains. Sometimes this required them to heat different sticky substances and mix them with another—e.g., plant resin mixed with charcoal—suggesting that this element in the composite tool required its own recipe. In commenting on what the use of adhesives meant for Neanderthal intelligence, the archaeologist Wragg-Sykes writes:

[T]o comprehend that bark would transform to sticky, pungent black liquid essentially means grasping that matter could transmute. Rather than being destroyed by fire, it would be utterly remade. Alchemy is a loaded term, yet Neanderthals certainly had concepts not far off this. [Kindred, p. 137]

Furthermore, there’s now evidence that Neanderthals made and used fibre and cords as well. Scientists have discovered three-ply cords in association with Neanderthals tools found in France. These ropes were fashioned from the inner barks of trees, which had to be separated into strands first and then twisted together to make thicker fibers. Musing on the cognitive implications on such a technology, the authors conclude their paper by saying

[I]t is difficult to see how we can regard Neanderthals as anything other than the cognitive equals of modern humans. [Source]

2.3.2. Organizing and executing coordinated group hunts

Neanderthals hunted, well, pretty much everything—animals small and large, from rabbits and marmots all the way to rhinoceros and mammoths. Some of the larger animals needed to be hunted in groups, and for our purposes, it’s useful to consider how such operations were carried out by these hominins.

In a site in Poland, for example, a coordinated group of Neandertal hunters killed a large number of horses in one go. By paying attention to the fossil and archaeological remains of predator and prey, it’s possible to construct a narrative of how this event actually went down all those millennia ago.

The overall strategy was to cul-de-sac a group of horses into an area surrounding by cliffs or large bodies of water. To accomplish this, Neanderthal hunting parties would need to have divided into two groups: one to track the horses, and one to wait in ambush. The tracker group drove the horses into the bottleneck, while the ambush group struck:

[causing] the animals to scatter in all directions. Some horses attempted to scale the steep valley walls; others ran into the river, others continued to run out of the bottleneck or turned in the opposite direction. In the chaos, Neanderthals killed indiscriminately at close quarters; confused horses trampled other horses. Later, and at their leisure, the hunters selected which animals to butcher, and took from these only what they wanted. [Source]

Neanderthals were “exemplary tacticians”, the authors conclude.

In their 2012 book How to Think Like a Neandertal, Wynn and Coolidge point out that planning and executing such complex strategies must have required a form of language—a way of referring to features of the landscape, precise locations and routes. Note that these authors represent the skeptical side of Neanderthal intelligence, so for them to make this admission is a big deal.

2.3.3. Running a “factory” for processing fat out of animal bones

Neanderthals carried out complex and large-scale food processing operations that can only be described as “factories”. In one site in Germany dated to some 125,000 years ago, Neanderthals were extracting marrow from a massive cache of animal bones by breaking them into tiny pieces and boiling them in water. When marrow-rich bones are heated this way, the grease rises to the top which can be skimmed off later. At least 172 large animal carcasses—including those of aurochs (extinct cattle), deer and horses—were processed this way in a small area close to the water’s edge.

Think about the sort of organization and strategic thinking required to carry out tasks like this: constructing a supply chain to deliver a large amount of animal remains to a lakeside area, running a massive butchery operation to break the bones down to tiny pieces, boiling them in containers of water.

While I was putting the final touches on this article, scientists ended up discovering another piece of trivia from Neanderthal activities at the “factory”. Apparently, Neanderthals living in this area were hunting small turtles and cleaning the inside of their shells. The fact that these turtles don’t yield that much food leads the authors to speculate that the shells themselves were being harvested by Neanderthals, possibly to use as tools or utensils.

2.3.4. Bodies decked out in prehistoric bling

Everything we’ve been talking about has to do with functional uses of technology, but there’s now overwhelming evidence that Neanderthals were men (and women) of culture who had artistic sensibilities. Neanderthals used pierced ivory, bone or shells as personal ornamentations, used different types of natural pigments not just to decorate their bodies but also to color their ornaments, had a particular affinity for eagle feathers and talons, and even made engravings on cave walls and other surfaces. These examples are so common that in their recent review on the topic, Meneganzin and Killin consider the aesthetic capacity of Neanderthals to be a fact “beyond any reasonable doubt”.

For example, Neanderthals living in a cave in Germany made deep markings resembling a Chevron logo on deer bone remains, while a Neanderthal cave in Italy yielded a seashell fragment that was sourced from hundreds of kilometers away. This Italian shell is a story unto itself: a Neanderthal once noticed the shell, carried it on their person for hundreds of kilometers, made a hole in it to wear as a necklace, and applied color on it by procuring a special pigment fashioned from material found miles away from their cave. Meneganzin and Killin muse:

Lots of time and energy went into such a small object. This suggests that the deliberate collection and manipulation of ‘exotic’ objects via the use of pigments was a component of Neanderthal lifeways. [Source]

2.3.5. Mysterious rituals

So this is a weird finding—I’ll first describe it in its own terms before commenting on it.

Deep inside a cave in France, scientists found a weird structure built some 176,000 years ago. By the looks of it, Neanderthals living in the area broke a large number of stalagmites and arranged them in elaborate, semicircular formations and lit fires on them. The cave otherwise contains no evidence of human habitation—no tools, no animal remains, no evidence that this place was used for any other purpose. The structure itself is more than 1000 feet away from the cave entrance, and in fact, located underground.

For reasons completely lost to time, a group of Neanderthals entered the bowels of the earth, painstakingly collected a large number of heavy rocks, arranged them in a semicircular shape, lit fires on them, and then left without setting up camp. It’s difficult to explain this as anything other than having a ritual significance.

There are other patterns in the archaeological record that suggest Neanderthal ritualism. In a cave in Spain, for instance, Neanderthals kept depositing skulls from horned animals. No other parts of their skeleton, mind you, but almost exclusively skulls, and exclusively from horned animals. Scientists reporting this find ruled out this cave from being a kill or butchery sites—i.e., where animal remains were being deposited after being killed for further processing. Nor can any geological process plausibly explain them. This leads them to speculate about other purposes such a cave might have served:

[The skulls] may represent trophies. Their concentration in a small space also suggests that the accumulation might be considered a hunting shrine. However, other interpretations cannot be ruled out, such as a link with ritual and fire (given the proximity of the evidence of the latter’s use), some expression of the symbolic relationship between Neanderthals and the natural world, or some kind of initiatory rite or propitiatory magic.

More recently, scientists looking into this site realized that this practice of depositing skulls in this cave continued for a long time. For some reason, generation after generations of Neanderthals kept visiting this cave only to deposit skulls of horned animals. This suggests not only were the Neanderthals engaging in symbolic, if not ritualistic activities—they were faithfully passing down these teachings to their children.

2.3.6. In sum: Neanderthals were cognitively complex, akin to modern humans

Let’s now take stock of our exploration of the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were expert strategists who could coordinate large and logistically complex operations, dabbled in forms of material processing that remind us of alchemy; were artsy individuals who beautified themselves and the world around them, and engaged in activities that seem ritualistic or magical—hinting at their knowledge and appreciation of a world beyond the material. When I read these accounts, I get the impression that I’m reading about any other ethnographic record of hunter-gatherer human communities living today.

Indeed, many anthropologists argue that there’s no clear distinction between how the Neanderthals and the early modern humans lived their lives. The philosopher of biology Anton Killin, for instance, recently argued that the idea that only Homo sapiens are cognitively complex or “behaviorally modern” needs to be retired, since Neanderthal activities fall squarely within the range of variation seen among modern humans.

So the next time you think “Neanderthal”, instead of picturing a hunched-over brute, learn to picture something like this:

Every aspect of this reconstruction is based on a plausible reading of the scientific evidence—stuff we’ve been discussing thus far.

For starters, this is a dead ringer for how their faces looked. Note the large nose, shelf-like brow ridge, weak chin, low forehead. They looked unconventional, but decidedly human. Secondly, as mentioned above, Neanderthals wore far more complex clothing than loincloths, including evidence suggesting that they processed animal hides to make tailored items.

But didn’t they have unkempt head and facial hair? Not necessarily—Neanderthals had access to sharp cutting stone tools which could easily have been used to trim their hair, and furthermore, we know Neanderthals and other ancient hominins practised at least some grooming (e.g., dental hygiene). We don’t know whether they similarly groomed their hair—such evidence wouldn’t fossilize—but nothing in the data rules it out.

Finally, as we saw in our discussion of Neanderthal bling, the large feathers we see him wearing, the use of red and black pigment on the face and head—all of these formed part of Neanderthal material culture.

So if Neanderthals walked like humans, quacked like humans…

2.4. Arguments against Neanderthal humanity

Lest I give you the wrong impression, there are experts who disagree that Neanderthals were cognitively equivalent to modern humans. We need to discuss their arguments as well to see if our case for Neanderthal humanity is successful in the final analysis.

To be clear, based on the archaeological evidence, it’s hard to deny that Neanderthals displayed a significant level of complex cognition. But that doesn’t immediately imply that they were our cognitive equals, and that’s really where the disagreement lies. This objection often crystallizes in skepticism about whether Neanderthals could use language, “the most complex product of human cognitive abilities and therefore possibly the highest expression of symbolic thinking”. (Source)

So, what reasons do these experts give for thinking that Neanderthals weren’t as smart as us—or that they couldn’t use complex language?

2.4.1. Rudolf Botha’s case against Neanderthal language

In his 2020 book Neanderthal Language Demystified, the linguist Rudolf Botha evaluates the case for Neanderthal linguistic capacity and comes to the conclusion that while they may have had a system of communication, it wasn’t as complex as the form of language we use.

It’s important to state at the outset that Botha doesn’t argue that Neanderthals didn’t have language—more so that we don’t know either way. He reviews a range of different arguments made to establish Neanderthal language: use of personal ornaments, cave art, the ability to engage in and teach complex toolmaking; and concludes that none of these abilities necessarily suggest Neanderthals could use language. The sole exception to this is group hunting which, as we mentioned above, requires the use of communication in order to coordinate and execute, and Botha agrees. However, the author claims even such hunting excursions could’ve been managed by rudimentary forms of language, not the complex, syntactic sort employed by modern humans.

If we accept the entire thesis of Botha’s book, all we’re led to conclude is Neanderthals definitely used a form of language, but we don’t know how complex that language was. More fundamentally, I’m not convinced by his case that Neanderthal activities didn’t necessitate complex language either, as his examples of what counts as a non-complex language are problematic. For example, he gives the example of gesture-based or sign language as a rudimentary form of language, but the very author he cites in support of this suggests that such a language can exhibit “discrete infinity”, which is the hallmark of modern language (Neanderthal Language Demystified, p. 136). This means the “rudimentary language” he’s postulating is, in fact, essentially as complex as a modern one. Botha’s categorizations of what counts as “modern” vs. “non-modern” forms of language have also been criticized (see, for example, Gabrić 2014).

2.4.2. Paleoneurological evidence against Neanderthal modernity

Regardless of whether you agree with Botha’s argument, the fact remains that he hasn’t really refuted the possibility of modern language being used by Neanderthals, only called its evidential basis into question.

But a more direct assault on Neanderthal language or cognitive sophistication comes from brain studies. The science of paleoneurology tries to decipher the abilities of extinct hominids based on their fossil remains and genetics. We can, for example, make internal molds of a fossil skull—endocasts—and study the features of the brain that once sat inside.

Homo sapiens and Neanderthal brains certainly differed in certain ways, but what does that imply about our differences? This is the question Wynn, Coolidge and Overmann take up in their recent review.

Neanderthal brains are organized somewhat differently from modern Homo sapiens brains. Homo sapiens, for instance, have larger parietal lobe—a section of the brain located near the top-back of the head, and as a result, our brains look rounder. Same goes for the cerebellum, a wrinkly region located at the back of the brain—ours is proportionally larger than those of Neanderthals. These regions in the brain are involved in, for example, a specific type of memory, a number sense (numerosity), social cognition and creativity.

It’s not implausible, therefore, that these brain differences would’ve led to differences in the cognitive capacities between the two populations. Modern humans, for instance, have an enhanced grasp of cause-and-effect reasoning, which allowed them to understand the abstract engineering concepts required to devise the bow-and-arrow. Neanderthals, in addition to never getting around to making this weapon, also had a pretty static material culture—their stone tools and other aspects of technology remained unchanged for long periods of time. This is also connected to the fact that we lived in larger groups than Neanderthals, resulting in us being generally more socially savvy and creative than them.

(Funny story—as I was putting the final touches on this article today, a new paper came out that argues that the difference between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal brains have no significant consequence when it comes to cognitive abilities! If these arguments go through, the paleoneurological objection to Neanderthal intelligence can be dispatched in one go)

What are we to make of these differences?

Note first that a lot of these claims are educated guesses—it’s not always clear how brain differences translate to behavioral ones. The archaeologist Rebecca Wragg-Sykes, for instance, says the following in this regard:

Our own brains are particularly inflated in [the frontal cortex] area compared to Neanderthals. But on the other hand, minds are famously flexible, physically adapting after serious injuries by shifting tasks between zones, and even growing new tissue in frequently used areas. Without directly observing Neanderthals in an MRI scanner, it’s hard to be certain if their big eyes and greater visual neuron volumes held back other cognitive and social capacity. [Kindred, pp. 55-56]

But more importantly, defending the humanity of Neanderthals does not mean defending the idea that their cognitive capacities were exactly similar to us. Going back to the criterion of I know humans when I see them, all we need to establish is Neanderthals were cognitively advanced enough to qualify as humans, or engage in behaviors we expect humans to engage in.

Along similar lines, Anton Killin argues that despite possible differences in cognitive capacities, human and Neanderthal abilities and behavior still overlap substantially—to the extent their activities can be placed within the wide range of behavioral variation seen among modern humans. That should be enough to deserve inclusion within humanity.

To my mind, these represent two of the most notable attempts to discredit Neanderthal cognitive sophistication.

(For the sake of completeness, I want to mention that Chomsky and/or Berwick have argued that only modern Homo sapiens used language (example 1, example 2), but I don’t think they’ve ever made clear why they think so. According to these authors and their acolytes, the essential feature of linguistic ability is a property they call Merge, but nothing about their theory of language states how far back or among which hominin populations this property could’ve emerged)

With that, I think we can safely conclude that our best evidence—or at least a plausible reading thereof—suggests that Neanderthals were indeed humans.

2.5. Genetic evidence of Neanderthal humanity

2.5.1. Our ancestors mated with Neanderthals

Thus far we’ve been building our picture of the Neanderthal Man from stones and bones. Over the past decades, however, we’ve become acquainted with another aspect of their humanity—their genetic legacy.

One of the most remarkable facts about Neanderthals was discovered when we sequenced their complete genome back in 2010. Scientists noticed that parts of the DNA found in humans looked suspiciously similar to that of Neanderthals. Not all humans, mind you, only non-Africans. Why?

Neanderthals occupied this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. If you look at a map depicting their fossil remains, their range seems to spread across much of Europe and the Levant, but Africa is where they’re conspicuously absent.

So fossil evidence tells us that Neanderthals never made it to Africa; and genetics tells us that Africans have virtually no trace of Neanderthal DNA—but the rest of humanity does. The most straightforward explanation of this pattern has to do with how the Homo sapiens dispersed across the world. The Homo sapiens population emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. When a part of them eventually started leaving the continent, the migrating wave of humans encountered Neanderthals in Europe and Asia and made babies with them, explaining why we bear the genetic legacy of Neanderthals to this day.

On the other hand, the Homo sapiens populations that stayed back in Africa never met Neanderthals, explaining why they have no Neanderthal DNA in them (not completely true—we now know even sub-saharan African populations carry some Neanderthal DNA, but that’s only because later human-Neanderthal hybrids went back to Africa and mixed genes with them. See this paper).

2.5.2. When did we interbreed—and how frequently?

The fact that our ancient ancestors made babies with Neanderthals—and that too, to such an extent that the vast majority of us still bear their genetic legacy—as well as the fact that we can nail all of this down just by reading DNA—is astonishing enough. But the science of genetics has progresses even further since then, and we’ve managed to sample even more precious ancient fossil remains and their DNA. These advances have allowed us to extract more details about the timeline and modality of Neanderthal-Sapiens interactions.

One of the more arresting facts about human genetics is that all non-Africans have pretty much the exact same amount of Neanderthal DNA.

Let’s take a second to ponder why this is strange. After all, Neanderthals didn’t live in China or Australia—they lived in parts of Europe and West Asia. And yet, Chinese, Australian and North American populations have almost the same amount of Neanderthal DNA as Europeans do. Why?

The only reasonable explanation behind this pattern is that us non-Africans received our Neanderthal genetic cargo in one go. When our ancestors left Africa and made babies with Eurasian Neanderthals, that’s the only pulse of Neanderthal DNA that got in our blood. All currently living non-Africans arose from from that hybrid population—meaning we all have the same share of Neanderthal genetic legacy.

It’s crazy how far the science has come in figuring out some of these details. Based on DNA extracted from early modern humans, we’ve identified specimens with very recent Neanderthal ancestors. A group of Homo sapiens living some 44,000 years ago in Czechia and Germany, for instance, were shown to have Neanderthal parents just about 80 generations back. For context, currently living humans are some 1,500 generations removed from the last Neanderthals.

Ok, so humans received Neanderthal DNA exactly once. But when did that happen, and how long did that period of interaction last? Large-scale analyses of ancient genomes put that date around 47,000 years ago, with the interaction between the two populations lasting some 7,000 years (another paper has corroborated this finding).

An even more recent paper—still under peer review—provided more details about how such interactions played out over those seven millennia. As the modern human groups expanded into Eurasia, they were mating with all Neanderthal populations they met along the way. So yes, Sapiens and Neanderthals intermarriage did constitute one episode, but that episode was several millennia long, and comprised countless conjugal encounters between the two populations whenever they met with each other.

Of course, all of this talk is about how Neanderthal DNA got into our genomes, but we can explore this in reverse as well: how much of Homo sapiens DNA got into the Neanderthals, and when? This is the question Joshua Akey’s team pursued a couple years ago: by poring over thousands of modern human genomes and comparing them to those of Neanderthals, they found two other episodes of interbreeding between the two populations about 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

The picture that emerges from all of this is over the past hundreds of thousands of years, waves upon waves of Homo sapiens kept encountering the Neanderthals, and whenever our ancestors met, they had children. Some of that DNA got into currently living humans, but the remnants of more ancient interactions didn’t. To me, this intimate, sustained relationship between us and the Neanderthals suggests that Neanderthals were as much of “us” as were the ancient Homo sapiens.

Perhaps even more so than the archaeological evidence, our shared genetic legacy underscores Neanderthal humanity.

2.6. TL;DR: Neanderthals were humans

Look, none of this is to say that Neanderthals were exactly like modern humans—after all, they did have a distinctive look and behavior about them. As we saw above, ancient hominin brain studies suggest that Neanderthals might not have been as socially adept, creative or innovative as Homo sapiens. Furthermore, some of their anatomical features differed from modern humans to such an extent that many scientists believe it’s scientifically useful to classify them as a different species to us (but see this for a contrasting view).

Notwithstanding these differences, given all of the evidence of their cognitive sophistication and their shared conjugal lives with our ancestors, it’s getting really hard to deprive them of the human title. Short of actually traveling back to the Middle Paleolithic, I think I’ve seen enough from Neanderthals and I now know them to be humans.

2.7. A note on Denisovans

One can’t talk about Neanderthals without mentioning another hominin species contemporaneous with them: The Denisovans.

Unlike the Neanderthals and the vast majority of hominins, we learned of the Denisovans from their genes first before we got acquainted with their bones. In the same year that the Neanderthal genome was sequenced, the same group of scientists managed to extract DNA from a hominin finger bone found in a Siberian cave. This DNA belonged belong to a population similar to both us and the Neanderthals, although they were closer to the latter. For the longest time, that’s the only robust evidence we had of the Denisovans—named after the cave in which their DNA was found—and it’s only last year that we identified a skull definitively attributable to this group. The Denisovans inhabited parts of Russia, East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Melanesian islands.

Since Denisovan fossils were hard to identify until recently, we don’t have as much information about their material culture as we do in case of Neanderthals. Remember, it’s only last year that we found out the Denisovan fossil even looks, and just a handful of remains have been confirmed to be Denisovan based on molecular evidence (See Box 1 in this paper for a quick survey).

However, there’s some circumstantial evidence suggesting the humanity of Denisovans. We now know that modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago, and yet, we find remains of “modern humans”—including rock art—in different parts of Asia before that time. One way of interpreting this pattern is to posit that these archaeological remains were left behind by Asian Denisovan populations. A 68,000-year rock art in Sulawesi, Indonesia, for instance, has been taken by some paleoanthropologists as being made by local Denisovans. If this inference is correct, then these Asian hominins would become the first human species to ever do so.

But if fossil or archaeological evidence can’t seal the inference to the humanity of Denisovans, genetic evidence certainly can. We previously interpreted the repeated and persistent mating between humans and Neanderthals as a sign of the latter’s humanity, and the same should apply to Denisovans as well—except the extent of Sapiens-Denisovan interbreeding was even greater. Different Asian humans carry varying amount of Denisovan DNA, and each group’s Denisovan legacy looks a little different from the others. The best explanation for this is that the Denisovans were living across a large part of Asia, and the expanding wave of modern humans made babies with each of the different Denisovan groups. Unlike Neanderthals, this wasn’t a one-and-done pulse, rather, the Denisovan contribution to our DNA accumulated in phases.

3. The model

3.1. If Neanderthals (and Denisovans) were humans—what follows?

Thus far I’ve been trying to argue that at least these three hominid populations were all humans:

• Homo sapiens who started off in Africa and eventually took over the world,

• Neanderthals who lived across West Asia and Europe, and

• Denisovans who lived further east.

These groups occupied the planet over the past half a million years ago, and produced offspring with each other when they met. If they represent three tribes of humanity—or, to go back to religious language—the children of Adam, their relationship is one of cousins. But if that’s the case, Adam and his earliest offspring must be the common ancestor of all these populations. The root of humanity must be located further back in the past.

But how far back? When did Adam and his earliest offspring live, and can we detect their signature in the fossil record?

We’ll be addressing this and other questions in the upcoming sections, but our work thus far gives us a skeletal form of the model. We have archaeological and genetic evidence that the Sapiens-Denisovans-Neanderthals groups were intermingling branches of humanity, so the progeny of Adam includes these populations as well as the ancestral humans that gave rise to them.

While our genus Homo goes back over two million years, as we saw in our last post, it’s naïve to assume that the origin of Homo corresponds to humanity’s origin. In fact, the earlier members of this genus (e.g., Homo habilis, H. erectus) and their later descendants (H. naledi, H. floresiensis) probably had too small a brain to accommodate the sort of complex cognition found in humans.

To complete the model, we need to find the first big-brained humans on earth that later gave rise to Homo sapiens, as well as our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins. Following the New Scientist figure above, let’s call them Ancestor X.

Well, who were those original humans—Ancestor X—and when did they live?

3.2. Who was the common ancestor?

We don’t know.

As frustrating as it might be for our purposes, we still don’t know who the Ancestor X was.

There are two ways of attacking this problem: one, by comparing the genome sequences of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens, we can figure out a rough timeline of when these populations started to diverge from their ancestral group. Two, we can then look for hominin fossils within that timeframe to see if any of them show potential as the Ancestor X.

Let’s start off with dates. Judging by how different the genomes of the three human populations are, the most up-to-date scientific estimate places their common ancestor as recently as ~700-825 thousand years ago. That’s when the ancestral group of humans split into two branches: the would-be Homo sapiens branch, and the would-be “Neandersovan” branch. This latter branch would eventually separate into Neandertals and Denisovan groups at about 500-600 thousand years ago.

Taking these dates at face value, Ancestor X could’ve lived close to a million years ago. Do we have fossils of any hominin species that lived near that timeline?

Take the Heidelberg Man—i.e., Homo heidelbergensis—whom researchers believed for a long time to have been the common ancestor for later groups. There are, however, many reasons to be skeptical of this proposal. Chief among them is the concern that Homo heidelbergensis isn’t even a coherent species, it’s more of a taxonomical “wastebasket”—scientists slap this label on whichever fossil specimen they find difficult to classify. One recent paper that looked at the variation among all of the specimens in this group concluded that the “Homo heidelbergensis” label represents more than one species.

Let’s place this data into the context of the Adamic origin of humanity. If all humans started with just a primordial couple and their immediate offspring, the earliest humans would all look similar. It’s only later through the ages that they would split into different groups and manifest differences. The fossils that are considered Homo heidelbergensis don’t look the same—in fact, they look so different that the authors suggest that they represent different hominin species. If that’s the case, clearly this group—if it’s even a coherent group to begin with—couldn’t have been the earliest humans. Instead, they’re probably just members of the already differentiated lineages leading to later human populations. (Note: I’m framing this problem in the context of Adamic Origin, but this reasoning is similar to why scientists don’t find this option plausible either)

Despite these issues, some scientists suggest that maybe the earliest members of Homo heidelbergensis could still represent our last common ancestor. Similar suggestions have been made about fossil specimens found in Spain (Homo antecessor) and Morocco around 800,000 years ago. Ancestor X or not, these groups of hominins probably represented populations much closer to humanity’s true origin. We’ll have more to say about their behavior and humanity later in the post.

All of this is to say that the science of this issue remains unsettled, and we still don’t know what the Ancestor X human population actually was. This is such a long-standing problem in paleoanthropology that the puzzle has a name: the “Muddle in the Middle” (alternatively, the “Chibanian puzzle”, in reference to that period of time). We know quite a lot about the early Homo fossil specimens like Homo erectus, and we know a decent enough about later human populations. But the period in the middle—exactly where Ancestor X lived and eventually gave rise to us and our cousins—remains mired in mystery.

Given the inconclusive nature of the evidence, we can only say this much about the model we’ve been constructing thus far: humanity consists of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans and whatever large-brained population of humans that gave rise to them around 800,000 to a million years ago.

On the other hand, the Homo populations that came before and gave rise to other hominins—Homo ergaster, H. erectus, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, H. juluensis—were non-human creatures.

3.3. Expert commentary in support of this delineation

Before we move further, let’s appreciate the fact that a not insignificant number of scientists agree with this conception of humanity, even if they might disagree with the Adamic Origin proposal itself. Commenting on how we should think about the humanity of the Denisovans, the renowned paleoanthropologist John Hawks writes:

Let me start with the question the New York Times asked me: What do we call [these new Denisovan fossils]? I call them Homo sapiens. Just like all living people, the Denisovans are part of our species. The history of repeated interbreeding among the Denisovans, Neanderthals, and their contemporaries in Africa shows that while geography may have made them look a little different, their shared biology went deep enough to bring them together into our genetic heritage. [Source]

Commenting elsewhere about the ~800,000 year old fossil found in Morocco we alluded to above, he writes:

In my way of thinking, these fossils are Homo sapiens. They fall somewhere within that tangle of groups that ultimately gave rise to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern people. [Source]

As can be seen, Hawks thinks that the three sister populations and their common ancestor—stretching back to about a million years—represent a group unified enough to deserve just one label: Homo sapiens. Humans.

However, Hawks is not so accommodating as to include other hominin species, such as those derived from Homo erectus (e.g., small-brained species like Homo floresiensis or hobbits, or Homo naledi) into humanity:

I think it is very likely that these hominins did not interbreed with humans when they met. . . . I think they were not us. Maybe DNA will someday prove me wrong about that. [Source]

So the provisional delineation Hawks seems to be making—modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and their common ancestor population = us (Homo sapiens), but Homo erectus, Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis = not us—is exactly the delineation our current model is proposing.

3.4. Quick clarification: Is this the model defended by William Lane Craig?

At the end of my last post, I mentioned that the model to be discussed in this part is one defended by William Lane Craig in his recent book on human origins. I think things are a bit more complicated than that. The evidential approach we’re using—starting from clear-cut cases of hominins that are members of humanity, and positing Adam to be their common ancestor—is indeed similar to the methods of Craig. However, Craig identifies Adam with a member of Homo heidelbergensis, while our model is more open-ended about the identity of the earliest members of humanity.

In his more recent writings on this matter, however, Craig does seem to adopt such an open-ended approach:

Given the incompleteness of the data and the provisionality of all science, the quest for the historical Adam will doubtless never end. Yet given the archaeological evidence, our tentative conclusions are not particularly susceptible to sweeping changes. Adam plausibly lived sometime between around 1 million years ago to 750,000 years ago, a conclusion consistent with the evidence of population genetics. The most recent plausible date for human origins will probably be pushed back with further palaeontological and archaeological discoveries. We may also expect clarification of the place of Homo heidelbergensis in human ­evolutionary history. But for now, that name serves as a placeholder for the large-brained human species that was ancestral to Homo sapiens and the various sister species of the human family. We can live with uncertainty. [Source])

(Also, Craig isn’t necessarily committed to the strict genetic isolation required by the Conventional View—which we’ll be discussing now)

4. Objections to the model

4.1. Going back to the Conventional View

Now that we have the model, it’s time to consider whether it violates any of the premises of the Conventional View. Let’s restate its premises for convenience:

1. Genetic isolation. After Adam and Eve were sent on earth, their children reproduced among themselves and in the process eventually filled the earth with humans. The Adamic progeny, as a whole, forms a genetically isolated group.

2. Primordial two-person founding. In addition to being genetically isolated, Banu Adam as a group was founded by exactly two individuals. All present human genetic diversity ultimately traces back to the genomes of Adam and Eve.

3. Discontinuity. Since Banu Adam—as a genus—arose via this initial, separate act of Divine Creation, we should expect a sharp disconnect between us and all other creatures—living or extinct—in terms of their characteristics and abilities. This disconnect is precisely what sets humanity apart. In other words, there are/were no humans outside the lineage of the Children of Adam. “Humankind” and “Children of Adam” are synonymous, as are H₂O and water. There might be creatures that look and act similar to us, but we won’t confuse them for humans.

4. Primordial Sophistication. Even the earliest members of humanity had advanced cognitive abilities—they were smart enough to use language, worshiped God and had associated religious concepts. We would never look at the earliest members of humanity and wonder whether they were “half-man” or “ape-man”—they would be just as recognizably human as the rest of us, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

In brief, our model predicts that humanity as we’ve defined it forms a genetically isolated population going back to just two individuals who lived around a million years ago. Even the earliest members of this population were unambiguously human, had complex language and other hallmarks of cognitive sophistication. Furthermore, humanity represented a break from the all other hominins that existed before—Homo erectus, for instance, would be qualitatively different from Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, and later human groups.

Are any of these premises contradicted—falsified—by any piece of scientific data? Let’s examine them in turn.

4.2. Was humanity (as we’ve defined it) genetically isolated?

4.2.1. The specter of interbreeding with non-humans

To make this question more precise, is there any evidence that humans exchanged genes with non-human hominins, like Homo erectus?

The most straightforward way of answering this question is to compare our genome sequence with that of a closely related “outgroup” species. For example, it was unclear for a long time whether Homo sapiens or Anatomically Modern Humans formed a genetically isolated group, or whether they shared genes with other contemporary hominins like Neanderthals. That question got definitively answered when we sequenced the Neanderthal genome and compared the two.

In this case, however, we haven’t really sequenced the genome of any of the contemporary non-human species like Homo erectus, H. naledi, or H. floresiensis. Without those sequences, the genetic isolation premise remains scientifically unfalsifiable.

However, a number of recent papers (see this paper and this blog post for a technical and lay-friendly review, respectively) have launched a more indirect challenge to this premise. Parts of our genome look quite different from others in terms of their mutational profile, and the suspicion is that these parts are foreign—they were deposited in our genomes when we bred with a very distant hominin like Homo erectus. We don’t exactly know who the contributing hominin was, since we haven’t sequenced the DNA of the hypothetical donor. Scientists have taken to call these mysterious hominins ghost superarchaics: ghosts, because we still don’t know who they were, and superarchaics, because they diverged from us such a long time ago.

Do these findings falsify the genetic isolation premise? There are at least two reasons to be skeptical.

4.2.2. Why this challenge fails

First, as I said, without a genome sequence of the contributing hominin in hand—this inference is not very robust, and scientists have been rightfully reticent to accept these claims. For example, a 2021 Nature review on the state-of-the-art of human origins research, authored by luminary paleoanthropologists like Chris Stringer, stated that the idea that we shared genes with “superarchaic” hominins lack evidential basis. I think it’s worth quoting the scientists in full context:

An emerging notion, fuelled by the many hypothesized events in the literature, is that archaic admixture into modern human populations occurred frequently whenever these groups came into contact. Although such admixture complexity is certainly plausible, we argue that the currently well-supported events include only those described above [i.e., gene flow from Neanderthals and Denisovans].

The current genomic data also do not support substantial unknown ‘ghost’ archaic ancestry in non-Africans^89,98,99, for example from Homo erectus or other groups. More substantial amounts of such ancestry would give rise to an excess of ancestral variants in some non-African groups over others, detectable even without access to the source genome, a signal that can be confirmed for Denisovan ancestry¹⁰.

A similar statement is echoed by John Hawks on his Substack when he writes:

Every “ghost” is a mathematical construct waiting for DNA from ancient skeletons to test whether it was real.

Secondly, a cache of more recent papers have argued that what some scientists interpret as the evidence for “ghost” gene flow into humans can be explained more readily by this phenomenon called population structure. Essentially, a population might not be completely genetically homogeneous: that only happens if everyone in the population marries everyone else and genes are exchanged freely between members. In reality, populations exist as groups of people that contact each other only infrequently. This sort of “structure” or heterogeneity in a population can leave a mark in our genome that looks like foreign gene flow, even though it’s just isolated populations coming in contact with each other.

Arguing along these lines, another Nature paper shows that if we assume the human population existed as two different groups about a million years ago, and one of those groups (“stems”, to use the authors’ language) later came in contact with the other human group—that can result in some parts of our genome looking very divergent; in fact, the authors demonstrate that this model explains the data even better.

We’re still dealing with pretty wispy science at this point, so naturally, other papers had come up with different timelines for when the two human groups existed or diverged (e.g., sometimes going back to 1.5 million years); but the bottomline is the data at hand is definitely not concrete enough to rule out a genetically isolated human population stretching back to about a million years.

4.3. Could humanity have arisen from a primordial pair of humans?

As we discussed in our last post, a very low population size is only detectable in genomics data if it lies within the past 500,000 years, and if it lasts more than a few generations. Since our posited origin of humanity goes well past that point—and early human generations could’ve produced many children—nothing in the genetic data rules out a primordial two-person founding.

4.4. Did the earliest members of humanity behave like humans?

4.4.1. Skepticism about the humanity of the Ancestor X

This is a substantial issue that deserves a detailed discussion. Throughout the article, I’ve been at pains to convince you that Neanderthals (and Denisovans) did have the cognitive sophistication and complexity to deserve the “human” title. However, can that be said for hominins that existed before them—those close to the mysterious Ancestor X, who lived nearly a million years ago?

Why not? If Neanderthals had complex language, and Homo sapiens had complex language, then their common ancestor (including Homo heidelbergensis) must also have had this capacity. But Wynn and Coolidge (2011) aren’t convinced:

Most scholars find this highly unlikely, largely because Homo heidelbergensis brains were slightly smaller than ours and smaller than Neandertals’, but also because the archaeological record of Homo heidelbergensis is much less “modern” than either ours or Neandertals’. [p. 130]

Homo heidelbergensis brains were about 100cc smaller than Neanderthal and Homo sapiens brains, both of whom have a median brain size of about 1350cc (I calculated these values from the supplementary information in this paper. Denisovan brain size fell in a similar range). We don’t have intact brain cases from Homo antecessor, but estimates range from 1000-1150cc. This is within the variation of brain size seen among modern humans, but definitely smaller on average.

Does this difference in brain size translate to different abilities and behavior? Maybe, but going back to our discussions about paleoneurology: it’s not necessary for a hominin to be exactly as smart, creative or socially savvy as the modern human in order for their inclusion among humanity. As long as they had complex language and a sophisticated enough form of cognition, they could still be meaningfully described as humans. Remember our litmus for identifying humanity—I know it when I see it: as long as a hominin displays recognizably human looks and behavior, that’s enough to consider them humans.

With that said, what does the archaeological record say about the humanity of these early hominins?

4.4.2. The pre-Sapiens/Neanderthal/Denisovan archaeological record

The archaeological record prior to the advent of the three later human populations is scant for sure, but even that record suggests that the hominins living even prior to the three sister groups were doing some pretty complex stuff.

For one, hominins before the advent of Neanderthals, much less modern humans, had the ability to make and use fire—with evidence for controlled fire use for cooking fish going back some 800,000 years ago.

European members of Homo heidelbergensis were making throwing spears out of wood, which they presumably used to hunt large game like horses. Scientists have recently produced a complete description of these wooden tools and reconstructed the steps needed to make them. Here’s a figure from their paper:

These operations require significant conceptualization and planning depth in order to execute. In our discussion on Neanderthal toolmaking, we mentioned that hafting—the act of joining two different tools to make a new one—is reflective of sophisticated cognitive abilities. As it happens, the earliest evidence of this goes back half a million years ago in South Africa, prior to the advent of Neanderthals.

Around the same time, members of the Homo heidelbergensis in England were busy making extremely thin, symmetric handaxes out of stone, exhibiting a level of dexterity “comparable to modern Homo sapiens experts” [Source].

Evidence of pre-Neanderthal hominins making artificial shelters similarly go back to 400,000 years, while the existence of wooden “furniture” employing joinery goes back even further, to nearly half a million years ago.

Pulling these strands together, it seems like hominins living before Homo sapiens or Neanderthals could organize hunting activities, made complex, hafted tools out of stone and wood, knew how to use and control fire, made “huts” and other wooden furniture, and—evidenced by their use of pigment and the symmetric shapes of their tools—possessed an aesthetic capacity as well; which also implies they probably employed elaborate modes of communication.

Despite how far back in the past these hominins lived, the fact that there are scattered but recurrent signs of humanity suggests they could’ve possessed the sort of cognitive sophistication we would with humans.

4.4.3. What does the absence of archaeological evidence imply about human cognition?

That said, it’s true that we don’t see the amount of evidence associated with, say, Neanderthal sophistication as we do in case of these earlier hominins. Does this fact call the humanity of these very early members of our lineage into question?

This leads us to a more fundamental point about paleoanthropology: cognitive capacity isn’t always straightforwardly reflected in the archaeological record, for at least three reasons. One, archaeological preservation is biased against humans who lived very far back in the past, because the further back we go, the less probably it is that the material would be preserved. Two, a lot of material culture is made up of perishable material, which wouldn’t survive preservation at all. And three, just because a human population has the cognitive capacity to make, for example, complex tools, doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily do it—or at least do so at a scale that’ll become preserved. Taken together, these facts suggest that an absence of evidence in the archaeological record doesn’t imply the evidence of absence.

4.4.3.1. Most material culture is perishable

Consider the second point about perishable material culture. Six years ago, a paper furnished evidence to the effect that Neanderthals knew how to make fibre cords. This is an extremely complex piece of technology, one that enables the making and use of tailored clothings, bags, baskets, mats, and much else besides. However, the only remnant of this technology is a 6-mm long piece of cord that was stuck to the side of a stone tool. That means virtually all evidence associated with this cottage industry was lost to time. And we’re talking about quite recent events—within the past 100,000-years.

The point here is that fibre, or other artifacts made from perishable material, doesn’t preserve well. This is also why a lot of the evidence of complex culture near the half a million year-mark all represent one-hit wonders: we’ve only ever found one example of wooden furniture, one cache of wooden spears, one example of artificially constructed shelters. Clearly, the humans in this period were engaging in a lot more woodworking, but these are the only remnants left.

But maybe the perishable stuff forms a small part of human material culture? Not really. In an interesting study published last year, Stibbard-Hawkes studied the material culture of three modern (as in, currently living) African tribes, and came to the startling conclusion that almost none of their material culture would become preserved in the archaeological record. These are modern humans, mind you; and yet—the vast majority of their lifeways finds its expression in perishable material.

Extending his conclusions to the paleoanthropological deep past—the vast majority of archaeological evidence associated with ancient humans would probably be lost to time. As such, it’s premature to conclude from a lack of material culture to its absence, much less the cognitive sophistication required to produce it.

4.4.3.2. Just because humans can, doesn’t mean they will

Let’s say we take a group of humans, decked out with their huge brain and complex cognition, and leave to fend for themselves in the wild. Clearly, these humans do have the cognitive wherewithal to make complex tools out of stones, bones and wood. But would they in fact do it?

It’s not clear that they would. Consider fire-making: it involves a relatively simple chain of operation involving two dry sticks and tinder; and yet there are at least five records of human tribes that didn’t use it. They could, just didn’t. Clearly, there’s a difference between performance and capacity.

This is the point Stibbard-Hawkes makes in the study we just referenced. Commenting on this paper, Ben-Oren et al. point out that the archaeological record almost always shows a time lag between the first emergence of complex, sophisticated cognition, and more persistent examples of it. Consider the famous Bruniquel Cave that Neanderthals built underground, for instance: that happened some 176,000 years ago. Clearly, Neanderthals knew how to build artificial shelters. But in the next 100,000 years or so, we never saw anything like this—either from Neanderthals or their Homo sapiens cousins.

This is also a much more general problem in paleoanthropology, sometimes referred to as the sapient paradox. Homo sapiens entered the fossil record at around 300,000 years ago, but for the next hundreds of thousands of years, their archaeological record was pretty similar to those of Neanderthals. The plentiful creative innovations we associate with modern humans came along much further down the line. It’s almost as if it took humans an unimaginably long time to start acting like humans. This suggests that having cognitive capacity alone doesn’t translate to doing cognitively complex stuff, much less the sort that would get preserved in the material record.

Ben-Oren conclude their take with the following words:

[F]or any cultural trait to appear in the archeological record, it needs to be invented, adopted, and preserved. We suggest that each of these steps is governed by multiple factors other than the cognitive capacity of the individual, meaning that while symbolic artifacts may be proof of sophisticated cognitive abilities, their absence does not rule out the existence of such abilities.

Bringing these threads together: for one, we do see sparks of sophisticated cognition in the material record left prior to modern humans and Neanderthals; and for two, an absence of such evidence wouldn’t rule out the cognitive sophistication of the earliest members of humanity.

4.5. Did the earliest humans represent a distinctly different creature from those that came before?

According to the Conventional Model, humans should be immediately recognizable as humans, and by extension—non-humans should also be recognizable as such. If we posit that that the Ancestor X and its offspring populations exhibited sophisticated cognition and language, that also imply the non-human hominins like Homo erectus were lacking such an ability. Is this premise borne out by the evidence?

The discussion in the previous section should be clarifying in this regard: since human cognitive prowess isn’t immediately reflected in the archaeological record, it’s nigh impossible to say how each hominin differed from a previous one in terms of their behavioral capacities. So the discontinuity premise is something that remains scientifically unfalsifiable.

5. Putting it all together

5.1. Limitations of the project

This concludes our discussion of a model of human origins that respects all the premises of the Conventional View.

At this point, some may rightfully object at the fact that this model places Adam so far back in the past. Can a straightforward reading of scripture accommodate a million-year old history of humanity? This question is substantial enough to deserve its own article—so be on the lookout for the next post in this series, in which we explore the great antiquity of man and its potential problems.

It’s now time to discuss some of the crucial limitations of the project we’ve undertaken. First, I’m still very much acquainting myself with the human evolution literature, so it’s possible I’m getting a few things wrong—and that should be an ongoing disclaimer for every article on this Substack. Specifically, I still have a lot of reading to do when it comes to the science of constructing population histories from genetics, and the transition to behavioral modernity.

Secondly, as mentioned among the disclaimers in the first post, for the purposes of the series we’ll be taking scientific claims at face value. You’ll notice that throughout this article, I’ve pretty much taken study findings at their words. Ideally, however, the next step(s) of the project would require going into each of the studies and investigate the evidential basis of each claim. This is especially a concern when it comes to constructing the history of human populations: how do we know which genomic signals are suggestive of interbreeding or population structure? How do we date events like gene flow and population split/divergence? How robust are these inferences made by the more recent papers? These are all questions that need to be explored in our next phases.

Thirdly, other than positing the initial creation of humans via Adam and Eve, I’ve kept the account free from any supernatural intervention. Of course, this is not how our history necessarily played out. It might’ve been that the earliest humans had a higher rate of mutation or reproduction, for instance, and that might have affects on the genetic data we have. These are subtle issues that need to be explored as well. It goes without saying that allowing the possibility of such interventions would make defending these models considerably easier. For the purposes of this project, though, we didn’t go that route.

5.2. The triumph of Adamic Origins

Those caveats notwithstanding, the main takeaway from this long exercise is the following. One can believe that all of humanity came from a single primordial couple, who were, in turn, placed on the earth in a supernatural act of God—and none of the scientific data we’ve accrued to this day would go against it. In fact, we can believe the most conservative version of this story—adhere to all the premises of the Conventional View—and it would remain unfalsified by today’s science.

I think this conclusion is significant. After all, there are many ways in which this might not have been the case. Only a few decades ago, a prominent theory of human origins was the Multiregional Model, which suggested, roughly, that all the ancient hominin populations inhabiting the different parts of the world eventually morphed into modern humans. If that were the case, we would’ve had to trace the origin of humanity so far back that the earliest “humans” wouldn’t look or act humans at all. In that reality, there couldn’t have been any plausible defense of Adamic Origins, at least none that respects the strictures of the Conventional View and saves itself from scientific falsification.

We can imagine other ways that reality could’ve been more problematic for a Muslim. Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans could’ve become so diverged that it would be impossible to place their common ancestor within a reasonably recent timeframe. Or, we might not have had the evidence for Neanderthal cognitive sophistication, which would mean that humans exchanged genes with, arguably, non-human brutes.

None of those things happened. We found pretty strong evidence of humanity for three contemporaneous hominin populations, and traced them back to a point in time inhabited by big-brained hominins that look very similar to us.

Could our exercise here have been easier? Well, one could imagine a world where all members of humanity looked and behaved exactly the same, and we didn’t have to puzzle over the humanity of Neanderthals, Denisovans or the Ancestor X. Furthermore, while tracing our origins back to a million years isn’t disqualifying, it could’ve been placed to a more recent point in time, one inhabited by hominins with even bigger brains and better evidence of cognitive sophistication.

It’s worth asking, however, whether these unfulfilled prospects are due to the model we’re defending, or because of how paleoarchaeological data gets preserved. Imagine a world where we only had two types of hominins: Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. One would like to think that in such a reality, one species could’ve been clearly identified as non-human (H. erectus), while the other as human (H. sapiens). But it might not have been as straightforward: because even in such a convenient reality, the aforementioned Sapient Paradox would exist. Scientists would doubt the humanity of the earliest members of Homo sapiens, as they continue to do until today, owing to the lack of complex material culture associated with the first humans. So just the quirks of archaeological preservation would open us up to skepticism, even in a reality where an Adamic Origins model is theoretically easier to defend.

Finally, to reiterate, we’ve come this far while not questioning the science or allowing further supernatural interventions; but one could argue that these strictures are unreasonably strict. If God created humanity in an act of special creation, it’s not question-begging to assume that such acts wouldn’t just stop. Adam was a Prophet, and the Qur’an mentions that God was in active communication with him and his children—so there might’ve been miraculous events in early human history that shaped the genetic data. We’ve defended our model of Adamic origins without allowing us to access that breathing room, which would only make the task more tractable.

5.3. What comes next?

Of course, our entire evaluation is based on the scientific data reported to this day: future advances might confirm or disprove aspects of this model. The field of paleoanthropology moves super fast—as it happens, a big study on Neanderthal brains dropped today, as I was putting the finishing touches on this document.

As time wears on, we’ll probably find more and more evidence of ancient material culture, placing the primordial sophistication of humans on surer footing. On the other hand, sooner or later we’ll end up sequencing the genome of a Homo erectus, which might demonstrate evidence of human-eretcus interbreeding, thereby falsifying the genetic isolation premise. We don’t know how the model will fare in the days to come.

Are there any futureproof models of Adamic Origin—models that are almost in principle impossible to falsify? There are. In recent times, some theologians have argued that at least two of the premises of the Conventional View aren’t necessarily scripturally warranted, and we can either do away with them completely or accept a more permissive version of them. These adjustments have made it possible to defend models of Adamic Origin that are almost completely unfalsifiable. No matter which direction science progresses, the models would remain unscathed.

This is a fascinating discussion that we’ll explore in the article after the next one.

1.1. Previously

We set out the purpose and scope of our project in part 1 of this series: in brief, the goal is to construct stories of human origins (“models”) that are allowable by scripture while also being in line with empirical reality. As an entry point to this discussion, we outlined four premises that are widely accepted by Muslims about Adamic origin, which are worth recounting:

1. Genetic isolation. After Adam and Eve were sent on earth, their children reproduced among themselves and in the process eventually filled the earth with humans. The Adamic progeny, as a whole, forms a genetically isolated group.

2. Primordial two-person founding. In addition to being genetically isolated, Banu Adam as a group was founded by exactly two individuals. All present human genetic diversity ultimately traces back to the genomes of Adam and Eve.

3. Discontinuity. Since Banu Adam—as a genus—arose via this initial, separate act of Divine Creation, we should expect a sharp disconnect between us and all other creatures—living or extinct—in terms of their characteristics and abilities. This disconnect is precisely what sets humanity apart. In other words, there are/were no humans outside the lineage of the Children of Adam. “Humankind” and “Children of Adam” are synonymous, as are H₂O and water. There might be creatures that look and act similar to us, but we won’t confuse them for humans.

4. Primordial Sophistication. Even the earliest members of humanity had advanced cognitive abilities—they were smart enough to use language, worshiped God and had associated religious concepts. We would never look at the earliest members of humanity and wonder whether they were “half-man” or “ape-man”—they would be just as recognizably human as the rest of us, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

These constitute what we called the Conventional View. The constraints of these premises allow certain models of Adamic origins and disallow others. This helps us neatly categorize models into two groups: ones that accept all premises of the Conventional View, and the ones that don’t.

In the previous post, we started our exploration of some of the models of the first type, and that exploration continues today—and will continue in the next post as well. Spoiler alert: at the end of this process, we will have identified at least one model fitting these criteria. The rest of the series will then explore models that diverge from the Conventional View and see how they fare. (Incidentally, when I said this was going to be a tripartite series—I was lying, because clearly this middle section is way too long to be crammed into one article)

At the end of the series you’ll hopefully have acquired a broad idea of the entire landscape of allowable models for Adamic Origin, the ones that work, the ones that don’t, and why people disagree about them.

1.2. Let’s learn about wrong models first

This series is not just meant to give you the answers, but also to educate you in the process of thinking through human origins. As such, before we get to the models that work, we have to discuss the models that don’t.

We built and destroyed one such popular model in our last article: the idea that the progeny of Adam corresponds to the group of humans referred to as Homo sapiens (or Anatomically Modern Humans) by the contemporary scientific community. This was not a waste of time: in thinking through why this model ultimately fails, we learned that it’s not easy or obvious to define the hominins that correspond to the everyday term, human (or the corresponding religious term—Adam’s progeny or children). The world we inhabit today has just one type of hominin, Homo sapiens, and we are all remarkably similar to each other. Such wasn’t always the case, however—the earth was once populated by many other hominin species. How do we know these now extinct species were also not humans—from the progeny of Adam? That’s not an easy question to answer.

To blithely equate the meaning of Homo sapiens with “human” commits the fallacy of conflating technical and regular-use terms, a common pitfall in science-religion discourse. As we saw in the last post, such a fallacy results in statements that contradict the Conventional View, and therefore a failed model.

We will continue the same exercise in this essay as well. We will explore yet another model of Adamic origin that’s very popular among Creationists, but—in my opinion at least—doesn’t really work. In the process of this exercise we will acquire two new lessons about human origins: the need to avoid theologically unjustified motivations, and the process of defining or recognizing humans. These lessons will be crucial in eventually defending a robust model of Adamic origin.

2. Humans are a genus, not a species

2.1. The model, described

The first bipedal hominins that we have evidence for lived 6 to 7 million years ago. A little further down the line, we reach one of the most well-known fossil hominins ever preserved: Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecis afarensis. Members of these and other extinct genera of great apes—Sahelanthropus, Ororin, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Kenyanthropus, Paranthropus—did walk on two feet, but no one would ever mistake them for a human.

It’s only around 3 million years ago that the situation starts changing: A large number of hominin fossils are found to resemble us to such an extent that scientists placed them in the same genus as ours, Homo. This group includes Homo sapiens, of course, but also the European Neanderthals, the Asian Denisovans, the scattered populations of Homo erectus who persisted on earth for nearly 2 million years, the diminutive “hobbit-man” or Homo floresiensis that once occupied the forests of Borneo, as well as the mysterious small-brained Homo naledi that lived along the southern tip of Africa. Clearly, these and other extinct Homo populations extended across a massive geographic and temporal range, and the first traces of the members of this genus were dated to some 2.8 million years ago.

A very popular model of Adamic Origin is to posit that all (or at least, the vast majority) of these populations can be considered the children of Adam. On this view, Adam lived well over 2 million years ago and all of these species are derived from his stock.

At first blush, this view doesn’t seem crazy—after all, the Latin phrase Homo just means human, and in popular presentations these groups are often given the generic label of “human” as well. If you visit the Smithsonian Museum’s website, for instance, they refer to the hobbits as an “early human species”, and news stories reporting new fossil discoveries likewise describe even early members of the Homo genus as humans. The rarefied title of “modern humans” is reserved from the most recent entrant in this genus, Homo sapiens (literally, “wise man”).

If our encounter with the “humans are Homo sapiens” model in the previous post has taught us anything—it’s probably a bad idea to take such popular equivocations at face value. This view, however, has other justifications going for it which are worth examining in more detail.

2.2. Justifications for accepting this model

2.2.1. Creationism and discontinuity

This model of equating humans with the genus Homo has deep roots in the broader creation-evolution discourse. It was originally propounded by members of the Christian Young-Earth Creationist community (henceforth, YECs), having since received support from prominent proponents of the Intelligent Design movement as well. These two groups represent the most dominant voices in the creation-evolution interaction space, which explains the popularity of this model.

But what are the justifications for holding such a view? To understand this, it would be worthwhile to explore the YEC theology of nature in a bit more detail—that’s where the root of this particular model of human origins is to be found.

Young-Earth Creationists believe that the universe—including the earth and its biodiversity—and, of course, humans—were created just a few thousands of years ago, and that too over the course of one week (literally, six 24-hour days). This implies that each kind of animal on earth were created separately by God within the same period. These beliefs follow straightforwardly from a literal reading of Genesis 1:

¹¹ And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. ¹² The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ¹³ And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. . . ²⁰

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” ²¹ So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ²² And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” ²³ And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. ²⁴

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. ²⁵ And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (English Standard Version, emphasis mine. I’ve omitted the verses between 14 and 20, which describe the creation of night and day, seasons of the year and various astronomical phenomena—not strictly relevant to the biological evolution discussion)

As you may note, the “according to their/each kind(s)” refrain runs through these passages, and that phrase is instrumental in informing YEC views about creation. God created all kinds of creatures—plants and animals—in the beginning, and those creatures eventually reproduced among themselves to generate the great biodiversity we see today.

The question is, what does the word “kind” refer to here? Does that simply mean species? Today’s YECs generally do not think so—they don’t believe God created each species exactly as they look now. Instead, they interpret the word “kind”—min in Hebrew—to mean more inclusive groups of animals. Here are some examples from the New Creation blog:

Terriers, fennec foxes, huskies, and bone-crushing dogs all share a common ancestor that was created by God. They are distinct from members of the cat family (Felidae), like leopards, lions, house cats, and saber-toothed cats. Our feline friends probably belong to a completely different min. In a similar fashion, chickens, turkeys, pheasants, and quail are thought to represent their own min. Meanwhile hawksbill, olive ridley, loggerhead, and green sea turtles are united within a completely different min. (Source, see under “Seaways of Discontinuity”)

For the YEC, then, God didn’t create house cats, lions, tigers and leopards separately during the Creation Week; instead, He created representatives of the cat kind who reproduced to produce the various genera and species we see today.

Contrary to popular belief, therefore, many, if not most YECs do believe in macroevolution—the idea that natural evolutionary processes can give rise to new species, or even new genera. However, there are limits to this, and that limit is at the boundaries of each min or kind. The cat-kind, for instance, can’t evolve into the dog-kind.

How these kinds are to be defined is a hot area of YEC research. Somewhat simplistically, YEC proponents make use of anatomical and physiological characteristics of each animal to place them into separate kinds. In this way, this task doesn’t look very different from the mainstream scientific field of systematics, and YECs have developed their own statistical terminology and tools to measure similarity between organisms and assign them to kinds. This field is referred to as Baraminology—from the Hebrew words “bara” and “min”, meaning Created Kind.

In some ways this is a fascinating phenomenon: YEC thinkers have started from a different set of assumptions about earthly biodiversity and developed an entire, non-mainstream statistical discipline in parallel. To get a taste of this literature, you can read YEC papers on bird kinds, turtle kinds, or even read this Baraminology tutorial using grass kinds as a case study. As a strange subversion of this, the mainstream biologist Philip Senter applied baraminological methods to demonstrate that dinosaurs in fact evolved, contrary to Creationist expectations.

How does any of this relate to human origins, or identifying the hominin populations that constituted Adam’s progeny?

2.2.2. The baraminology of humans

A fundamental expectation of YEC views about biodiversity is that each kind of animal must look profoundly different to each other, since they were created separately. As discussed above, while members of the same kind—tigers, leopards, lions, house cats—might have differences among themselves as well, the extent of dissimilarity between different kind is stark and insurmountable. For the YEC proponent, earthly biodiversity is fractured, not smooth or continuous.

One can demonstrate the YEC thought about biodiversity using the following metaphor (borrowed from here). Imagine all creatures representing islands on an ocean. Each island is occupied by members of the same Created Kind, held together by their similarity with each other. However, between each island are seaways of discontinuity that are impossible to traverse.

Applying these intuitions to human origins, YECs believe that humans as a group must likewise exhibit an extreme, stark amount of dissimilarity with all other creatures, including extinct hominin. To be sure, the discontinuity between humans and non-human creatures is also a premise of the Conventional View on Adamic Origin. However, the YEC expectation of discontinuity is more extreme than this: they posit that not only must humans differ from other creatures in cognitive abilities (e.g., the ability to use language or complex symbolic thought), but their physical features, including skeletal characteristics—must also be very different. In fact, the extent of physical differences must be so great that they can be read off from the fossil evidence alone.

Because of this expectation, for a long time YEC thinkers assumed that humans are the only bipedal hominins—no other hominin could ever have walked upright on two feet. Perhaps the most famous hominin fossil was Lucy—Australopithecus afarensis—a creature that could walk on two feet, but would not be considered humans by any stretch of the imagination. This would be an inconvenient fact if you want to maintain that only humans could ever have been bipedal, which led influential YEC proponents to claim that the bipedal reconstruction of Lucy was fraudulent. This is an extremely common mini-conspiracy circulating among YECs, although it’s been waning as of recent. But this goes to show how strong the creationist expectation about human-nonhuman discontinuity is: they require a veritable chasm of anatomical difference to exist between us and them, often going so far as to posit bipedalism as being human-unique.

Perhaps the single most important contribution to the human discontinuity thesis was the YEC thinker Marvin Lubenow’s 1992 book, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils (I read the 2004 edition of the book over a decade ago). Lubenow classified the few fossils that have been discovered by then into two categories—“humans” and “apes”—based on their anatomical features. According to his scheme, Neanderthals and Homo erectus fossils were both classified as humans (along with Homo sapiens, obviously), while members of the Australopithecus genus were considered apes. (Lubenow included a few other specimens in his categorization as well which we’re omitting for the sake of simplicity)

As mentioned above, the latter half of his thesis—that Australopithecines weren’t humans—is uncontroversial. What was novel was including these very ancient non-sapiens hominins—including early members of the Homo genus—in the human group. We briefly considered the prospects of considering Neanderthals as humans—i.e., children of Adam—in the first part of this series, a topic that will occupy us in the next post as well. But broadening the definition of humankind to include Homo erectus—a hominin group that emerged some 1.8 million years ago—would turn heads.

We’ll get to the plausibility of this extension soon, but remember the main YEC motivation behind building their models: identifying massive discontinuity between humans and nonhumans. Since no one would say Australopithecus were humans, placing the human-nonhuman boundary between them and members of the genus Homo wasn’t a crazy idea.

Also consider, Lubenow’s model was proposed a long time ago. By the early 1990s, only a handful of hominin fossils had been discovered and even mainstream scientists thought Homo erectus represented a marked departure from hominins that preceded it. Creationists, for instance, quoted this passage from a 2000 paper authored by the anthropologist John Hawks:

[N]o gradual series of changes in earlier australopithecine populations clearly leads to the new species, and no australopithecine species is obviously transitional. (Sourced from this paper, under the section A Genetic Revolution)

So even mainstream scientists seemed to be suggesting that the island occupied by Homo erectus and other humans were surrounded by seaways of discontinuity from ape or nonhuman-inhabited islands.

2.2.3. How have things changed since Lubenow 1992?

Since Lubenow, we’ve had a steady stream of hominin fossil discoveries which has led YEC thinkers to update and fine-tune their views. But in all this time, the basic YEC model hasn’t really changed: most, if not all, members of the hominin populations placed in the Homo genus should be considered from Adam’s progeny, while all other genera should be considered nonhumans. Lubenow was one of the early influential thinkers to spell this out, and his views have by and large been maintained since then.

The reason behind this lack of change is not hard to understand. In YEC systematics, the focus is always on discontinuity—identifying seaways of vast dissimilarity between groups of organisms. That was held by Lubenow, and it’s held today. The way of inferring such seaways and islands has updated as more fossil evidence has rolled in, but again, the overall picture remains intact.

To get a taste of a cutting-edge example of how discontinuity is inferred between humans and nonhumans in YEC thinking, consider the case of the YEC geneticist Todd C. Wood. Wood started his career as a mainstream geneticist, and perhaps because of that training he attempts to bring a degree of robustness to Creationist thinking by using advanced statistical methods.

In a 2016 paper, for instance, Wood conducted a comprehensive survey of hominin fossil specimens discovered to date. Instead of just labeling fossils as “humans” and “apes” based on vibes, Wood tabulates each anatomical feature found in these specimens and compares them to modern humans and apes. He then transforms these features into mathematical representations and plots them, a technique that allows researchers to classify things based on their similarity. The general method is very commonly used in a wide range of scientific fields, including taxonomy and systematics—Wood here is co-opting those methods to answer a question he finds interesting.

Here’s how one of his plots look:

Each point in this plot represents a species, and their position in the graph represents a composite metric derived from all of their anatomical features. We don’t need to understand the mathematical guts behind the plot to understand the overall takeaway: the closer the points are, the more similar the corresponding species are; the further they are, the more dissimilar or “discontinuous”.

As can be seen, all the yellow points—corresponding to the members of the genus Homo—do group closely together, quite distant from living or extinct apes. If robust discontinuity is the criterion to go by, Wood’s scheme does manage to capture the gulf between putatively human and non-human organisms.

This is the main motivation for the “all Homo are human” model of Adamic origin. Lest I give you the wrong impression, this way of thinking about Adamic Origin is not confined to YECs—some proponents of the Intelligent Design movement also subscribe to this view, although they are more open to accepting mainstream datings of these fossils (i.e., not thousands of years as held by the YECs).

Despite its pervasive presence in the creation-evolution discourse, the Intelligent Design movement’s main concern isn’t human evolution. However, there’s been at least one prominent publication on the topic from this camp: the 2012 book Science and Human Origins. In the relevant chapter of the book, the ID-proponent geologist Casey Luskin states:

Hominin fossils generally fall into one of two groups: ape-like species and human-like species, with a large, unbridged gap between them. [Science and Human Origins, p. 45]

Unlike Wood, Luskin doesn’t use statistical methods to justify his claims, relying instead on detailed expert descriptions of the fossil specimens. Either way, this suggests two things: one, the model has acceptance in groups not strictly associated with the YECs; and two, extreme discontinuity is considered by many to be a useful tool to separate humans from nonhuman creatures. (I don’t mean to give the impression that Luskin or other prominent ID figures hold this view today—you can read his more recent paper here where he compares different models).

With all that said, now it’s time to ask: can a Muslim reasonably accept such a view?

3. Evaluation

As mentioned previously—and as their name suggests—Young Earth Creationists adopt non-mainstream views about the timeline of human origins. Whereas the scientific community at large places the origin of the Homo genus well over 2 million years ago, the YEC proponent is forced to posit that all of these hominin populations are only a few thousand years old, and so is the earth they occupied. Islamic scriptures are by and large silent on the dates of humanity’s origin, so Muslims are free to accept the mainstream dates for these fossils. There might be indirect concerns about placing the origin of humanity in such deep antiquity—a topic we’ll discuss in more detail in the next article.

With that adjustment, the model that we have on the table suggests that Adam was sent on earth over two million years ago, and his descendants included almost all populations classified as Homo. The small-brained early Homo erectus or the island-confined hobbit-men are just as much from the progeny of Adam as are modern humans living today. On the other hand, the various hominins that came before: Lucy or other members of Australopithecus, other bipedal species that preceded it by several millions of years—none of them are humans, and instead represent something like the bipedal variations of great apes.

At this point, the key question to ask is: does this model violate any of the premises of the Conventional View laid out in the beginning?

3.1. The good: Hard to falsify

The good thing about this model—and with generally placing the origin of humanity so far back in the past—is that it’s effectively shielded from various types of scientific falsification. For example, we don’t have genome sequences from early members of the Homo species, meaning we can’t form conclusions about whether they mated with non-Homo populations like the Australopithecines. Nor can we exclude the possibility of a two-person founding event at such prehistoric depth. That means just as a consequence of the postulated origin of humanity being so ancient, it’s impossible to draw out falsifiable scientific predictions about their genetic isolation or two-person founding. If the goal is to tell stories about human origins that aren’t contradicted by scientific data, these would qualify as positives.

Whereas we don’t have any genetic evidence from these early hominins, we have plentiful fossil and archaeological remains—and that can allow us to reconstruct how these hominins looked, lived, and differed from non-Homo populations. This is where the two other premises of the Conventional View become relevant.

3.2. The unnecessary: Sharp discontinuity

We saw above that the main motivation for grouping humans and non-humans this way is the perceived discontinuity between them. Of course, our goal here is to see whether such models are acceptable in terms of Islamic theology (e.g., the premises of the Conventional View), so it’s entirely reasonable to ask: is the YEC understanding of human-nonhuman discontinuity something a Muslim must accept?

Before we have that discussion, though, it’s important to first realize that the sort of discontinuity YECs posit between categories of humans and nonhumans—between Homo and non-Homo populations—might not even exist.

3.2.1. Questioning the discontinuity

To my mind, the best indicator for the absence of a clear-cut discontinuity is all the intra-YEC disagreement about how to categorize members of the early Homo genus. Basically, different thinkers broadly affiliated with the YEC movement look at the same fossil specimens but disagree on whether they’re human or not. If the discontinuity between humans and non-humans really were as stark and notable as these proponents have been claiming, we shouldn’t see such disagreements.

For example, in the same paper in which Todd Wood conducts his clustering analysis to demonstrate that the human-fossils group differently from nonhuman-fossils, he has a different plot that groups a member outside the Homo genus—Australopithecus sediba—in the “human” cluster:

As you can see from the above, the green point representing Au. sediba groups closely with members of Homo—much to the chagrin of many of his colleagues within the YEC community. We’ll get to what this specific disagreement entails in a bit, but for now it’s worth noting that proponents of this model are not agreed about which hominin populations do and do not belong to the progeny of Adam, thereby undercutting their claim to stark discontinuity.

The most up-to-date defense of this model is presented in Ross, Wood and Brummer’s 2023 paper entitled Human History from Adam to Abraham: Integrating Paleoanthropology with a Young-age Creation Perspective. The authors helpfully tabulate the different YEC thinkers’ views about each hominin specimen:

The “-”-signs indicate that the authors didn’t comment on the corresponding specimens (often because much wasn’t known about these fossils when they were writing). As can be seen, all but Cuozzo (1998) agree that Neanderthals, Denisovans and H. erectus were humans. H. floresiensis and H. naledi were contemporaneous with/derived from the same stock as H. erectus, so it’s small wonder that they are also classified as humans by the authors who commented on them. But when it comes to the earliest members of Homo—H. habilis and H. rudolfensis—opinions are split down the middle (“mixed” means some specimens assigned to the taxon are humans, while others are ape). And we already mentioned the disagreement over A. sediba.

The fact that experts disagree about the specimens that are supposed to represent the “edge” of humanity—earliest human specimens, and the latest non-human specimens—clearly indicate the difference between the groups isn’t very obvious. This undercuts the central motivation for opting for this view.

Finally, remember how I mentioned that some YEC thinkers used a quote by the mainstream paleoanthropologist John Hawks to defend their claim of a sharp discontinuity between Homo and non-Homo individuals? That quote was from 2000, and things have changed a lot since then. On his Substack, Hawks himself commented on this creationist co-option of his quote and had this to say about where he stands today:

The idea of a big shift from an unknown Australopithecus-like species to Homo erectus has given way to an understanding that none of these hominins around 2 million years ago were very different from each other. Australopithecus and their close relatives were much more humanlike, and Homo erectus much more Australopithecus-like, than it once seemed. (Source, see under “A transition to Homo”)

3.2.2. Is this sort of discontinuity theologically warranted?

Muslims, at least those who subscribe to the Conventional View, do believe that humans would be different from all other non-human creatures on earth. However, that discontinuity could manifest in a number of ways: in our complex cognitive abilities or our use of language, for instance. The Islamic view of discontinuity doesn’t rule out the fact that creatures that resemble humans—in terms of their ability to walk on two feet, brain size approaching our own, lack of body hair, or even the ability to make and use rudimentary tools—might have existed on earth.

On the other hand, YECs conceptualize discontinuity in a specific, exaggerated way: all creatures, including humans, must be very distinct from each other even in terms of their gross anatomical features. In fact, YEC thinkers expect the the discontinuity to be manifest in the fossils themselves, just by observing our skeletons. This is not something a Muslim would necessarily accept, who could readily grant that creatures with similar bone structures as humans might have lived prior to or even contemporaneously with us, but were still meaningfully different to us in terms of their cognitive abilities or their looks.

Subtle differences in facial structure and behavior, for example, can translate to two hominin species looking completely different. But YEC thinkers are by and large not happy with this level of discontinuity. Todd Wood, for instance, wants a type of discontinuity that can be detected by statistical tests conducted on datasets tabulating fossil anatomy—which is a rather coarse approach. To be honest, it’s not clear to me why even a Christian—even a YEC—would have reason to bear this peculiar burden of proof, let alone Muslims. Wood has since responded to criticisms about his methods, but hasn’t really bothered to justify the definition of discontinuity he uses.

Unwarranted assertions spell the death of good models. YECs have constructed their model of human origins on a premise that’s gone unchallenged over three decades, even with accumulating scientific data and intramural disagreements undercutting any material basis for discontinuity.

The lesson here is simple: Muslims should always ask whether the premises and assumptions we use to build our models are solid.

3.3. The ugly: not all Homo were humans

The models we are exploring all work within the constrains of the Conventional View, but as we’ll explore in part 4 of this series—not all of its premises are uncontroversial. Some theologians have argued, for example, that neither the genetic isolation or the discontinuity premise are warranted by scripture. However, there’s one premise in the Conventional View that no one disagrees with: Primordial sophistication.

This premise encodes the idea that throughout our history, including near its inception, no child of Adam looked or behaved so differently to us that we’d hesitate to call them humans. The entire progeny of Adam not only looked very similar to modern humans but also had a comparable degree of cognitive sophistication. The justification for this view is readily apparent in scripture: Adam and his sons had the ability to use language and prayed to God.

As it happens, this all-important premise is precisely the one that’s violated by the model we’re discussing. This is why this model is not only unsuccessful, but also unsalvageable—no amount of theological handwringing can save it.

In their pursuit of defining Created Kinds as separate, disconnected groups of biological organisms, YECs often tend to stretch the meaning of what we would intuitively consider to be one organism. For example, we saw above that YECs consider tigers, lions, leopards and house cats as essentially the same kind of animal—part of the same created cat-kind. This might seem like little more than a quirk of Creationist taxonomy, but when applied to humans, this implies the inclusion of creatures among the children of Adam that really don’t look or act anything like humans.

Consider the intra-YEC disagreement we mentioned above about the inclusion of Australopithecus sediba into humankind. This species is so distinct from humans that it has been placed in an entirely different genus by the mainstream scientific community—and yet, a prominent strain of Creationist analysis argues for their inclusion among the children of Adam. Would we be comfortable including them among Adam’s progeny?

When the suggestion to consider these creatures as the children of Adam was first made, it was met with pronounced backlash from other members of the YEC community. The Answers Research Journal, the YEC journal where Wood’s Baraminological analysis was first published, carried a paper containing a collage of three different responses. Here’s what Anne Habermehl, a YEC proponent with her own model of human origins, had to say:

Will we now accept these obvious apes (such as Australopithecus sediba. . .) as human, because somebody’s manipulation of statistics tells us that we should do this? And no matter what fossils this statistical technique dredges up and lumps into the category of humans, are we expected to welcome these beings into our human family with wide open arms? We might well wonder what other fossils will get admitted as humans by the time baraminologists are done. (source)

We can see the discomfort other creationists are feeling in stretching the definition of humanity to such an extent, just for the pursuit of a form of biological discontinuity—which, lest we forget, probably doesn’t even exist.

At this point, the YEC proponent might protest that the inclusion of A. sediba into humanity is a fringe, minority view; and not representative of the model at large. That’s fair. Where there doesn’t seem to be any disagreement is about the status of H. floresiensis, H. naledi or H. erectus. These creatures, while placed in the genus Homo, nonetheless looked substantially different from the human form we’re familiar with today—with a brain-to-body-ratio that’s significantly smaller than modern humans. While brain size isn’t a direct predictor of intelligence, it’s undeniable that there’s at least some connection between the two.

This makes the claim that Homo erectus, for example, are part of Adam’s progeny prima facie implausible, and the burden of proof should be on those making the claim. YECs have indeed attempted to meet that burden, and their efforts are worth considering—but to get to that point, we must settle one of the fundamental questions in this discourse.

4. How to recognize humans

What is a human?

In the first part of this series, we raised the possibility that hominins other than Homo sapiens—Neanderthals, say—might qualify as humans. On the other hand, in this part we’re arguing that early members of the Homo genus should not qualify as such. In making these evaluations, clearly we’re operating on a set of criteria that picks out humans from non-humans.

Well, what are they?

4.1. Seeing is knowing

I think the best definition of a “human” comes from the US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, in a completely different context, said: I know it when I see it.

When we encounter another human being, we are immediately able to tell that they are, indeed, a human—we know humans when we see them.

If you were expecting a list of necessary and sufficient conditions that delineates the category of humans from other animals, I’m sorry to have disappointed you. However, that’s exactly the point this definition is making: it’s nigh impossible to settle on such a universally agreed upon set of criteria. Sure, it’s easy to define humans in the abstract—the classical “rational/speaking animal” chestnut, or even the soul bestowed upon us by God—but these characteristics don’t show up in the fossil or archaeological record (at least not in a straightforward way).

An entire suite of anatomical and behavioral/cognitive characteristics define humans, and while that suite is hard to make a list out of—they can be immediately recognized as soon as we look at a human being. This is why the definition we started with is the best possible definition, because it hinges on this recognizability. Put differently, if we had access to a time machine to travel back hundreds of thousands of years and saw different hominin populations living their lives, this dispute would’ve been a non-issue: we could immediately recognize human populations as such, and non-human populations as such.

Absent such a privilege, however, we have to make the call based on fossil and archaeological remains. Scientists are able to infer a lot about the look and lifestyle of these now-extinct hominins, giving us the opportunity to read about their lives in the same way we have access to ethnographic records of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies.

On the I know it when I see it method of detecting humans, we can form educated guesses about the status of these populations just by reading from these records. Mainstream thinkers about human origins agree with this. In defining what humans are, the philosopher of biology Andra Meneganzin makes a similar point:

[Humans are] people whose lifeways resemble those of ethnographically recorded societies in all or most relevant respects. (Source)

In other words, we know a population is human if they resemble what we know about ourselves, including other humans—especially those whose descriptions we find in ethnographic records. Anton Killin, when grappling with the question of whether Neanderthals should be considered humans, cites a similar criterion:

The [fossil/archaeological] record contains trace evidence of Neanderthal behaviors/practices that fall within the range of variation of the behavioral profile of ethnographically known human foragers . . . (Source)

These are all extensions to the criterion of I know it when I see it—we need to look closely at extinct hominin populations as reconstructed from the paleoanthropological data, and if they resemble humans as we know them—we’d recognize them as humans.

We’re simplifying this discussion to a crazy extent: after all, the paleoanthropological data is woefully incomplete, the inferences drawn from them are often indirect, and scientists disagree on which piece of data indicates what about cognitive sophistication.

Thankfully, for the question that occupies us right now—we don’t really need to navigate much of that complexity.

4.2. How smart were the early Homo?

As we mentioned briefly in the last post, there’s a live scientific debate about the humanity or cognitive sophistication of Neanderthals—in fact, I’ll argue in the next post that Neanderthals can plausibly be classified as humans. However, the YEC Homo=human model goes a step further than this. In their scheme, not only are recent hominin species like Neanderthals to be considered humans, but also species that lived or diverged much earlier, like Homo erectus, Homo naledi, or Homo floresiensis. Proponents of this model argue that while these creatures might look different to us, they nonetheless displayed a level of cognitive sophistication that justifies their inclusion among humankind.

In defense of this claim, Ross, Wood and Brummer (2023) provide a list of six types of behavior which, if found to be exhibited by a hominin, could be considered their evidence for humanity:

1. Controlled use of fire
2. The manufacture of advanced tools
3. The crafting of unnecessary objects that attest to artistic creativity or preferences
4. Care for the wounded or elderly
5. Intentional burial of the dead
6. Complex behaviors associated with dispersal or even exploration, such as accessing cave chambers far from the cave entrance or accessing islands. (Source)

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about whether these criteria, even taken together, can be taken as evidence for humanity—and we will delve into this in more detail in the next post. For now, though, it’s sufficient to note that at most two out of these six proposed behaviors are uncontroversially associated with the early hominins whose humanity we’re contemplating.

Take controlled use of fire, for instance. The earliest incontrovertible evidence for fire use goes back to around 800,000 years in a site in Israel, but we don’t know which hominins lived here. More recently, scientists have claimed a South African hominin population, the small-brained H. naledi, used fire and buried its dead. While these claims received a lot of media attention, they also drew sharp criticism from other scientists. This in turn was responded to in a set of more recent papers by the original scientists, and the debate has since spilled over to the science influencer space. Clearly, we’re treading on contested grounds as far as evidence of fire use is concerned.

Similarly, the large geographic range across which ancient hominin remains have been found—including on islands—have been taken as evidence of complex behavior. This too, however, is a controversial claim—scientists go back and forth on whether these hominins were indeed seafarers.

That leaves “manufacture of advanced tools” and “crafting of unnecessary objects that attest to artistic creativity or preferences”. The stone tools most commonly used by H. erectus are what are called “bifaces”, and researchers do agree that some of these tools exhibit a sense of aesthetic preference. Note how symmetric the shape of this tool is: In order for the tool to be functional, this level of symmetry is not necessary. And yet, their makers took it upon themselves to impose this pattern on their tools. This means for Homo erectus, it was important for the tools not just to be functional, but also to be pleasant to look at. Beyond just the shapes of tools themselves, H. erectus also made geometric marks on mollusk shells, also considered to be a form of aesthetic expression.

Are these capacities necessarily characteristic of humanity, though?

Before we answer, we need to have an informed baseline about what capacities or behaviors do not necessarily constitute human-level cognitive sophistication. Chimpanzees, for example, use a range of tools to bust open peanuts or fish for termites, and captive great apes could be taught to use basic stone tools as well. Furthermore, macaques have been seen making intentional marks with chalk as a mode of interacting with objects. Clearly, what the early Homo erectus were doing was a step removed from this. But the relevant point is a sense of aesthetics alone—just the idea that objects have a “this-pleases-me” feel—isn’t sufficient for humanity.

Taken together, I don’t think this evidence justifies the claim that early hominins like Homo erectus possessed behavioral sophistication approaching humans. In paleoanthropology, of course, evidence of absence doesn’t necessarily mean absence of evidence. However, we should remember that H. erectus lived on earth for close to two million years, having gone extinct as recently as a couple hundred thousand years ago. If they indeed possessed sophisticated cognitive capacities, we would reasonably expect much more evidence of such behavior than what we’ve just surveyed.

In all likelihood, H. erectus were not humans—nor were H. naledi, H. luzuensis, H. florisiensis, and definitely not H. habilis. The model fails to meet the all-important premise of primordial sophistication, and should therefore be rejected.

5. What have we learned?

In this and the previous article, we’ve reviewed two models of Adamic origin that ultimately failed. It’s useful to dwell on why these models failed to work, so we can put these lessons to use later.

For one, both models are motivated by mistaken or unwarranted assumptions. The “only Homo sapiens are humans” model conflates a everyday use term with a technical category; while the “all Homo are humans” model starts with a discontinuity requirement that’s really not justified. These are errors we should’ve recognized even before looking at the data. And yet, these models have become quite popular—propounded by science-religion juggernauts like the Reasons to Believe ministry or the very many YEC organizations (not to mention some ID proponents).

If these approaches constitute failures, what should a good model look like? Whatever it might be, such a model must be evidence-first. Instead of starting with unwarranted assumptions, we should objectively look at the paleoanthropological data to see which hominins can be reasonably considered humans, and go from there. In the process of falsifying today’s model, we have gained an understanding of how to go about doing this.

If there’s any model that embodies this approach of following where the evidence leads, it’s to be found in a recent book authored by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. To my mind, this is the most promising model of Adamic origin that’s consonant with the Conventional View, a discussion which will keep us occupied for the length of the next article. We’ll delve into how this model came about, what it gets right, and which parts require work.

We will then discuss some issues that concern not just any one model, but all models that try to constrain themselves within the Conventional View. First, all non-Homo sapiens populations (or even the earliest members of Homo sapiens) looked and acted at least somewhat differently to modern humans. Second, all of these models place the origin of humanity in deep antiquity—far beyond the reaches of the historical timeline we read about in the scripture. We’ll discuss whether these facts raise any theological concerns worth losing sleep over.

The Islamic scriptures expect us to believe something truly extraordinary about human origins: That all currently living humans trace their lineage to just one primordial couple—Ādam and his wife, Ḥawwāʾ, peace be upon them (for ease of communication, henceforth Adam and Eve). What’s more, this primordial couple were born without parents via an act of Divine Special Creation, meaning humans share no ancestry with the rest of earthly biodiversity. In the rest of this essay, we’ll refer to this view as Adamic origin.

Does this view conflict with what we know about empirical reality—and if so, how do we address such conflicts? That’s the question Islam and Evolution Discourse™ aims to answer.

This tripartite essay is meant to be an entry point to this vast and often confusing discourse.

You may have heard the phrases “human exceptionalism” or “Adamic exceptionalism” thrown about, but in my experience—there’s virtually no useful material that tries to explain exactly what these views entail, why we should opt for one view above the other, heck—why we’re even making these categories in the first place.

That changes today.

My goal in this series is to first explain what problem we’re even trying to solve when we build and discuss these models. Once that’s settled, we can take our sweet time to explore one view after another, in the process evaluating the theological and scientific justifications that motivate the models.

But before we get into any of that…

2. Housekeeping

The field of Islam and science is quite messy, and so we need to straighten a few things out before getting into the meat of this discussion. Call this conceptual housekeeping.

First, some people believe that talk of any conflict between science and Adamic origin is misguided, since the latter is a miracle and therefore beyond the scope of scientific investigation. We’ll spend some time with this objection and see where it goes wrong.

Second, we have to settle the issue of what we even mean by science or scientific data. The discipline we’re wading into makes lots of claims about fossils, genetics, dates—do we take all of these at face value? How do we decide? That’s an important question to clarify before the project can get off the ground.

Third, we should note that there’s no one Islam-evolution “conflict”. Rather, there is a family of conflicts, and the models of Adamic origin are relevant to just one of them. We need to have this broader perspective in view to understand which problem(s) these models even supposed to solve, and which they aren’t.

Let’s discuss these in turn.

2.1. How can the miracle of Adamic origin contradict “science”?

2.1.1. The problem

Muslims believe that the creation of Adam was a miracle—a supernatural event beyond the reaches of the laws of nature as we know it. Well, isn’t a miracle by definition scientifically unfalsifiable? Science can only operate in a universe with laws of nature, but the event we’re discussing is above those laws. So is it even coherent to suggest that there’s a “conflict” between science and such a phenomenon?

The theologian David Solomon Jalajel, whom we’ll meet again later, makes this point forcefully in his Yaqeen essay:

If it could be argued that [belief in Adam and Eve] rests solely upon a person’s acceptance of the divine origins of the texts that speak about them, then by the same logic, it is impossible for science to critique the special creation of Adam and Eve. Biologists are not concerned with mythical beings. It would be ludicrous for a biologist to argue the merits or demerits of various theories regarding the mythical origins of mythical people or to talk about the evidence for their existence. [Tawaqquf and the Acceptance of Human Evolution, p. 13]

Clearly, if Dr. Jalajel’s argument works, then this project is a waste of time. After all, Muslims (and Christians) also believe that a child was born miraculously without a father some two thousand years ago. Should we then launch a project to investigate whether the Virgin Birth is in conflict with science? No, because the event was beyond the laws of nature: scientifically unfalsifiable. So why wouldn’t a similar judgment be applied in case of Adamic Origins, also a supernatural event?

The problem with this reasoning is simple: Not all miracles are unfalsifiable. Some miracles produce effects that do leave their marks in empirical records.

2.1.2. Thought experiment: Young-Earth Islamic Creationism?

Humor me for a second.

Let’s imagine an alternative reality where the Islamic scriptures explicitly stated that the universe and everything in it was created just a few thousand years ago. Not only that, all animals on earth, including humans, were created rapidly—say, in the span of one week—as in, a literal 24 X 7 week—in the forms familiar to us today. On this view, everything from the earth, our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy to the furthest reaches of the universe are only a little older than the currently accepted age of the Sumerian Civilization. Also, humans and dinosaurs had to have co-existed.

How do you think we, as Muslims, would feel about this? Would we be completely okay with our scriptures making claims that seem to fly in the face of virtually everything we know about science—about the speed of light, radiometric dating, fossils and paleoarchaeology, or the progressive emergence of new species?

I don’t think so. For us Muslims, it’s a point of entirely justifiable relief that our scriptures don’t contain any scientifically problematic details about the creation of the universe or earthly biodiversity.

In an influential lecture on the topic given over a decade ago, Dr. Yasir Qadhi passionately emphasized that the Muslim scriptures, even when read literally, don’t require us to deny the existence of dinosaurs (to our point, affirm the co-existence of humans and dinosaurs) or a great age of the universe—and that shows that mainstream Islam can have a much more productive interaction with science than Christianity could ever have hoped. (Listen to his full talk below)

Along similar lines, the Muslim political commentator Abdullah al-Andalusi argued that it’s important to detach the Islamic understanding of the world from Protestant Christian beliefs entailing Young Earth Creationism, the failure to do which has led to Muslims experiencing “cognitive dissonance” about science-religion interaction.

Clearly—in the alternative world that we’re imagining for the purposes of this thought experiment—had Islam actually contained beliefs we associate with Young-Earth Creationism, we would’ve been in for a much worse time.

But wait, some theologians warn us at this point, you have it all wrong. You see, the creation of the heavens and earth, including its biodiversity, are supernatural events—special acts of Divine Creation that transcend the laws of nature as we know it. As such, even if scripture had said that the universe was made six thousand years ago and dinosaurs and humans were placed on earth side-by-side, that rendition of pre-modern Jurassic Park would still not contradict science. These are miracles, knowledge of which we only gain from scripture—and therefore entirely beyond the scope of scientific falsification.

I think we would agree that something has gone wrong in this line of theological reasoning.

The premise is correct—the creation of the universe is indeed, ex hypothesi, a miracle. And yet, we plainly understand that a young-age description of creation would contradict science.

The problem here is in assuming that miracles are by definition unfalsifiable. Some miracles are indeed, like Jesus’ Virgin Birth—peace be upon him; while others aren’t, like our hypothetical example of very recent creation. This is because of their difference in nature.

The Virgin Birth is a one-time event located in deep antiquity. Short of inventing a time machine, we have no way of scientifically investigating whether it happened. Such an event would leave no trace in the record of empirical reality: nothing about the geological column or subsequent human genetics would be affected if a singular person was born without a father and left no offspring some unspecified time ago.

However, a recent creation of the universe leaves deep scars in the historical record. In a young universe, we wouldn’t expect light to travel at a uniform speed, the radioactive isotope in rocks to depict signs of great age, and we would expect to find rabbit fossils in the Cambrian geological strata or human fossils in the Cretaceous. A world created very young would be expected to look very different, even if the act of creation itself were a miracle.

2.1.3. Can God “hide” the evidence?

The only possible way of getting out of this bind is to suggest that somehow, for some unspecified reasons only known to Him, God went out of His way to arrange all the evidence in such a way that would give the impression of a very old earth. But I don’t think we would want to endorse that view, given what that implies about God and His character.

Fun historical aside: this exact possibility was raised by the victorian thinker Philip Gosse. In his book Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, Gosse argued that the earth was in fact very young but God created it with an appearance of age. The name of the treatise (Omphalos, Greek for “navel”) was in reference to his claim that while Adam had no umbilical cord and therefore no need for a navel, God nonetheless gave him one.

Gosse’s book came out just two years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin, but even then it was soundly rejected—not just by Naturalists, but by men of faith. Here’s what the Reverend Charles Kingsley, a priest in the Church of England, had to say about Gosse’s thesis:

Your book is the first that ever made me doubt [the doctrine of absolute creation], and I fear it will make hundreds do so. Your book tends to prove this—that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes God-the-Sometime-Deceiver. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in. . . your newly created Adam’s navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here... . I cannot. . . believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind. [Quoted in Naked Emperors: Essays of a Taboo-Stalker by George Hardin, p. 54]

For Kingsley, to believe in a God that makes a young earth but goes out of His way to decorate it with vestiges of deep antiquity is tantamount to believing in Loki. It’s small wonder that science-based arguments against religion often level the charge of Divine Deception: if God did indeed create in X way, why do things look as if they were created in Y way? Doesn’t this imply that God hid the evidence to intentionally mislead us?

2.1.4. An example of getting this distinction right

Mufti Muntasir Zaman, whom I’m fond of citing in the context of Islam-science discourse, realizes this point in his discussion on the height of Prophet Adam and early humans.

An authentic Prophetic hadith seems to suggest that Adam was ninety feet tall, and humanity as a whole has been decreasing in height ever since. As the Mufti demonstrates in his book, this proposition contradicts scientific reality on at least two points: first, there has been no reliable archaeological evidence of giant human remains, and second, such great heights are incompatible with human physiology as we know it. To build a creature that’s scaled up to the size of a building would not be recognizably human. This, then, presents us with a direct conflict between Adamic origins and empirical reality.

This concern is hardly allayed by playing the miracle card, because as we discussed above, even miracles can lead to expectations about the world. If there were thousands of generations of early humans, where did their fossils go? And more importantly, how can it be that such an extreme form cannot be biologically accommodate? The only way out of this is to suggest, as Gosse did above, that God arranged the evidence of paleoanthropology and human physiology in just such a way to keep us from seeing the truth of the matter.

(Thankfully, as the Mufti convincingly demonstrates, the relevant hadiths can’t be taken to mean that early humans on earth were very tall—rather, they could be describing Adam’s original height in Heaven. Heaven, of course, is beyond scientific falsifiability. You can read his recently published paper and/or my review of his book for the full story. Or if you like listening, maybe check out his interview on Blogging Theology for a précis:)

2.1.5. When does a “science-religion conflict” arise?

The foregoing discussion helps us define science-religion conflicts in very concrete terms.

In order for there to be a conflict between science and religion, two ingredients must be present:

1. Religion must make a scientifically falsifiable claim, and

2. That claim must contradict scientific data.

(Of course, this invites a lot of discussion on what it means for religion to make a claim and what constitutes scientific data, but that’s beyond the scope of the present discussion. For a more thorough treatment of these issues, I direct my readers to the beginning chapters Mufti Muntasir Zaman’s book, the one we were discussing just now. For what we mean by scientific evidence in this essay—see next section!)

This dual requirement also clarifies which religious claims would not qualify as being scientifically problematic. As long as a miracle claim made by a religion isn’t falsifiable—meaning, it doesn’t affect the record of empirical data we have in our hands—it doesn’t present a conflict.

Consider the Prophetic miracles reported in the Qur’an, for example—the Virgin Birth of Jesus, the transformation of the Staff of Moses, the Moon splitting at the hands of Muhammad—peace be upon them all. Would any of these events produce any tractable scientific data? If not, then they are not scientifically falsifiable, and the question of conflict doesn’t arise. We can say similar things about the punishments meted upon past nations as well.

(Some might argue that these events do conflict with science in that they contradict the laws of nature. In response, religious believers would posit that since God is the Author of these laws, He can act beyond their operations. To see whether such a view is coherent depends on your preferred metaphysics, but see Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies, chapters 3-4 and Jeffrey Koperski’s Divine Action, Determinism and the Laws of Nature as readable accounts)

So, the question “does Adamic origin present a potential conflict with scientific data?” essentially reduces to “does Adamic origin make claims that are scientifically falsifiable?”

As we’ll see, the answer to that ultimately depends which model of Adamic origin you prefer!

2.2. What is this thing called “scientific evidence”?

We’ve been talking a lot about scientific evidence, data, and falsifiability, without clearly defining those terms.

When we say “scientifically falsifiable”—i.e., something that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by science—what do we mean by that? That’s the next piece of housekeeping we must attend to.

2.2.1 Evidence as the consensus of mainstream scientists

For the purposes of this essay, we define scientific data or evidence as the conclusions reached by the (near-)consensus of mainstream scientists working today. Let me illustrate what I mean with some examples, and then explain why I’m opting for this definition.

When there’s general agreement about, say, the date of a fossil specimen or the interpretation of a particular archaeological finding, we will accept that inference at face value. In contrast, we won’t put too much weight on conclusions that are controversial or subject to a lot of expert disagreement.

For instance, some scientists recently made the revolutionary claim that an extinct hominoid with a tiny brain—less than half the brain volume of modern humans—engaged in sophisticated behaviors like lighting cave fires, producing rock art, and methodically burying their dead. This claim received a lot of media attention, but it also drew very sharp criticism from other scientists. This in turn was responded to in a set of more recent papers by the original scientists, and the debate has since spilled over to the science influencer space. Clearly, this is an issue with no settled consensus, and we can’t take such a claim at face value.

In paleoanthropology—i.e., the study of ancient hominoids—these disagreements are all too common. In cases like these, we won’t take sides but take the disagreement at face value.

There are other issues that are still subject to some scientific disagreement, but the dissenting voices represent an extreme minority. For example, since the publication of the draft genome sequence of Neandertals, the idea that Homo sapiens and Neandertals interbred and produced children—to the extent that all living humans have some amount of Neandertal DNA in them—gained scientific consensus. However, there’s a very, very small minority of scientists who disagree with this conclusion (example 1, 2). In cases like these, we would side with the majority view (while mentioning the caveat).

2.2.2. Why are we defining scientific evidence in this way?

Because this is the standard practice of dealing with any science-religion conflict, both in the scholarly and popular spaces.

Consider, for example, a particular instance of science-hadith conflict that became popular during the pandemic: the idea that Islam doesn’t believe in the concept of contagious diseases. In response, the vast majority of scholarly commentary on this issue, regardless of ideological bent, explained that the hadith, when read in context, doesn’t really imply that—quite the opposite, in fact.

Examining this discourse at a meta-level: on event of a conflict between science and religion, one might either question the transmission or interpretation of a piece of scripture, or reject the science. In case of the contagion example, scholars went with the former. But they could just as easily have gone with the latter approach: they might instead have called into question the Germ Theory of Disease, one of the most successful theories in modern science, and safeguarded the hadith interpretation. There’s a non-negligible undercurrent of germ theory denialism usually associated with alternative medicine and wellness movements. Variants of the so-called Terrain Theory, for instance, claim to explain how we get sick without reference to a contagion. Well, our scholars could’ve hitched their ride with that theory instead, and gone to war with a scientific consensus spanning centuries.

Well, why didn’t they? Why did we choose to question the interpretation of scripture, instead of revisiting the science?

Because of a straightforward plausibility analysis.

Many hadiths lend themselves to multiple interpretations, and in view of all the different hadiths on the issue of contagion, an alternative interpretation seems immediately plausible. On the other hand, questioning the Germ Theory would involve overthrowing an imposing body of empirical knowledge accrued over many generations. In the final analysis, the former is much more promising a route than the latter.

I don’t think we can draw a straightforward analogy between Germ Theory and paleoanthropology, which relies a lot more on indirect inferences from hard data, leading to conclusions that are more plastic and subject to change. Regardless, as a first crack at the problem, I think we should still pursue the most promising track: let’s assume that the scientific consensus on these matters can be taken at face value and see whether plausible models Adamic origin can survive.

This also helps me highlight the scope of this essay: this is supposed to a first attempt at science-religion reconciliation, not only because of our prima facie acceptance of scientific consensus—which is the most convenient way of reading science—but also because my own studies and thoughts on the issue are still evolving. Once the draft foundation is built, we can hopefully explore more ambitious approaches that actually look at the data and explore how strong the underlying inferences are.

2.3. Conflicts, not conflict

The last important clarification to be made about this enterprise is that there’s no single conflict between science and Adamic origins, but rather multiple points of conflict that are best conceptualized and addressed separately.

2.3.1. At least five different points of interaction

One class of conflict has to do with direct contradictions between scripture and science. The example I gave above about the height of early humans, if reliable, could have been one such example. Another example would be the presumed scientific difficulties associated with starting all of humanity with just two individuals. If all of us did arise via Adamic origins, this objection goes, the extent of our genetic diversity would be much lower than what we in fact observe. We’ll discuss this and other such objections shortly, but they represent a class of direct conflicts: as in it’s not possible to believe Adamic origins and the claim about genetic diversity at the same time. They are conceptually incompatible.

To address conflicts of this sort, what we try to do is tell a scripturally plausible story of human origins that doesn’t contradict any scientific fact.

This is where the talk of “models” of human origins comes in: different groups have produced their own accounts of human origins that they think best achieve this. The rest of this series would be exploring and evaluating these models—put forward by Muslim and Christian thinkers alike—representing the broad coalition of the proponents of Adamic origin. (Incidentally, all a “model” means in this context is an account or a narrative about how human origins happened).

Crucially, however, this is not the only type of conflict in this space: Another class of conflicts have to do with the putative evidence for human evolution. A truly wide range of scientific facts derived from a number of disciplines—including but not limited to paleoarchaeology, genetics, and comparative anatomy and physiology—are taken as evidence for the proposition that humans shared a common ancestor with other creatures. This body of evidence is strong enough to undergird a virtually unshakeable scientific consensus on the topic. If we believe in Adamic origin—and this applies to any and all model, as long as we subscribe to a special, separate creation of the children of Adam—we would have to address why this evidence obtains. To put this conflict in terms of the Divine Deception objection I alluded to above: if humans didn’t evolve, why do we look as if we did?

This is a huge topic deserving of its own standalone treatment. I’ve launched a series on this blog to address the issue step by step: you can read the introductory pieces here and here, but given the glacial rate of progress on that series (last part came out three months ago…) I think it’ll take me quite a while to complete the whole thing. In the meantime, you might want to read my long, first-draft, probably poorly crafted, needlessly dense essay on the topic where I attempt to develop a solution to the problem.

But for the present post, we’ll not be discussing this issue—just evaluating the different ways thinkers have attempted to evade the more direct science-religion incompatibility would keep us plenty occupied.

Beyond these, there are other potential scientific objections raised in the area that we won’t have time to wade into. If we look beyond human origins, the question of how to square Divine Design with biological evolution is widely discussed. Along similar lines, the fact that the evolutionary process entails a “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel” process—à la Darwin—is taken by some to be evidence against the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. The evolution of religion is similarly taken to furnish evidence against Abrahamic religions. We could probably go on, but the point is that the exercise we’re doing right now—constructing models of human origins to escape direct conflicts with scientific data—represents one strand in a larger discussion.

2.3.2. Perspective is important

Distinguishing between these different conflict types is important because they require different solutions. One common pitfall in this space is that people expect the solution to one class of conflict to apply to all others.

Last year when I posted my essay on addressing the putative evidence for common descent on my X account, I received the following question:

What do you think about the theory that Adam and Eve were sent down when humanoid creatures were on earth and they procreated with the children of Adam?

Well, I or anyone else shouldn’t think anything about this issue, because this discussion isn’t relevant to the evidential challenge of evolution. The questioner here is asking about a certain model of Adamic origin (row #1 in the table above), but that has nothing to do with the evidence for human-ape common ancestry (row #2).

Similarly, when we’re discussing the models of Adamic origin—it wouldn’t be appropriate to bring up Intelligent Design (row #3), or ask how this or that model would explain the evidence for evolution (row #2). These are distinct classes of conflicts and so require different, parallel conversations. Unfortunately, such errors have crept into published literature as well (see pp. 326-327 in this book).

With all of that clarified!—We can finally enter our discussion on the models of Adamic origin.

3. What does scripture say about human origins?

As mentioned above, a “model” of Adamic origin is a story that is allowed by scripture, and not falsified by scientific evidence. To make any headway into this discussion, we must first discuss what scripture has to say on the topic.

3.1. The Conventional View

If you ask the Muslim on the street about what Islam teaches about human origins, they would probably endorse the following claims:

1. Genetic isolation. After Adam and Eve were sent on earth, their children reproduced among themselves and in the process eventually filled the earth with humans. The Adamic progeny, as a whole, forms a genetically isolated group.

2. Primordial two-person founding. In addition to being genetically isolated, Banu Adam as a group was founded by exactly two individuals. All present human genetic diversity ultimately traces back to the genomes of Adam and Eve.

3. Discontinuity. Since Banu Adam—as a genus—arose via this initial, separate act of Divine Creation, we should expect a sharp disconnect between us and all other creatures—living or extinct—in terms of their characteristics and abilities. This disconnect is precisely what sets humanity apart. In other words, there are/were no humans outside the lineage of the Children of Adam. “Humankind” and “Children of Adam” are synonymous, as are H₂O and water. There might be creatures that look and act similar to us, but we won’t confuse them for humans.

4. Primordial Sophistication. Even the earliest members of humanity had advanced cognitive abilities—they were smart enough to use language, worshiped God and had associated religious concepts. We would never look at the earliest members of humanity and wonder whether they were “half-man” or “ape-man”—they would be just as recognizably human as the rest of us, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

Let’s take these four claims to comprise what we’ll be calling the Conventional View of Adamic Origin, representing the set of propositions almost any lay mainstream-adjacent Muslim would assent to. (I’ve broken them down this way because each of these claims lead to their own set of potentially falsifiable expectations about the scientific data, which makes it convenient to detect conflicts as and when they arise.)

If you’ve been keeping up with modern Muslim discourse around evolution, you’d know that some theologians have questioned whether all of these views are entailed by scripture either—but we’ll get to that in a second. For now, let’s take these widely agreed upon premises as our point of departure.

3.2. What else does scripture say?

Some may suggest that this sketch is incomplete, and that the Muslim on the street would probably subscribe to other beliefs about human origins as well: that Adam and the earliest humans were giants, for instance; or that they had unnaturally long lifespans; that Adam visited Makkah to build the Ka’ba; that Adam’s sons engaged in animal husbandry (or at least domesticated animals); or that Adam lived at a certain time point in the past—in the order of a few thousand years. Surely, at least some of these beliefs about human origins might be scientifically falsifiable as well.

As it happens, though, all of these statements result from forcing specific meanings on ambiguous pieces of scripture (or, even worse, relying on weak or unreliable narrations). We already alluded to Mufti Muntasir’s threadbare discussion on the hadiths about giant humans above, and with the exception of the singular figure of Prophet Noah, peace be upon him—whose case might have been a miracle—scripture provides no indication of very great lifespans of early humans.

Similarly, the verse that’s taken to suggest animal domestication by the sons of Adam mentions nothing about a domestic animal (just “a sacrifice”). One interpretation of a verse in the Qur’an does suggest the Ka’ba being the first house of worship built on earth, but even taking that reading at face value, scholars disagree on whether the original builder was Adam or Angels.

Finally, there’s a hadith suggesting there were ten centuries or generations between Adam and Noah and ten between Noah and Abraham, peace be upon them. Since we can form a reasonable estimate about when Abraham lived, some people argue this pins down a specific date for the origin of humanity. Leaving aside expert reservations about the authenticity of parts of this hadith, scholars have differing opinions on whether there were ten total generations between Adam and Noah, or just ten generations that remained faithful to God.

Very shaky stuff.

This leaves us with the four propositions we started with: humanity is genetically isolated, goes back to just two primordial founders, discontinuous from the rest of earthly biodiversity, and even the primordial humans were cognitively comparable to us.

If this list looks substantive, check your Muslim privilege and thank God that we’re not Christians. Unlike Islamic scriptures, the Bible is absolutely rich in detail about the lifeways of the earliest humans, and even liberal-leaning Christians feel the need to dedicate time and effort in explaining how those details fit with science.

In chapter six of his book on the topic, the theologian Andrew Loke has to explain how descriptions of the Genesis account—the idea that Adam’s immediate descendants practised farming and animal husbandry, for instance—are to be made sense of; and Joshua Swamidass similarly devotes a chapter (Ch. 15) discussing the natural consequences of the Fall. These gentlemen are quite accommodating of modern, unconventional views about Adamic origins, so you can only imagine how hard this task would be for more traditionally-minded Christians like the Young- or even Old-Earth Creationists.

In comparison, Muslim beliefs about human origins look positively austere. Even more so when we realize that only a fraction of these beliefs lead to scientifically falsifiable predictions in the first place.

3.3. The two classes of Adamic origin models

Some modern scholars have questioned whether even the Conventional View is entailed by scripture. To my knowledge, no one among mainstream scholarship doubts Primordial Sophistication or Two-person Founding, but scholars like David Solomon Jalajel, Shoaib Ahmed Malik and Massoud Vahedi have raised interesting questions about whether the scriptural descriptions of Adamic Origin do entail strict genetic isolation or discontinuity.

This is a fascinating discussion that we’ll explore in more detail in part three of this series, but I’m flagging this now because these disagreements represent a major point of divergence in Adamic origin models.

All models of Adamic origin can be usefully categorized as those who accept the propositions in the Conventional View as scripturally binding vs. those that don’t. If you’ve seen talk of “Adamic Exceptionalism” as opposed to “Human Exceptionalism” in the discourse these days—that’s what this cleft represents. I’m not a fan of the Human vs. Adamic exceptionalism talk because, as we’ll see shortly, both of them can accommodate multiple, substantively different views about Adamic Origins; so these are not models as much as they are classes of models (more so because human exceptionalism has a different, well-established meaning).

With that classification in place, we can now begin our evaluations of the models of Adamic origin.

In the first two parts of the series, we’ll discuss the models that arise within the strict confines of the Conventional View, while in the last part we’ll explore the models that are generated once we loosen some of the four premises.

Learning to learn

My goal here is not just to hand y’all a list of models—rather, I want to demonstrate the process of building models and evaluating them. To facilitate this, we will first talk about models that are wrong, or have rather obvious scientific problems. Discussing these models will build intuition about how a good model is supposed to look like, and we’ll carry these intuitions over to building more successful ones.

Keep this in mind in the next section of the essay!

4. Let’s build a (bad) Adamic origin model

Dr. Shoaib Ahmed Malik in his book Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm wonders:

[I]t is unclear how science can contradict [Adamic origin model] as argued by Qadhi and Khan (2018), or [yet another Adamic origin model] as argued by Jalajel (2018). In the former case, if Adam did indeed descend to earth with all the right biological properties as expected of evolution, which gives it a look of seamless continuation, and were then passed on to all of his descendants, how can [one] produce empirical evidence to deny this scientifically? [p. 327]

To my eyes, Dr. Malik seems to be questioning whether Adamic origin models can have scientifically falsifiable predictions at all. Can the Conventional View—implicit in the most popular Adamic origin models, particularly the ones defended by Qadhi and Khan (2018) alluded to above—yield predictions that are scientifically falsifiable?

Sure they can.

For starters, we know Homo sapiens—also known as Anatomically Modern Humans—have been around on earth for quite a while. The oldest known fossil of our species was excavated from the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco, and it dates back to around 300,000 years. Since the Conventional View stipulates all humans are the progeny of Adam, that must mean Adam lived at least 300,000 years ago, and not much earlier than that.

That gives us a timeline. We’ve started moving from theological premise to concrete scientific data.

In response to Dr. Malik’s question above, we will now demonstrate how plenty of scientifically falsifiable predictions follow from the premises of the Conventional View.

4.1. Genetic isolation premise

This premise entails that Homo sapiens never exchanged genes with anyone outside the group. However, we’ve known since publication of the first Neandertal genome sequence that Homo sapiens and Neandertals interbred and produced children. In fact, all living humans, particularly non-Africans, carry some fraction of Neandertal DNA in our genomes (see this review for a sketch of the evidence).

I mention Neandertals because they represent the most recognizable extinct hominoid, but there’s evidence for interbreeding between modern humans and other extinct, non-sapiens groups as well (the Denisovans, for example). This squarely contradicts our genetic isolation premise.

4.2. Primordial two-person founding premise

This premise suggests that Homo sapiens, in addition to being genetically isolated, arose from just two individuals. Under that assumption, a minimum amount of time would need to pass to generate the amount of diversity seen in modern humans. Given a rate of reproduction and mutation—both of which we can calculate, and an initial population size of two—we can figure out the latest when our primordial ancestors must have lived.

According to analyses from a number of researchers (example 1, 2, 3, see chapter 12 of this book for a synthesis), that time couldn’t have been earlier than 500,000 years. But if Adam and Eve lived at least half a million years ago, that comfortably precedes the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens on earth. The two-person founding premise, therefore, also seems to generate scientific problems.

4.3. The discontinuity premise

This premise entails that there would be no creature that can be meaningfully described as “humans” outside the children of Adam. Non-Homo sapiens humans would be a contradiction in terms.

In popular imagination, Neandertals are viewed as brutish, hunched-over animalistic creatures—even their name is used pejoratively. However, the more we’ve learned about their looks, genetics, and behavior, the more this idea have been proven wrong. In fact, many scientists now believe that these European hominoids that went extinct some 40,000 years ago should be described as humans: i.e., that they were not qualitatively inferior to modern humans in terms of their cognitive capacities.

The status of Neandertals—including the question of whether they had language—continues to be hotly debated, but it’s clear that they were quite similar to us. They stood upright as you and I, had complex stone tool technology, could control fire, used personal ornaments, even made a form of rock art. And while they looked unconventional—pronounced brow ridge, flatter skull, lack of a protruding chin, large nose—they could arguably pass the subway test: that is to say, if you take a “Neanderthal man, dress him in a three-piece suit, give him a briefcase and a haircut, and put him on the subway”, it probably wouldn’t turn too many heads.

We’ll explore the question of Neandertal and non-sapiens cognition in more detail later, but for now let me note that many if not most scientists working in the field are converging on the opinion that Neandertals were just as human as we are. If that view is correct, then that rubs up against our discontinuity premise, which suggests only Homo sapiens and the children of Adam were humans.

4.4. Primordial sophistication premise

This premise entails Homo sapiens were always cognitively comparable to us—they could always speak, had symbolic cognition, and the capacity to be religious. However, there’s some scientific doubt about whether the earliest members of the Homo sapiens species did indeed have cognitive sophistication. Some authors suggest language, in its now-familiar modern form, arose considerably after the first Homo sapiens walked the earth. However, I don’t think these thinkers are in the majority, so we can set this problem aside for now.

Taking stock, our survey of the scientific predictions following from the Conventional View suggests three of the four premises go against plausible readings of empirical data.

5. Autopsy of the model

Now that we’ve built and deconstructed a model of Adamic origin, let’s examine its ruins and see what we learned.

The first lesson is the demonstration itself: we can draw our scientifically falsifiable expectations from Adamic origin.

The second lesson is more subtle.

5.1. There are humans, and there are humans

Note that in the foregoing discussion, there’s a crucial assumption that has gone unstated: humans are Homo sapiens.

This might sound odd. Of course humans are Homo sapiens, you might say, this is the commonsense way of defining the term.

But why think that?

“Homo sapiens” (or Anatomically Modern Humans) is a scientific category that came about recently, while “human” is a cultural term we’ve used since forever. The scientific definition include features like having a protruding chin or reduced brow ridge. Why are we so confident that a heavier-browed weaker-chinned specimen cannot be placed within the category of humans—especially if they used language and had a complex culture, as we do?

Or is this another case of conflating everyday cultural terms with newfangled technical ones—a problem that I wrote about recently?

It’s not hard to understand where this equivocation between humans and Homo sapiens comes from, of course. All living humans are Homo sapiens, and despite our ethnic and cultural differences, humans on earth are remarkably alike. Humans living on two different continents are more genetically similar than two chimpanzees living across a river. This has remained the case for all of recorded history and quite a bit of prehistory, so we could be forgiven for thinking that this is how humans have always been.

But there’s still a conceptual leap between all current humans are Homo sapiens to all humans that ever lived are Homo sapiens.

If we could travel 50,000 years in the past—not a long time in the grand scheme of things—we would’ve discovered an earth populated by many more types of creatures that all resemble humans. There would be our familiar Homo sapiens in Africa, of course; but we would also find Neandertals in Europe, Denisovans in East Asia, the diminutive hobbits in the forests of Indonesia, the small-brained Homo naledi in southern Africa, and of course, Homo erectus, the first hominoid (human-like) species to colonize Europe and Asia.

Standing on such an earth, could we have said with equal confidence that only one of these various populations represent “humans”, while the rest are something else? Maybe, but the evidence doesn’t allow us to immediately reach that conclusion.

Despite the theological relevance of these questions, the reason we haven’t had much scholarly discussion on the issue is because this is a relatively new scientific discovery. The first non-sapiens hominoid fossil was discovered only around a hundred and fifty years ago, and we had to wait even longer until the implications of this finding became clear.

New discoveries often lead scholars to attempt to answer questions that haven’t been raised before, and in the process break new conceptual ground. Interestingly, I’ve found at least one fatwa website that have declared Neandertals to have been humans as well.

If this way of problematizing the idea of humans as Homo sapiens seems novel, consider this thought experiment.

Islam has a number of rulings regarding dogs which have been discussed and debated by our scholars. However, in no point in the history of this discourse did any scholar bother to ask what a dog is (at least, I think not). We all know what dogs are, so the question makes no sense.

But let’s say we reach a point in society when, because of natural or artificial processes, it no longer remains clear what a dog is. We could imagine a new type of creature that has features of both cats and dogs, for instance. In such a situation, it would be entirely legitimate to problematize dog-hood, and question which creatures do and do not qualify as dogs.

I feel like the discovery of the prehistoric hominoid fossil record has placed us in a similar situation. For virtually all of history, figuring out the biological properties that set humans apart from creatures that resemble us was a non-issue (beyond chestnuts such as “Man is a rational animal”), because all humans looked the same. Now that we know that there were creatures on earth that did resemble humans in looks and possibly in behavior, the question has become a live one.

We’ll discuss the question of what makes or breaks a human in much more depth in part 2 of this series. For now, let’s complete our autopsy of the Homo sapiens model to see if there are further benefits to extract.

5.2. Why was this model popular?

Part of our mistake in identifying “humans” with Homo sapiens might’ve been our tendency to conflate technical terms with religious or cultural ones, but that’s not the end of this story.

This model has been defended by people who certainly knew the literature better. What was their motivation?

As recently as three decades ago, we knew considerably less about hominoids outside of our species (i.e., non-sapiens populations like Neandertals), and scientists generally believed that behavioral modernity—the ability to make complex tools, hunt large animals, make and control fire, use language, exhibit aesthetic capabilities—were exclusively found in Homo sapiens. Furthermore, we didn’t have access to the genomic DNA of these non-sapiens species, and had no idea that our members of the two species interbred and shared genes.

These led many thinkers to believe that the emergence of Homo sapiens represented a unique cognitive revolution—a great leap forward, if you will—when all the tell-tale signs of modernity arose. This, combined with the supposed genetic isolation of our species, led many to think our species is the only one that can be appropriately described as “humans”.

This line of reasoning was picked up by some Christian authors attempting to construct their human creation models. Fazale Rana and his Reasons to Believe ministry defends an old-earth view of Biblical Creationism, and in their book Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity presents a spirited defense of the view that only and exclusively Homo sapiens represent the progeny of Adam.

In one of the first chapters of the book, they lay out some scientific predictions of their model, e.g.:

Human culture appears and expands explosively in the archeological record since humanity's origin

And

Humans are behaviorally distinct (in ways that reflect God’s image) from the earlier hominids, the great apes, and other animals.

Of course, defending such a claim requires demonstrating that the non-sapiens hominoids most similar to us—i.e., the Neandertals—were indeed behaviorally and genetically distinct from us. Rana and Ross wrote this book in 2005 when these details were still murky, which gave them enough wiggle room to argue that Neandertals did not display sophisticated cognition and that they didn’t contribute to the current human gene pool.

As alluded to above, the science on the issue has since settled against them.

Is this to say that the Homo sapiens-Adam view is completely unsalvageable? Maybe not, but that would require tweaking with some premises of the Conventional View. That’s an interesting exercise that we will undertake in part 3 of this series.

6. End of part 1: Taking stock

Thus far, we’ve established the following:

1. Adamic origin can lead to scientifically falsifiable predictions

2. An Adamic origin “model” is a scripturally plausible story that can escape being falsified by scientific data

3. These models can be categorized as ones that accept the Conventional View as scripturally binding, vs. the ones that don’t

4. One popular model can be constructed if we join the Conventional View with the premise “only and exclusively Homo sapiens are humans”, but that leads to a number of problems

5. The concept and boundaries of “human” is something that requires more investigation, especially in light of the discoveries about fossil hominoids

The next natural step of this project is to try to nail down what it means to be human, and defend a better evidenced model based on that. This is exactly the exercise we’ll undertake in the next part.

Specifically, we’ll discuss one of the most popular models among Christian thinkers (and recently adopted by some Muslim ones as well), which is the idea that humans represent all or most species in the Homo genus. We will explore the motivations for holding this view, find out that it’s very likely wrong, and discuss why it’s wrong. The more wrong models we discuss, the sharper our intuitions about constructing and defending the right models.

With that discussion in the bag, we’ll move on to a very promising model of Adamic origin recently proposed by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. In my opinion, this is a contender for a good, evidence-based model, so it’s worth going into its pros and cons in detail.

In part 3 we’ll move on to models that don’t consider the Conventional View as binding, and bring the whole discussion to a close.

(Mis)reading science into a hadith

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is reported to have said:

If a man's water dominates the woman’s water, then the child resembles the father; and if the woman's water dominates the man’s water, then the child resembles the mother.

This statement, found in different variants across authentic hadith collections (example 1, 2), raise a number of interesting issues worth parsing. (In fact, some friends and I are working on a long-form essay just on this one hadith—stay tuned.)

The hadith seems to suggest that the reason a child resembles one parent over the other is due to the way male and female “waters”—i.e., reproductive fluids—interact with each other. The mode of interaction is specified by the verb translated here as “dominates”, but the specific wording isn’t settled across variants. Most variants have the word سبق which means preceding, but also carries the connotation of outcompeting or dominating (e.g., see the usage in Qur’an, 56:60]; while a smaller number of variants mention على, literally “above”, which also connotes dominating or prevailing.

The fact that the hadith mentions “dominance” in the context of genetics is taken by some Muslims to think the reference here is to genetic dominance. For instance, Sh. Dr. Yasir Qadhi in his explanation of the hadith says the following:

This translation fits in absolutely perfectly with the modern concept of genetics. Because whichever of the genes “overpowers” the others, the child will be looking like that person. And in fact even in modern biology, ask any student of genetics, what is the word that is used? Dominant genes. This is سبق, this is what it is—dominant genes. [video, 16:20 onwards]

The shaykh then goes on to explain what genetic dominance means, and sums up the discussion by saying “this is exactly how we can understand the hadith”.

I think this approach is wrong. But before I explain why, let me state that this error is entirely understandable.

The problem of forcing everyday language into scientific categories

The fact that the word used in modern genetics is exactly the same as the word used in plausible translations of the hadith is definitely interesting—it struck me as interesting too—and from there it’s not hard to equate the two concepts. However, as we’ll see below, “genetic dominance” carries a very specific, technical meaning; while the wording used by the Prophet connotes dominance, prevalence, or outcompeting in a general, broad sense. This is obvious: the سبق or على are normal, everyday words that could refer to a wide range of relationships, while the term “genetic dominance” has come about in a specific scientific context and has its own utility. The semantic scope of the latter is much more restricted than the former.

Furthermore, contrary to Sh. Yasir’s comments above, of all the mechanisms that determine the resemblance between parent and child, genetic dominance is quite rare. (The reason this concept in genetics has so much cultural capital is because it’s the most convenient mode of inheritance to teach in high school biology.) So by restricting the meaning of the hadith to genetic dominance alone, we actually end up constructing a scientific conflict where there wasn’t any.

This is an example of a common hermeneutical error: conflating the semantic scope of commonly used words with those of recently coined technical terms.

Consider this analogy. In most human cultures, the word “fish” historically referred to whales as well. On the other hand, a taxonomist whose goal is to categorize organisms based on their deeper biological organizations, would scoff at such a suggestion—after all, whales are warm-blooded, don’t lay eggs, don’t have gills, and breathe with their lungs.

Say we come across an ancient text describing something that sounds very much like a whale: a massive, horizontally-tailed ocean fish that made water spouts through their blowholes. Upon consulting with the resident taxonomist, however, we quickly learn that while whales do meet that description, whales aren’t fish. We therefore conclude the event described in the ancient text must’ve been wrong. After all, no fish matching that description ever existed.

Clearly, that would be silly: it’s a category error to use such technical, utilitarian definitions to restrict common expressions. (This mistake is also seen when ancient descriptions of heavenly bodies are forcibly mapped on to modern scientific categorizations of planets, stars and meteors.)

Reading the hadith with fresh eyes

Let’s return to the hadith and the word “dominance”, both its colloquial and technical meanings. In what follows, I’ll describe what genetic dominance is, and survey all the different ways in which resemblance between child and a parent is determined. In the course of this exploration, we’ll realize that all such mechanisms of determining resemblance can be described as a vague, general notion of dominance (or overpowering, or outcompeting—take your pick).

Before that exercise, let’s look at the hadith one more time to see what natural phenomenon it’s meant to describe,

If a man’s water dominates the woman’s water, then the child resembles the father; and if the woman’s water dominates the man’s water, then the child resembles the mother.

In what follows, we’ll gloss “water” as “reproductive substance”—as in, the substance contributed by mother and father that’s responsible for heredity. We now know the identity of those substances (genes, or alleles if we’re talking about gene variants). In a later section of the article, we’ll discuss whether this water to allele gloss is fair.

Note first that the hadith isn’t about the general phenomenon of resemblance between parent and child. A child’s features often represent the midpoint between theparents, but in some cases, the child might resemble one parent more than the other. That’s what the hadith is talking about, so in what follows we’ll discuss the genetic mechanisms that cause a child to exhibit such a skew.

We start with the most familiar textbook case—the one Sh. Yasir immediately thought of in relation to the hadith.

Let there be science

Genetic dominance

I think intuition about genetics is most easily built by looking at concrete examples, and that’s what we’ll do here.

Consider lactose intolerance. Most humans cannot digest the lactose sugar found in milk, which leads to stomach problems in many of us. As it happens, everyone can digest lactose as infants, but the ability goes away when we grow up. This is because the enzyme responsible for breaking down the sugar stops being produced in our body. In other words, each of us possesses the molecular machinery required to digest milk, just that in most of us that machinery gets turned off after infancy.

People in Northern Europe and some parts of Africa and the Middle East, however, have the ability to digest lactose even as adults. This happens because these individuals have genetic mutations in a region in the genome involved in regulating the production of the lactose-digesting enzyme—a “switch” for the machine, if you will. As a result, their lactose digesting-switch never turns off, even after growing up.

Before continuing with this story, we need a basic biology interlude.

All humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, which can be conveniently understood as packets of DNA. The child receives one of each pair from each parent—one set from mother, one from father. The DNA contained within these chromosomes, taken together, comprise the human genome—the sum total of all genetic information required to specify our characteristics (phenotype).

Stretches of DNA within chromosomes—genes—specify different human characteristics or phenotype. For example, a gene on chromosome 15 produces a protein which determines the color of our eyes.

All humans largely receive the same set of genes from both parents, but some genes might differ in their sequences between the two parental copies. Each of these gene variants are referred to as alleles, and different alleles often have different functional consequences.

Now imagine a child with a European mother and an Indian father, who receives a lactose-digesting allele from mom and a “normal”, non-digesting allele from dad. Would this child be able to digest milk in adulthood or not?

Upon digestion, lactose generates two products—glucose and galactose—which are released into the bloodstream. This means we can measure the activity of the lactose-digesting enzyme in an individual by measuring their blood glucose following the ingestion of milk.

Someone with two European parents who can both digest lactose would have a high amount of blood glucose, while someone with only Indian parents would have very low activity. As it happens, our hypothetical child with a lactose tolerant-mother and a lactose intolerant-father only has an intermediate level of enzyme activity.

Interestingly, however, even such an intermediate level is enough to provide full lactose tolerance in an individual. In the final analysis, if a child inherits a lactose-digesting allele from one parent and a “nondigesting”-allele from another, their phenotype in regards to lactose tolerance will be determined by the former.

This phenomenon is captured by the metaphor of “dominance”: it’s as if the lactose-digesting allele “dominates” the effect of the other allele in determining the child’s characteristics. Or put another way, the child resembles the parent whose allele dominates.

Lactose tolerance is the textbook example of genetic dominance, and its easy to see why one would think this is the only phenomenon the hadith would be referring to. However, this is not the only reason a child resembles one parent more than the other.

Resemblance, but no genetic dominance

Consider a variation of the example in which one parent, say the father, has one lactose-digesting allele and one non-digesting allele, while both of the mother’s alleles are non-digesting. According to the schema described above, dad can digest lactose but mom can’t. Since just one of each parental allele gets passed on, the child has a 50% chance to end up inheriting a non-digesting allele from each of the parents. This would mean the child would have the exact same allele complement as the mother—two non-digesting ones, and therefore the same phenotype as well (see figure below).

This is a case of the child resembling the mother and not the father, and yet genetic dominance isn’t at play here. In order to have dominance the child must have two different alleles, but in this case both alleles are the same (non-digesting).

However, if we step away from the technical definition and instead try to describe the interaction between maternal and paternal alleles in common language, it certainly wouldn’t be wrong to say that in this situation, the mother’s alleles or genotype prevailed. After all, the child ends up with the exact same allele-set as the mother, so her genotype “wins out”. Dominates, if you will.

How resemblance is usually determined: complex traits

Our extended example of lactose intolerance is the way people usually think about genetics, possibly because this is how we’re introduced to the concept in school. However, very little of human genetics works this way. For one, unlike our example, a trait is rarely determined by just one gene or allele, but rather via the aggregate action of many individual alleles. Perhaps the most well-studied example is height: different studies suggest that human height might be influenced by hundreds to thousands of different alleles (see this article for a review).

Secondly, lactose tolerance is what we call a binary trait: either you can tolerate milk or or you can’t; but clearly, most human variation can’t be described this way. There’s no threshold, for instance, to what’s considered short or tall—the trait varies on a spectrum. Relatedly, the vast majority of our alleles don’t interact according to such strict dominance: in fact, if mom and dad passes on alleles of contrasting effects, the child’s phenotype falls near the midpoint. Large-scale analyses of human genetics datasets consistently suggest that dominance is a rare phenomenon (this study, for example, identified dominance interaction for a little less than one-fifth of the total alleles considered).

All of this reinforces our earlier point: genetic dominance is textbook, but not common; so it’s definitely problematic to pigeonhole the hadith’s semantic scope in this way.

So how else does a child resemble one parent over the other? Let’s go back to height: as mentioned above, human height might be determined by as many as thousands of different genes acting together, each having a small to moderate effect. In case of such complex traits, the genetic component of the child’s height would be determined (i.e., if we leave environmental effects to one side) by the number of height-affecting alleles they have, multiplied by the effect contributed by each. Some alleles boost height, some heights decrease it, and the child reflects the aggregate.

In such a system, how might a child resemble one parent over the other? If the taller parent passes on more height-increasing alleles than the other, they would cumulatively manifest in the child being taller (and thereby resembling the tall parent).

Again, this effect cannot be called “dominance” in the way the word is used in genetics—none of the alleles are competing with their counterparts.

Note again, however, in this case we can easily describe the phenomenon as the dad’s alleles “dominating” over the mom’s: the child’s genome is flooded with height-boosting alleles that they got from the tall dad. The dominance language expresses the higher number of one parent’s alleles than the other.

It’s dominance, all the way across

There are other, more uncommon ways in which a child might resemble one parent more—for instance, between the two parental alleles, only one might be expressed while the other is silenced, a phenomenon referred to as “imprinting”. While this is also not a case of genetic dominance, here too the language of dominance expresses the fact that the non-silenced parent’s alleles are dominating.

In summary, the myriad ways in which a child resembles one parent more than other can all be captured in the word dominance, or prevalence, or outcompeting. Whether via strict genetic dominance, the manifestation of one parent’s genotype, the higher number of alleles inherited from one parent than the other, or one parent’s allele getting silenced—as a commonly used catch-all term, one parent’s reproductive substance “dominating” is pretty good.

A further note on descriptions of natural phenomena in scripture

According to the hadith, the reason one child resembles dad and not mom (or vice versa) is because of the way their reproductive substances interact. As our survey above shows, the various complex interactions between male and female alleles can be appropriately described as one somehow being dominant over the other. Given how general the language of the hadith is, it successfully evades the charge of any scientific error.

This leaves one residual issue.

Sure, we can buy that the Prophet’s answer doesn’t contradict science, but maybe this was not the best answer to the question. The hadith reduces an extremely complex, multifaceted phenomenon to a general form of dominance, not to mention equating between alleles and “water”. However, whether this impression is correct depends on what the Prophet was tasked to do in the first place.

The Prophet was an emissary of the Omniscient God, and in the same hadith he goes on to say that he was informed of these details via Divine Revelation. It’s certainly not beyond the powers of God to reveal as much scientific detail as He wished. However, the Prophet’s task is not to provide scientifically informative answers, but to speak in a way that would accommodate the phenomenology of the audience. This phenomenon is referred to as Divine Accommodation—roughly, the idea that God speaks in a way that’s sensible and useful to the audience (as long as it doesn’t contain straight-out falsehoods, of course).

The mode of God’s language about natural phenomena is a fascinating topic in its own right, but for our purposes let’s briefly note the context of the hadith itself. The hadith is part of a longer conversation between the Prophet and an inquisitive Rabbi who, as a test for the Prophet’s truthfulness, is quizzing him about knowledge of Jewish scripture. To satisfy this questioner, the Prophet must provide not just any scientifically accurate account of parent-child resemblance, but the specific statement the Rabbi expects—the one that’s found in the Jewish sources.

Since the Rabbi is satisfied by the Prophet’s response, we understand that the answer did echo some pre-existing Divinely revealed piece of scripture that the Rabbi was familiar with. As such, taking the hadith at face value, the right question isn’t why the Prophet described the phenomenon in this way; but rather, why God chose to reveal this detail to the Jews in the first place. We have no way of knowing the answer to that question, but we can surmise that there was little benefit in providing gratuitous scientific details to that audience either.

Once we fix these constraints of expression, it’s hard to see how else the phenomenon could’ve been described other than the words found in the hadith. Let’s pick up the equivocation between “alleles” and “water” and consider how else the Prophet—or God before him, when He spoke to the Jews—could’ve explained it. Sure, God could’ve described genes and alleles in all their gory details, but that wouldn’t accommodate the audience’s phenomenology (not to mention, what spiritual benefit would that level of detail have?).

But perhaps there a way of referring to genes without describing them in detail. For a long time prior to the discovery of genes, thinkers used abstract concepts to indicate the reproductive substance. Mendel, for instance, used the word “factor” as a placeholder for the substance that acts as units of heredity, without knowing anything about the nature of that substance. However, speaking in terms of such abstract notions would also similarly confuse the audience.

If one can’t describe alleles in details, and has to use concrete referents only—no abstract placeholders—“water” really is the best one can do (the rest of the hadith describes the water’s color and consistency, meaning the more accurate translation is “fluids”). After all, the alleles (which are on chromosomes) reside within sperm and egg cells, themselves carried in a suspension of reproductive fluids. Interestingly, the Prophet does elsewhere acknowledge that it’s not the fluid itself, but an unspecified part thereof that’s relevant to heredity.

Such a project falls into the purview of what the industry calls negative apologetics: roughly, defending Islamic truth claims against philosophical, scientific, or ethical objections. As it happens, the vast majority of Islamic intellectual discourse that happens today falls into this category. Every current piece of content—every new book, blog, debate, article, podcast—seems to be dedicated to defending Islam against some objection or other.

That enterprise is definitely important—indeed, Qur’anic, as the Qur’an quite often engages with its hostile audience by responding to their arguments. However, there’s another, perhaps even more important aspect to apologetics: making a positive case for the religion. This is something God does as well. In numerous verses, the Qur’an makes a case for its Divine origin [2:23-24], the improbability of the the book being produced by someone like the Prophet [69:38-47], or the Prophet’s miraculous knowledge of previous scriptures [12:3].

Let’s now apply this lesson to the question of human origins.

Islam asks us to believe something truly extraordinary: that all humans currently living on earth were born from a single primordial human couple, who in turn were made separately through an act of Special Divine Creation. Given the spirit of the times, our first impulse is to ask whether such a narrative squares with the scientific evidence at hand—and as I mentioned in the beginning, that’s what my 30,000 word essay and currently ongoing blog series plans to address in-depth.

But beyond that, we shouldn’t be afraid to ask: what’s the evidence for such a proposition? Are there any facts that the Islamic creation story explains better than the naturalistic one? What positive reasons do we have to prefer it over its alternatives?

That’s the cue for a new series—and, I’m grateful to announce, a new author!—on this blog.

My friend Omar has been carefully investigating facts about human cognition that seem to fit better on an Islamic special creation model. I’ll let him briefly explain the contours of the project he has planned for y’all.

*******

For much of history, there were at least two things that were thought to separate humans from other animals: the ability to reason, and the use of language. We can see this in classical philosophical definitions of “human”, such as the “rational animal” or (in some translations) the “speaking animal”, and in discussions where eloquence and uses of language were thought to be a distinguishing feature of humans¹.

But with the advancement of science, especially the theory of evolution, these unique traits might no longer strike us as unique. Don’t lots of animals talk? Cats meow and dogs bark, and but we’ve discovered that birds and whales sing songs of their own².

And if humans evolved along a gradual path of development, we aren’t any different from other animals in principle—every one of our abilities must be present, in some muted, prototypical form, in other animals—especially those thought to be our closest relatives.

Similarly, with regards to reason, the most significant counterexample in our day is artificial intelligence, especially the powerful capabilities of large language models. AI researchers have pointed to the increasing capacities of these models as proof that human reasoning is nothing special beyond making predictions from massive training datasets.

This, at least, is the common understanding.

But I think a deep analysis of the evidence shows this is mistaken. When we consider the difference between humans and animals, the gulf is mind-boggling in what we are able to achieve versus what the smartest animals are able to achieve. The closer you look at (human) language, the more unique and fundamentally different it seems to be. Likewise, we get the same impression the better we understand just what is happening when we reason.

The plan is to explore these two topics in turn. In the first part of this series, we’ll analyze different schools of thought within linguistics, look at animal studies (especially those related to apes), and see what makes human language special. We’ll realize that not only is the human language completely different from anything found in other animals, but also that naturalistic evolutionary explanations really struggle to explain how such a feature might have emerged. We’ll fend off various scientific and philosophical scruples against this argument and conclude that facts about human language provide evidence for the Islamic model of human origins.

*******

Our two series on human origins: one authored by me, on the evidence against special creation of humans; and one by Omar, on the evidence for that exact proposition, will continue in parallel. I hope these two strands together will produce a compelling and viable research program to address what is perhaps the most important science and religion conflict of the day.

===================

Notes and references

1. Aristotle, De Anima, II, 3; Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī; Feryal Salem, Isagoge: A Primer on Classical Logic (Blue Mountain Press, 2022), p. 38; al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī, al-Dharī’ah ilā Makārim al-Sharī’ah, p. 191; al-Zamakhsharī, al-Kashshāf, 55:4; al-Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-Tanzīl wa Asrār al-Ta’wīl, 55:4; Charles Herbermann, ed. “Man”. Catholic Encyclopedia. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1913).

2. R. S. Payne, S. McVay, Songs of humpback whales. Science 173, 585–597 (1971); C. K. Catchpole, P. J. B. Slater, Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Stewart is an extraordinary comedian, and like all great comedians, he has the gift of distilling complex ideas down to memorable quips. This clip is no different. His case against God and religion is made using the same edgy, irreverent humor we associate with him.

And yet, the satirist still manages to come off as humble and empathetic. Despite his myriad complaints against religion, Stewart seems to place the burden of his lack of faith on himself: “I wish I could get there [to faith]”, he says; self-deprecatingly refers to his atheism as being “very f***ing annoying”; and lampoons naturalism as the view that entails “we’re just bathroom mold that got luckier than other bathroom mold”. There’s no moral or political grandstanding here, just a comedian off-handedly laying out his cards.

This whole package—edgy-sounding arguments couched in the language of empathy while delivered by a matchlessly charismatic comedian—makes for a potent and accessible case against religion, one that could sway people more easily than an hour-long academic lecture on the topic. So today, I thought it would be worth exploring the arguments in this clip in more detail.

Let me acknowledge from the get go that this exercise is odd: Stewart, after all, is making jokes; and you know what they say about analyzing jokes. More so if that analysis is in the form of a high word-count Substack essay.

Thing is though, the arguments he makes in the video are thought-provoking, I think. On first listen, if God is the perfect designer then why is my scrotum so wrinkly and weird sounds like typical rage bait you’d find on r/atheism, but there’s a core to the thought there that’s worth exploring. To my mind, that makes this exploration worthwhile—if for nothing else, then our own theological edification.

Other than a brief allusion to the problem of suffering, I caught two complaints in the clip: the fact that religions tend to make arbitrary, hyper-specific claims that seem ridiculous; and the argument from “bad design”. I have a standalone post about the first of these complaints, so here we’ll only be discussing the second one.

Let’s dive in.

Why was the Blackbird incontinent?

God doesn’t make mistakes. And I’m like, have you seen a scrotum? . . .

[God was like] here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take all the nerve endings, and we’re gonna tie them up like a ball.

And you’re like, oh, that doesn’t sound very smart, but ok—what are we gonna do with the ball?

We’re gonna put it in a pouch.

Oh, like a nice pouch?

No, not a nice pouch, like a pouch with hair and weird sh*t on it.

And then you’re like, well alright; we’re gonna put it in like the sternum? To protect it?

No, here’s what we’re gonna do. we’re just gonna f***ing hang it so that any a**hole can walk by and [do a nut-tap].

Pictured above is the Lockheed SR-71 aka “Blackbird”.

This slick, stealthy thing of beauty was the fastest manned aircraft that ever took to the skies: it could retain Mach 3+ speed for over an hour—a record that hasn’t been broken to this day. In its twenty-four years of flight during the Cold War, the Blackbird logged over 11,000 hours in the air, amounting to some 3,500 missions. All the while being incredibly safe and hard to catch on radars. Politics aside, this was definitely one of the coolest, most well-designed machines in the history of human flight.

And yet, as seen above—the Blackbird had a tendency to leak fuel all over the ground.

This picture is just objectively funny: the menacing high-capacity reconnaissance aircraft that dominated the Cold War frequently wet the bed with fuel. And it did so to such an extent that this became quite an annoyance to the ground crew.

If the human scrotum is bad design, Blackbird incontinence certainly qualifies.

Surprisingly, no one with even a modicum of knowledge about the aircraft would agree with this assessment. You see for the Blackbird, far from being a weird quirk or bad design, the leakage is a feature—or at least, the inevitable consequences of other essential design choices that had to be implemented.

As we know from middle school physics, matter expands when heated. An aircraft like the Blackbird often reached extremely high temperatures that made its panels expand by several inches. To account for this, the fuel tank panels were only fitted loosely at ground level, so they can expand and seal themselves when the aircraft eventually, and inevitably, encountered high heat. A necessary consequence of this looser fit is the fuel leak.

The lesson to be drawn from this is the following: so long as we’re operating in a universe governed by laws, any design project involves compromise. If you want to optimize the whole, you have to compromise on the parts. There are always trade-offs. It’s impossible to design a system in which every single component is optimal.

We’ll expand on these ideas in a bit, but for now let’s take a look at biological design. For our case study, we’ll pick an example just as strange and quirky as the scrotum: the male nipple.

Why do men have nipples again?

We take this for granted but, like the peeing Blackbird, the concept of men having nipples is funny.

Nipples are, if nothing else, the ultimate representation of motherhood—and by extension, femininity; yet no man is spared a set. Even the most gym-obsessed testosterone-filled baritone-voiced mountain-dwelling unshaven lumberjack sport a couple of patches on their chest whose primary function is for infants to latch on to and feed.

Nipples are truly the scandal of masculinity.

And yet, and yet—wouldn’t you believe it—there’s a deep logic in the existence of male nipples, one that has to do with how the human body develops in the womb.

Men and women share 22 pairs of chromosomes, but differ when it comes to the last pair which are appropriately referred to as the sex chromosomes. Going back to high school biology, biological females have two X-chromosomes in these slots, while males have an X and a Y.

This is true as far as it goes, but there’s more to sex determination than the mere presence of chromosomes. Chromosomes are essentially packets of DNA, collectively representing the cell’s blueprint. By itself, a blueprint or an instruction manual can’t do a whole lot. The instructions in the blueprint needs to be read, interpreted and implemented if we want to get anything done.

In the language of molecular biology, this is called DNA or gene expression. It’s not enough to just have the genes, they need to be expressed in the cell for any biology to happen.

As the video above demonstrates, pieces of DNA are transcribed into the language of RNA, which are in turn translated into proteins. Proteins are the cellular workhorses that accomplish most of our biological functions.

At conception, biological males are endowed with the coveted Y-chromosome, the only one that sets us apart from females at the level of DNA. However, it takes a while for the genes on that chromosomes to kick in. It’s only around day 40 after conception that a stretch of DNA on the Y-chromosome starts getting expressed.

Long story short, this gene (SRY—Sex-determining Region Y) located on the Y-chromosome encodes a protein that sets an incredibly complex cascade of operations in motion, eventually leading to the development of male reproductive organs. Put differently, the development of maleness is crucially dependent on this Y-chromosome button being pressed. If it’s not pressed—if the gene is inert for some reason—the child essentially develops as a female, with the full complement of internal and external female reproductive organs. (These individuals do present with reproductive issues later in life—but that’s a different discussion. Look up Swyer syndrome if you’re interested).

To put it simply, the picture that emerges here is that maleness is something that has to be activated at a certain time during development. Meaning, for the first forty or so days, males and females develop roughly along the same lines. This makes sense—after all, for all our differences, both sexes share the vast majority of our biology. It would be inefficient to write two completely different development programs from scratch to ultimately produce much of the same outcome.

And guess what part of the body gets built within those forty days? The mammary crests, which eventually manifest as nipples. In short, the reason men have nipples is that we share a developmental pathway with females for the first forty or so days of our existence.

I like to think of features like nipples as representing the “seams” in our design. This analogy is not original to me—I believe it was first suggested by the Christian biologist Joshua Swamidass on his blog. Considered on their own, seams are imperfections: they represent bumpy patches on pieces of clothing, but they’re also inevitable consequences of how that shirt was made. We could, if we wanted, have produced the shirt in a way that made no seams, but that would require such a drastic revision of the process that the end product would no longer remain the same. Like seams in our clothing, male nipples aren’t a quirk—they’re an inevitable result of an elegant, two-in-one developmental pathway.

Think about this for a second: how else could we have designed humans to develop? Could there have been a nipple-free way to make male bodies? For example, could sex determination be pulled forward a little—by a few weeks, say—so that it precedes the development of nipple-precursors?

No, because the Y-chromosome gene SRY needs to kick in at a very specific window—too early or too late would throw off the the logic of development. Turning SRY on too late has essentially the same consequence as not turning it on at all (i.e., leading to development of ovaries instead of testes). On the other hand, if it activates too soon—cells that respond to the SRY protein activity wouldn’t have had time to mature yet; and this too would lead to ovaries.

Well in that case, couldn’t God have set up completely different developmental pathways for the two sexes? Maybe, but that would’ve been incredibly wasteful: since men and women share so much biology between them, running entirely separate developmental programs to achieve the same ends amounts to reinventing the wheel.

This is why it’s important to focus away from the fuel leak or the male nipple or the wrinkly scrotum, and instead, study the system as a whole. Optimizing human design as a whole requires un-optimizing its components. Such trade-offs are inevitable. In fact, trying to myopically optimize each part of a system is such a common pitfall in design logic that the tendency has a name: suboptimization.

Here’s how Marks, Dembski and Ewert summarize this point in their book:

Trade-offs are necessary in design. Designing a car that is both inexpensive and safe requires one criterion to be balanced against the other. Cheap cars aren’t safe and safe cars aren’t cheap. More than not, global optimality necessitates component suboptimality. Ill-informed critical claims of suboptimal design in biological systems is clarified with a discussion of the trade-offs inherent in any multi-objective design. [Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, p. xvi]

Perfection = as good as it gets

But these are fallible human limitations, you may protest, Stewart was talking about God’s design who, lest we forget, is supposed to be perfect.

Yes, God is the perfect designer, but He too creates, maintains and animates the universe in a law-governed way. God could certainly have miraculously materialized every individual human de novo, for instance; or placed us in an utterly lawless universe where each of our bodily actions were specially determined from on high. But that’s not the universe we inhabit: God chose to operate our world through natural regularities, a feature that itself speaks to His existence and providence. Any world that’s ruled by such uncompromising regularities would necessarily entail trade-offs. As with the machine production of clothing, a law-like production of organisms result in design seams.

To my mind, this also suggests that we need to build up a better understanding of what “perfect design” even means. I think the error Stewart (and many others like him) fall into is having an underdeveloped view of perfection. A perfect design can’t mean unrealistically good, it’s only as good as it gets. The ceiling of goodness is fixed by the constraints of the design space. Put differently, in a law-governed universe, there are limits to how good a design can get.

For each aspect of our design that seems odd or flawed—be it the scrotum, the nipples, the inverted retina or the appendix—I think we can always find a deeper logic that necessitated it. Each of those examples instantiate a design that’s as good as it possibly could’ve gotten.

Bad design, and on not knowing why

A crucial disanalogy between human bodies and the Blackbird, however, is that we know far less about the former than the latter.

Human engineers designed the Blackbird, and if we’re ever puzzled about the puddle of slick fuel on the runway, all we need to do is ask them about the piece of design logic that led to this outcome. For humans, however, God doesn’t straight up tell us what the logic is. The design principles undergirding His creation need to be discovered—which entails a long, complicated, continuous process spanning centuries if not millennia of doing science. The developmental principles I described above, for instance, only became apparent with the last few decades of scientific progress.

This means that in many cases, we might be completely baffled as to why aspects of the human design look a certain way. Our judgments are always made at a certain point in our ever-unfolding understanding of biology, which means that at any given point, there are facts that would have to await discovery. Even if our design is perfect, we might not always have the scientific knowledge to demonstrate that yet.

A case in point is the ongoing controversy about the functionality of the human genome. About 1% of our genome makes proteins, and a slightly larger fraction make functional RNAs and perform other regulatory roles in the cell. What of the remainder of our genome, which constitutes its vast majority? Are they functional or not?

Clearly, the answer to this is relevant to the question of perfect or optimal design: If humans are indeed made in the best of forms, isn’t it weird that most of our genome performs no functions at all? That we’re just lugging along billions of nucleotides in our cells, copying them over generation after generation, that result in zero biological consequence? Maybe it’s not as immediately funny as the scrotum or the nipple, but it raises the specter of bad design just as forcefully.

Whether the bulk of our genomes is indeed functional is a question that continues to be hotly debated in the scientific community, and I plan to explore the issue in detail in a future series on this blog. For present purposes, let’s just say that the scientific dust on this issue is yet to settle.

There are arguments for and against pervasive functionality in our genome, but to the point of our ignorance related to the matter: Havstad and Palazzo, in their paper on junk DNA, speculate about numerous possible functions “junk” DNA might have, but ones that haven’t been tested yet. Either the experiments are still unfeasible to do (economically or otherwise), or our technology hasn’t caught up with the hypotheses, or they simply haven’t been done. Bottomline: we’re still missing a lot of crucial information.

So with junk DNA, and potentially many other aspects of the human design, the jury is still out on how advantageous or functional they are, and how they fit into our overall design logic.

It’s the context, stupid

In this post, I’ve been at pains to demonstrate that rushed, gut-feeling dismissals of our design is probably premature, because one, this ignores the broader context of the process, and two, we might not have enough information to make that call just yet.

We didn’t discuss Stewart’s other argument in this post, which was about religions making hyper-specific, seemingly arbitrary and ridiculous truth claims. But if you read my article in which I discuss that objection at length, you’ll realize my objection to that argument is essentially the same: ignoring the broader worldview context.

Whether it comes to evaluating design in nature or religious worldviews—the works of God or the word of God, one wants to say—we ignore context at our peril.

That’s it. That’s the takeaway.

In this blog post, we’ll be discussing the putative evidence for human evolution.

At least, that was the plan.

In addition to presenting my own views on Islam and evolution, I also want this series to represent a conversation with the prevalent discourse. And so as I started on this piece, I thought I should do a quick review of how Muslim authors writing on this topic have addressed this.

That review ended up being something of a project unto itself. I think there’s a problematic, if fascinating, pattern characterizing Muslim evolution discourse: No one writing on Islam and evolution bothers to properly explain to you what the evidence for human evolution is.

Pardon my cynicism but, I suspect this is partly because many of these authors don’t understand the contours of the evidence themselves. And this is precisely why, in my opinion, Muslims have rarely developed good responses to human evolution—after all, you could hardly be expected to effectively counter what you don’t even understand.

Let me assure you at this point that this is not meant to be a rant against Muslim scholars or academics. In fact, as I’ll explain, an inadequate understanding of the evidence for evolution is not a peculiarly Muslim problem, but one that’s been discussed in literature about science outreach. Non-experts everywhere struggle with this, and science educators have grappled with how to improve this state of affairs.

I think this is definitely worth a brief detour, before we actually delve into the evidence for human evolution—in our next post.

Case studies

In what follows, I’ll be sampling four instances of Muslim interaction with evolution:

1. The Muslim da’i and apologist Hamza Tzortzis’ 2012 essay, Has evolution been misunderstood? Revelation, science and certainty

2. Drs. Nazir Khan and Yasir Qadhi’s 2018 essay, Human origins: Theological conclusions and Empirical Limitations, published by the Yaqeen Institiute

3. Dr. Shoaib Ahmed Malik’s 2021 book, Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm

4. Dr. Nidhal Guessoum’s 2010 book, Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science

These examples not only represent some of the most influential write-ups on the topic, but also cover the entire range of attitudes towards evolution. Tzortzis’ essay criticizes evolution as a whole; Khan and Qadhi is prepared to accept all of evolution except when it comes to humans; Malik is even prepared to accept human evolution—as long as the special creation of Adam is spared; and Guessoum opts for wholesale acceptance.

Despite these differences, I’d characterize all of these treatments as exhibiting a light-touch approach when it comes to presenting the evidence for evolution: either not mentioning the evidence at all (Tzortzis), mentioning it only barely (Khan and Qadhi), or not bothering to address the most common responses to the putative evidence (Malik and Guessoum). Let’s explore these tendencies in turn.

Case study 1: Not mentioning the evidence at all

One of the first serious attempts to address the evidence for human evolution was made by the Muslim apologist Hamza Tzortzis who, in his essay on the topic, takes a philosophy of science-based approach to undercut the epistemological basis for (human) evolution. In one of the later posts in this series, we’ll have a lot more to say about what I think about this overall approach (spoiler alert: it is, at best, marginally useful). But for now, let’s note that nowhere in his essay does he explain what the evidence for human evolution is supposed to be.

[Note, this is a problem even for an approach exclusively relying on scientific antirealism—roughly, the view that scientific theories are not meant to be true representations of reality, just useful summaries of data. After all, if we’re asked to accept an antirealist construal of a piece of scientific evidence, we’ll need to know what that evidence is, in order to know what an antirealist interpretation of that evidence would look like. A blanket antirealism about science in general is, to my mind, indistinguishable from skepticism. I say a bit more on the topic in a post I wrote earlier]

Case study 2: Barely a mention

In their essay on the topic, Drs. Nazir Khan and Yasir Qadhi has all of the following to say about the evidence for human evolution:

An opponent of religion might object that it is deceptive for God to create human beings to resemble other biological organisms in a manner compatible with evolution. [Human origins: Theological Conclusions and empirical limitations, p.13]

I mean without more details, it’s nigh impossible to evaluate what this evidence is, much less gauge whether their response to the problem is adequate.

Case study 3: Doesn’t address common responses

The two Islam and evolution books that spend more than a paragraph discussing the putative evidence for evolution are Nidhal Guessoum’s Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science [pp. 278-286] and Shoaib Ahmed Malik’s more recent Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazali and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm [pp. 32-38]. These two authors are not ideologically aligned: Guessoum supports a metaphorical reading of what scripture has to say about human origins—straying well away from mainstream Islamic tradition; while Malik’s more committed to a defending the traditional view (or at least, his perception thereof).

Both of these books discuss the various lines of evidence for evolution, focusing both on comparative anatomy (including those of extinct fossils) and genetics. In the field of genetics, for instance, both authors mention the high degree of genetic similarity between humans and other great apes, the idea that we share non-functional pseudogenes, as well as the fact that one of our chromosomes resemble a fused version of two great ape chromosomes.

Don’t get me wrong—this is definitely a step in the right direction.

The reason this is still inadequate is because neither of these authors even mention the common responses against these lines of evidence, much less address them. This problem is worth exploring in detail.

The “common design” response

For example, when presented with the high degree of similarity between humans and other creatures as evidence for our common descent, it’s almost trivially easy to respond: Well, why couldn’t God have done it that way? After all, why think God would create humans with no biological similarity whatsoever with the rest of creation? Couldn’t humans, great apes, and earthly biodiversity in general, reflect a shared design plan—a common design?

This response is only too common among groups critical of evolution: Young Earth Creationists, Old Earth Creationists, and Intelligent Design (ID) proponents all present common design to undercut similarity-based arguments for evolution.

I’d wager you wouldn’t even have to go to creationist websites for this, just ask a random brother or sister from the mosque about evidence based on similarity—you’ll hear something along the line of Allah could’ve made us that way, on a similar design plan.

The “no DNA is junk” response

The situation only worsens for the claim about pseudogenes: when presented with the claim that humans and non-human creatures share putatively non-functional DNA sequences, one could easily retort: well, how do you know those are non-functional? Science is still progressing, new functions for bits of our genome are discovered all the time, so why can’t we say we’ll soon discover functions for so-called “pseudogenes” as well?

Perhaps the flagship claim trumpeted by the Intelligent Design movement is their rejection of non-functionality in the genome, as evidenced by, among other things, the ID-affiliated biochemist Jonathan Wells’ book The Myth of Junk DNA, the celebration of mainstream pop-science books that are suspicious of junk DNA, the numerous articles hosted on the main ID website, the recent debate on the topic…suffice to say, there’s a vast literature dedicated to showing why the claims to non-functionality are either hasty or downright false.

Even worse, the idea of pervasive functionality across the human genome is also quite common among mainstream scientists with no affiliation with ID, creationism, or even theistic evolution. The biochemist John Mattick, one of the scientists involved with the famous ENCODE functional genomics consortium, recently came out with a veritable textbook in which he defends this idea at length. A 2020 paper published in Nature Reviews Genetics specifically calls for a re-evaluation of the functionality of pseudogenes. Such examples are only too numerous—the view of the human genome being pervasively functional—or at least, not demonstrably non-functional—is, well, pervasive among molecular biologists (admittedly, evolutionary biologists—not so much).

Here too, the academic popularity of these responses is one thing, but this is also the response the Muslim on the street would give when presented with the scientific data about pseudogenes. It’s only too easy to say “for all we know, they could be functional”; the fact the authors don’t take this into account is disappointing.

Look, as I said, I commend these authors for going where others have not: actually putting some effort into explaining what the evidence for (human) evolution is supposed to be. But not addressing—even mentioning—the most commonly heard objections to these arguments—ones that are not only popular in academia, but also ones the average Muslim would instinctually reach for—leaves their treatments woefully incomplete. The omission on part of Malik hurts a bit more, since he does go the extra mile of recounting some common objections to evolution as a whole—but none that have to do with the evidence for evolution itself (except one claim about the fossil record being incomplete, p. 50).

Furthermore, he has an entire chapter dedicated to canvassing the “Christian responses” to evolution. Surely, one would expect the popular Christian protests against the putative evidence for evolution to make an entry? Nope.

Why is this a bad thing?

Neglecting to adequately present the evidence for evolution has consequences: if you don’t understand the evidence, chances are your responses to said evidence won’t be all that convincing. You have to size up the beast first before an attack. As we’ll see in later posts in which we go through all the common ways Muslims (and Christians) have attempted to respond to the evidence for evolution, the vast majority of these approaches fail because they fail to present the evidence fairly.

But perhaps even more obvious—this tendency undercuts the very project these authors have embarked upon. Despite their divergent views on the matter, they would all agree that there’s something—call that a conflict, a misunderstanding, whatever—that needs to be addressed about Islam-evolution interaction. To a Muslim audience, the message is that there’s something about evolution that needs to be taken seriously. But why take it seriously, if it’s entirely unclear whether it has any solid evidential basis? Why would a Muslim even bother to undertake such a reconciliation effort?

How to do this right

Whenever it comes to science-Islam interactions, there’s one book I’m particularly fond of citing—only because there’s hardly any others like it. And that’s Mufti Muntasir Zaman’s The Height of Prophet Adam: At the Crossroads of Science and Scripture.

As the title suggests, the goal of this book is to explore a particular instance of science-scripture conflict concerning the height of early humans (you can read my detailed review of the book here).

In order to demonstrate to his readers that there is indeed a conflict at hand, the Mufti carefully compiles all the scientific evidence against the possibility of early humans being giants. He could’ve easily not done this—in fact, when I first started reading the book, I expected him to just vaguely allude to the scientific consensus on the issue. Instead, not only does he bring up the absence of giant humans in the archaeological record, he also discusses the more fundamental issue of the human anatomy—even when scaled up—not being compatible with the physiology of being very large. Furthermore, he diligently looks into conspiratorial claims about museums hiding the evidence for giant human fossils, in addition to considering miracles and scientific antirealism as plausible explanations.

In conducting such an exhaustive survey, not only does the Mufti present compelling evidence for the scientific facts in question, but also anticipates and addresses responses one might get. It’s only too common to hear “there are giant fossils, we just haven’t found them because the fossil record is so patchy” as a response, which is why he presents the physiology-based objection. One could even say “well God still could’ve done it”, which prompts him to respond to miracles as an explanation. What’s left? Science is somehow epistemologically unreliable? That runs into his philosophy of science discussion.

This is what we need—and I wish we had more of. If this Mufti can present a detailed, sober-minded discussion of the evidence in regards to just one hadith, Muslim authors writing on evolution—who often do have academic training in science—can definitely pull this off when it comes to the single most important conflict between science and religion.

So this is where my rant ends, and we turn this around by showing how…

It’s not the Muslims’ fault

As frustrating as this state of affairs might be, this is not a uniquely Muslim problem.

The evidence for evolution—specifically, that of common descent—happens to be hard to grasp for everyone. This might seem surprising but, despite being considered one of the most successful scientific theories, and despite having as massive a cultural footprint as it does, there’s not a lot of material that makes a drawn-out case for the evidence for evolution (specifically, common descent), starting from first principles.

The philosopher of science Elliot Sober writes the following in his Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science:

Given how central the thesis of common ancestry is to evolutionary reasoning, one might expect there to be a vast literature in which the evidence for that claim is amassed. In fact, the question is discussed, but the literature on it is hardly vast. For most evolutionists, the similarities that different species share make it obvious that they have common ancestors, and there is no reason to puzzle further over the question. [p. 264]

Allmon and Ross, in their 2018 paper on the topic, has some insightful comments on the difficulties of understanding and communicating the evidence for evolution to non-experts. First, they note that common ancestry—the idea that different species (humans and other great apes, say) share the same ancestor—is conceptually different from the popularly cited mechanism for evolutionary change, i.e., natural selection. Evidence for common ancestry does not necessarily mean evidence for natural selection, or vice versa. For historical reasons, however, these two issues get frequently conflated, so people often pass off “compilations of examples of adaptation” [p. 2] as evidence for common ancestry. I mean, that’s clearly not the case. One can accept, for instance, the fact that finches’ beaks and the wing color of peppered moths were shaped by natural selection, and yet disagree with the idea that humans and chimps share a common ancestor—one would think the latter would be more challenging to prove.

This aside, Allmon and Ross identify three distinct reasons as to why the evidence for evolution might be challenging to grasp:

1. People often assume, without prior justification, that an organism’s trait is the way it is because that’s the best, perfect or optimal arrangement. Going back to our junk DNA example above: if one assumes that each letter in our genome sequence is optimally designed, then obviously a historical explanation for genomic similarities would fall on deaf ears: Humans and chimps share similar DNA sequences because that’s the best and most optimal way of designing these creatures.

2. It is inherently challenging to use present, static data to infer a past historical process.

3. So-called homology-based arguments often come off as circular reasoning: things are similar because they evolved from a common ancestor…which is why they look similar.

The authors also discuss design-based explanations for the putative evidence for evolution in the penultimate section of their essay, and it’s evident that getting past these arguments isn’t very straightforward.

All of this goes to show that presenting and evaluating the evidence for evolution is hard. Not only Muslims, but I haven’t really seen any able Christian responses to this problem that goes any significant distance; and as mentioned above, this is largely because of a failure to present (and understand?) the evidence as it is.

Now that I’ve talked a big game about all of this, let’s actually discuss the evidence for evolution—the way it should be discussed! Next post.

On that note, I’d like to announce a new series on just that topic!

What’s the most obvious challenge posed by science to a traditional Islamic account of human origins? Surely, it’s the idea that there’s nigh insurmountable scientific evidence for human evolution. Data from so many different fields of research—comparative anatomy, genetics, the fossil record, paleoarchaeology— are believed to have converged on the conclusion that humans did not arise de novo—rather, they share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, the other great apes, and indeed the rest of biology on earth. Whatever the definition of a successful scientific theory might be, this one surely qualifies.

In the face of all of this, Muslims (or at least, the vast majority of them—as well as many Christians) believe that humans arose from a single primordial couple, who in turn were brought into existence via an act of special, miraculous creation. These original humans didn’t have parents, much less sharing common ancestry with other non-human creatures.

This is the scientific conflict of our age: If there were ever a doubt about whether science and religion can get along, this precipitates it.

And yet, you would search in vain for capable Muslim (or indeed, Christian) treatments of this dilemma. I don’t mean a lot hasn’t been said or written on it—it has—but, for reasons we’ll discover later, none of the responses come close to addressing the crux of the challenge.

This realization is what made me publish a 30,000+ word essay on the evidential challenge of human evolution a while ago. In the essay, I analyze in detail what the problem is, survey existing solutions, and then propose and defend a novel approach that I think can adequately address the problem. Basically, the thesis in the essay is the following:

Since its publication, however, the essay hasn’t really received a lot of peer review (this is the only somewhat substantive one that comes to mind), possibly because of its length and the challenging nature of the material. Plus, I don’t think the essay was very well-organized.

To remedy this, I’ll be publishing a series of blog posts that will try to break down the contents of the essay in simple, accessible terms. I don’t know how many posts the series will have, but I’d rather make the material lengthy and easy to understand, than concise and inaccessible.

Roughly speaking, these are the broad topics that will covered in the series:

• What is the evidence for human evolution?

• How have Muslims and Christian authors tried to address this evidence—and what can we learn from their responses?

• What is the Islamic creation model?

• How does the Islamic creation model explain the data surrounding human origins?

• Response to objections to this model

• Extinct hominids and junk DNA as case studies to stress-test the model

Each of these topics will probably have more than one dedicated post. The series will end with a brief discussion on junk DNA, but since that is a substantive topic—I plan to start a standalone excursus on just the junk DNA issue once the present series ends.

In parallel, this blog will also host a different, related series on what makes humans unique and exceptional—which is a crucial part of the aforementioned Islamic creation model—so keep your eyes peeled for that!

1.1. This was meant to be a book review

I recently purchased the Farid al-Bahraini’s (aka “Farid Responds”) new book titled Why the Companions Converted to Islam. The book struck me as interesting in at least two ways.

First, Muslim discourse these days tends to be defensive: I’d say over 80% of our efforts are spent defending the religion against scientific or moral objections. This is not healthy: A robust apologetics program would also need to focus on providing positive reasons for the truth of Islam. This has been the practice of God Himself. The Qur’an frequently defends the Prophet against objections, it also provides strong reasons to accept its truth claims. Just think of the so-called “challenge” verses, for example: 2:23, 10:38, 11:13, and 17:88. Farid’s book focuses on making a positive case for Islam, and that definitely deserves special credit.

Secondly, the book differs from other contemporary books or articles in its genre, in that it doesn’t just tally all the reasons for the truth of Islam. Rather, Farid’s interested in a more historical question: why did the Prophet’s earliest audience decide to accept Islam? Clearly, Islam to them was a heretofore unseen religion, and there would’ve been no baseline motivation to even consider it seriously, much less accept it. Islam had a very low prior probability for this audience, so to speak.

And yet, the companions did accept Islam—that too in large numbers. Why?

Farid attempts to reconstruct these reasons by focusing on four instances from the Prophet’s life during which a large number of people became Muslims at the same time. The inciting incidents for these four large-scale conversions were as follows:

1. Exposure to the literature of the Qur’an: An accomplished poet listens to the Qur’an and immediately forms the belief that this recital has Divine origins. Swayed by his expert testimony, his tribe accepts Islam en masse.

2. Jewish prophecies about the advent of Islam: The Jewish community living in Yathrib (now Madina) had an influential prophecy about the coming of a Prophet, and it matched the timing and location of the arrival of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Upon meeting him, the tribes in Yathrib accepted Islam when they recognized the Prophet as representing the fulfillment of the prophecy.

3. A micro-miracle: A hostile opponent of Islam comes to assassinate the Prophet, but the Prophet foils his plans by revealing to him his true intention, the details of his scheme, who his accomplice was, and the terms which were agreed upon by the two men. Since this conversation was had in secrecy, the only way the Prophet could’ve known about this is via supernatural guidance. This micro-miracle convinces the assassin of the truth of Islam, which in turn results in the conversion of many Makkans.

4. Fulfillment of an unlikely prophecy: Following the defeat of the Byzantines at the hands of the Persians, the Qur’an made an explicit prophecy to the effect that the former would be victorious again, and that too within a period of ten years. This was considered to be highly unlikely because of the dire straits the Byzantines were in, so the eventual fulfillment of the Prophecy was considered by many as evidence for the truth of Islam.

This book can be appreciated as an account of the case for Islam according to Islam. The thoughts and actions of Islam’s earliest followers have normative religious value, so what they understood to be its best and most convincing arguments are religiously significant. This utility of the book is alluded to in its subtitle: The Historical Context Behind the Proofs of Prophethood.

This is what sets Farid’s book apart from run-of-the-mill presentations of the “proofs” of Islam, in which the arguments are often introduced without historical context and might seem arbitrary. Sure, numerical and/or scientific miracles might be fun to discuss, but were they the reasons that brought the companions into Islam? If not, then it seems like we’re making arguments for Islam that the religion doesn’t make for itself, meaning they must be assigned a low prior probability.

Note, however, the book is not all historical context: after narrating these mass conversion events, Farid does attempt to unpack the arguments so they can be evaluated on their own merit. In that way, the book doubles as a work on the evidence for Islam. Which is where my obsession about the issue become relevant: I’ve been interested in the positive case for Islam for a long time, so wanted to write a thorough-ish review on the arguments advanced in the book.

That was the plan, at least. As I started noting down my thoughts on the chapter on the argument from Qur’anic literature—I realized the material here would be substantive enough to be a standalone article on its own merit.

So here we are: This is now an article on the literary qualities of the Qur’an and what makes them miraculous/inimitable.

1.2. But it’s now an article on the Qur’an’s literature

In what follows, I’ll sketch out what I think are some of the most promising arguments for the literary miracle of the Qur’an. While the article has transmogrified from being a book review to a standalone piece on this topic, I will still be using the relevant chapter from Farid’s book as a framing device.

Here’s how we’ll proceed.

We’ll first discuss the prospect of making this argument by appealing to the beliefs of the Qur’an’s earliest listeners, many of whom happened to be experts in poetry. The earliest expert testimonies about the Qur’an’s literature consistently describe it as being impossible to imitate, a work that is beyond poetry, or one that surpasses the limits of human creativity. Does that furnish evidence for the Qur’an’s “inimitability”, and even its Divine authorship?

We’ll realize that while such testimony does offer some evidence for the Qur’an’s truth claims, it would significantly strengthen the argument if we had some idea about what this inimitability entails. When the Qur’an’s earliest listeners described the book as they did, which features or literary qualities did they have in mind? When we say that the challenge of the Qur’an could never be met (e.g., 2:23, 10:38, 11:13, and 17:88), what specifically about its literature constituted that challenge? What, exactly, was so difficult to imitate that no one could approach it?

Farid himself offers an answer to this. The Qur’an’s language is maximally precise: it always uses the exact choice and order of words or phrases to achieve the highest possible rhetorical effect; and it is this precision that is referenced by the Qur’an and its initial listeners alike. In order to reinforce the argument, we’ll cite a number of sources that provide examples of both micro- and macro-level precision (i.e., involving individual or a small number of verses vs. larger chunks of text, respectively). I think anyone attending to this literature would agree that the Qur’an does display a bewilderingly degree of precision and sophisticated arrangement of text. Is this, then, what’s alluded to in the Qur’an’s claim to inimitability?

This yields a surprising answer: the Qur’an’s literary precision very plausibly represents a miracle, but this alone doesn’t make the Qur’an inimitable in quite the way its challenge verses would suggest.

A miracle represents something beyond the capabilities of the laws of nature. Given the nature of the Qur’an as a primarily oral, minimally revised text that was produced out of order across long periods of time, it is implausible that someone in the position of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ could have produced it (this conclusion is reinforced further if you incorporate the facts about his life, e.g., his sincere belief that the Qur’an was the verbatim word of God). This completes our proof for a miracle. However, the challenge verses of the Qur’an go a step beyond this claim: not only is the Qur’an impossible to produce by someone in the Prophet’s position, it’s impossible to produce by anyone, in any context—even the collaboration of all of humanity (and Jinn, whatever such a collaboration might entail). It is this strong form of absolute inimitability, and not just a miracle, that the Qur’an boasts for itself and its initial listeners acknowledge. The concepts of miracle and inimitability, therefore, come apart, even though they’re almost always conflated in popular discourse.

We then go on to ask whether we have any plausible candidates for what might’ve constituted the Qur’an’s inimitability which, after a brief detour through an argument that I think is entirely unconvincing (the Qur’an’s “uniquely literary form”), brings us to the work of the Syrian scholar of Arabic, Bassam Saeh. According to Saeh, the reason the Qur’an is inimitable is not simply because it constitutes very high literature, but because it represents a radically new linguistic innovation that cannot be imitated in any other context. After getting acquainted with his view to some degree, we’ll discover that this approach, while certainly controversial, is not an altogether implausible reconstruction of what the Qur’an’s elusive inimitability might’ve been. In this way, Dr. Saeh’s analysis provides more context to the reaction of its initial listeners, rendering the aforementioned argument from testimony not only intelligible but also more plausible.

That…was a lot. Let’s jump in.

But first…

1.3. Disclaimer 1: We’re doing philosophy, not linguistics

For the sake of brevity, I won’t be mentioning detailed examples of the literary features that will come up in this article. It is imperative—are you listening? IMPERATIVE—that you carefully peruse the relevant material before forming any opinions about the overall argument(s).

The Qur’an’s literary features cannot be discussed in the abstract, one needs to read about and consider a significant number of examples to understand them. I say this because people often make comments about the formal logic of these arguments without having read any of the literature themselves. Quite often, I’ve found that the best response to comments like “but I think ring compositions are subjective” is just to say, “Have you read Farrin or Cuypers or Randhawa or Reda? No? Read them first”. And wouldn’t you know it, people actually change their minds once they read the literature themselves. In this field, you have to understand the underlying data first. That is not negotiable.

To facilitate this process, whenever I discuss a new argument, I will not only reference stuff that’s been written on the topic, but also try to explicitly direct the reader to useful starting points.

1.4. Disclaimer 2: We’re doing philosophy, not history

Quite different from the spirit of Farid’s book, we will not be discussing the long and storied history of the development of the concept of i’jaz. Instead, we’ll take the Qur’an as it is, isolate some of its literary features, and see what conclusion they lead us to vis-à-vis its miracle, inimitability, or more general claims to truth.

With that said, if you’re interested in the history of the concept of i’jaz or inimitability in (especially early) Islamic thought, I recommend this lecture by Sh. Yousef Wahb.

With all of that said…

2. Argument from testimony

2.1. The Qur’an is inimitable because they say it’s inimitable

They would say that he is a poet, a soothsayer, or a magician. I have heard the speech of the soothsayers and this is not their speech. I’ve compared his words to the types of poetry but nobody can say it is poetry. By Allah, he is truthful and they are the liars.

—Poet Unays, after listening to the Qur’an. [Quoted in p. 17 of Why the Companions]

An influential approach to argue for the Qur’an’s inimitability has been to reduce this to an argument from testimony. Accomplished poets and experts among the Qur’an’s initial audience frequently described the Qur’an’s literature as being supernatural [34:43]—not simply excellent or beautiful, mind you—but altogether beyond human capabilities. In addition to the poet Unays above, Farid alludes to five other examples, including Walid b. Mughira who, despite being a master of poetry, had to resort to “magic” as a face-saving explanation of the Qur’an’s origin. For a more complete list of early testimonies about the Qur’an’s literature and its influence on its earliest audience, see the first chapter in Navid Kermani’s God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Qur’an.

The Qur’an also explicitly issues challenges to its audience—again, among them many accomplished poets—to produce a book or chapter like its own [2:23, 10:38, 11:13, and 17:88]. Judging by the religion’s eventual success, such challenges likely went unmet; thereby furnishing an indirect testimony to its literary inimitability.

The Muslim apologist Hamza Tzortzis in his popular book The Divine Reality: God, Islam and the Mirage of Atheism argues for the Qur’an’s language being “inimitable” in the following way:

1. The Qur’an presents a literary and linguistic challenge to humanity.

2. The 7th century Arabs were best placed to challenge the Qur’an.

3. The 7th century Arabs failed to do so.

4. Scholars have testified to the Qur’an’s inimitability.

5. Counter-scholarly testimonies are not plausible, as they have to reject the established background information.

6. Therefore (from 1-5), the Qur’an is inimitable. [p. 208-209]

The argument has a few more premises to connect “inimitability” to Divine authorship by ruling out naturalistic hypotheses, but I don’t think that’s necessary. Going back to how Unays and his 7th century Arab contemporaries reacted to the Qur’an, they weren’t just saying the book is unique or remarkable, but Divine (or at least, supernatural). If we take these testimonies seriously, as any argument hoping to succeed on their basis needs to do, this sort of inimitability is incompatible with natural explanations to begin with.

2.2. Testimony-based arguments are valuable

As can be seen from the argument, no effort is spent to explain what about the Qur’an is inimitable, just that experts claim that it is. That’s fine. All other things being equal, expert testimony does constitute evidence, even strong evidence. Evidence for evidence is still evidence.

Furthermore, establishing the incidence of a miracle via historical reasoning or testimony-based evidence is certainly not unheard of. They’re found in other religious traditions as well, most notably the case for the resurrection of Jesus (see this video for an evenhanded Christian appraisal of the evidence, and this lecture for an Islamic view which can accommodate some of this evidence—I post these without endorsing).

Farid himself agrees with this approach:

The testimonies of the brilliance of the Qur’an from the masters of eloquence should be sufficient for those that are not familiar with the intricacies of the language. [p. 22 of Why the Companions]

(As I said above, I would take exception to glossing the testimonies as just reporting “brilliance”—what they report is something supernatural)

Because of these reasons, I certainly wouldn’t write off an argument from testimony straight off the bat. However, there are reasons for not being content with a testimony-only approach to establishing the Qur’an’s Divine authorship.

2.3. Limitations

2.3.1. Are the testimonies historical?

The first, and perhaps the most obvious, objection to this argument would be to question the historicity of these testimonies. Analyzing this issue would probably take us too far afield, but see this article by Suleiman Hani for some initial considerations. (Additionally, I’d like it if someone conducted an Isnad-cum-Matn analysis on these reports to see if they can be traced back to the earliest generations of Muslims, similar to what Seyfeddin Kara recently did with the preservation of the Qur’an).

2.3.2. The testimonies do not mention any detail

Leaving that aside, I think there’s also a logical problem with this argument. Earlier, we said that testimony-based arguments for religious miracles are not unprecedented. However, there’s a crucial dis-analogy between these examples and that of the testimony for the Qur’an’s inimitability.

For testimony-based arguments to a miracle, we expect the testimony to spell out exactly what the miracle is. Take the case of the famous Marian apparition of Zeitoun in which people claimed to have miraculously witnessed the Virgin Mary (see this article for a brief skeptical review of the evidence). The reason we would take such testimonies seriously (at least, offer them some initial charity prior to cross-examination) is that they describe the miracle in some detail—the figure of the Virgin Mary above the church, for instance. On the other hand, if the witnesses just said “we saw a miracle”—that would still be interesting and worth investigating, but certainly not as worthy as detailed testimony.

The problem with the testimonies about the Qur’an’s literature is that these descriptions don’t contain any detail. The poet Unays, like his contemporaries, describes the Qur’an either as being impossible to imitate without explaining why, or only describes it in negative terms (i.e., it’s not poetry, it’s not the ramblings of soothsayers, etc). This is akin to multiple witnesses to a supposedly supernatural event just calling it a miracle and leaving it at that—no further details.

2.4. Salvaging the testimony-based argument

2.4.1. Strategy 1: Abductive reasoning and uncanny events surrounding the origin of Islam

While it’s hard to believe in miracle testimonies if the witnesses don’t describe what the miracle is, it’s still strange that such a claim is being made at all. This “surprise” factor can be fodder for an abductive argument of the following sort:

• P1. The surprising fact C is observed.

• P2. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.

• C. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Think of the butler’s fingerprint on the murder weapon. Sure, the fingerprint alone isn’t enough to convict him, but it’s still surprising that the fingerprint is there at all. Our surprise evaporates, however, if we assume that the butler did indeed commit the murder—in that case, finding his fingerprint on the gun would be entirely mundane, “a matter of course”. In this way, the fingerprint furnishes some evidence—not definitive evidence, maybe—but some evidence of the butler’s crime.

Similarly, the fact that expert poets among the Qur’an’s earliest listeners are claiming that the Qur’an is inimitable, beyond poetry, or magical—is surprising. Absent the details of their claim, we might not understand why they’re saying this; but it’s still surprising. On the other hand, if we assume that the Qur’an is from God—this reaction is entirely expected. A matter of course. This is how these testimonies provide some evidence that the Qur’an is of a supernatural origin.

I think this consideration can form part of a larger battery of similar arguments. In his paper titled An Evidential Case for Islamic Theism, the philosopher Zain Ali argues that the origin of Islam was accompanied by a number of events which, while not miraculous in themselves, are still surprising—for example, the rapid success of Islam despite insurmountable odds, the abrupt transformation of the Arabic language brought about by the Qur’an, and one might also add the uncanny degree to which the Qur’an has been preserved. The confluence of these events accompanying the birth of a religion is quite surprising, but entirely expected (“a matter of course”) if we posit that the religion is from God. The early testimonies to the Qur’an’s miraculous origin can perhaps be considered another such example. After all, why would there be such testimonies—fingerprints on the gun—if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on?

In itself, however, I don’t think the testimony argument moves the needle of evidence too much. I would consider it a C-inductive argument in that it increases the probability of Islam being true, but do not carry the probability above the 50% mark at which point Islam becomes more plausibly true than not.

I think we can do better.

2.4.2. Strategy 2: Identifying the reason behind such testimonies

Remember what prevented us from putting too much faith in this argument: the fact that, by themselves, the testimonies don’t tell us what about the Qur’an is Divine, supernatural or inimitable. This analysis suggests an obvious room for improvement. If we could identify the factor(s) that plausibly led to these reactions, the testimony-based case would suddenly start to look better.

Say, for example, we have a bunch of people clamoring about a miracle they just supposedly witnessed. Upon commencing a fact-checking operation on this claim, it appears that the reports are incredibly thin on details. The witnesses are agreed that a miracle did occur, but don’t have anything more to say on the matter. Now let’s assume, via an independent investigation of the scene—say by accessing the feed of a close-circuit camera that happened to be running at the moment—we unearth evidence that something strange had indeed transpired in that location; something that plausibly defies naturalistic explanations. All of a sudden, the heretofore vague witness testimonies appear a lot more convincing. In such a case, the miracle would no longer remain ineffable, and we would be able to understand why such testimonies existed.

Analogously, this consideration should prompt us to look to the Qur’an itself for clues. Can we identify the literary features in the Qur’an that might’ve led to these testimonies? If so, those testimonies immediately become much more significant—there’s now a reason as to why they said what they said.

All of this aside, though, it would still be nice—for purely psychological reasons—to be able to access the magic of the Qur’an for ourselves instead of just relying on testimonies. After all, Muslims pride themselves in carrying a living miracle in the Qur’an.

We’ll be pursuing this exact motivation in the next few sections.

3. Argument from literary precision

3.1. Introduction and influence

Here’s the answer Farid provides to explain the reaction of the poet Unays and his contemporaries: the Qur’an’s literature is of supreme, unsurpassable quality. There are objective criteria to assessing the eloquence of a work, and the poets among the Qur’an’s primary audience evaluated the Qur’an according to these criteria and found it to be perfect. In principle, this route of investigation is available today as well—anyone with the relevant linguistic and lit-crit expertise can, in principle, evaluate the Qur’an and come away with the same conclusion that its earliest listeners did. Farid then lists two short examples (one contrasting the phrase placements in verses 6:102 and 40:62, and one about the word choice and repetition in verses 109:3-5) to highlight the depth and subtlety in Qur’anic language, even in minor or arbitrary word choice. Let’s call this the argument from literary precision.

Although not as pervasive as the testimony approach, this argument has also been influential. Yasir Qadhi’s An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’aan, one of the more comprehensive English books on the Qur’anic sciences (“‘Ulum-al-Qur’an”), lists choosing the best word, syntax, and verb form over near-equivalent options as examples of the Qur’an’s “literary i’jaaz” [p. 268]. Taqi Usmani’s book on the same topic, translated in English as An Approach to the Quranic Sciences, likewise mentions the choice of context-optimal words, phrases or syntax with examples [p. 266-272].

Outside the scope of Qur’anic studies books, this genre was popularized in the English-speaking world by Nouman Ali Khan who, leveraging his expertise in classical Arabic, produced numerous examples (“gems”) of the Qur’an’s literary precision. For a taste of this approach, you can watch his two-part lecture (part 1, part 2) in which he makes a general, accessible pitch for the project with a few case studies, or this compilation of examples made by one of his followers.

This work eventually culminated in a co-authored book titled Divine Speech: Exploring the Quran As Literature, which, to my mind, is the best treatment of this topic in English. The book presents a systematic exploration of the various types of eloquence and precision that characterizes the Qur’an’s language. Chapters two through seven discuss five categories of literary precision: word choice, word order, grammatical shifts, imagery, oaths, and “other subtleties”. These are placed under the broader label of “micro-literary features”—i.e., examples of precision restricted to one or a handful of verses. This contrasts with the contents of the second half of the book, which focuses on literary features that can only be appreciated if we take large chunks of the Qur’an as a whole—like entire stories (chapters 9 and 10), entire Suras (chapters 11 through 13), or multiple Suras (chapter 14).

I think this book makes a strong case for extreme degrees of literary precision in the Qur’an—in how words are positioned in verses of similar meanings, how oaths are chosen to make an argument, or how material is arranged across larger units within the text.

Despite being a recent entrant in the field, I’d say this book has become essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Qur’anic literary merits. If you don’t have access to the book just yet, you could instead start by focusing on just one type of micro-scale literary precision first. I would personally recommend Neal Robinson’s article and M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s article on iltifat or sudden changes in person or number.

3.2. Nazm: Literary precision on steroids

Perhaps the most extreme examples of the Qur’an’s literary precision have to do with large-scale ordering of verses (referred to as nazm or coherence). A great entry point to this literature is Mustansir Mir’s 1986 book Coherence in the Qur’an, in which he—based on the work by the Pakistani scholar Amin Ahsan Islahi—argues that the verses within even larger Suras of the Qur’an display a deep underlying unity (as do pairs of Suras, or even larger groups).

Here’s how he summarizes his argument:

Islahi has convincingly shown—although it is not necessary to agree with all of his conclusions—that the Qur’an has design and method. He has shown that individual Qur’anic surahs revolve around specific central themes, that an essential complementarity exists between the members of surah pairs, and that larger sets of surahs, which he calls surah groups, display identifiable patterns of nazm. A study of Tadabbur-i Qur’an is bound to leave one with the impression that, contrary to the usually held view, the Qur’an is a well-ordered book. Islahi has demonstrated that the Qur’an has not only thematic but also structural coherence, that, for example, not only do the surahs of a group deal with a definite master theme, but also the structure of the group is a logical one, and that the thematic and structural aspects of nazm are ultimately inseparable from each other. [p. 100]

Let’s take a second to acknowledge that this is odd. The Qur’an wasn’t written down in one sitting—it was an orally recited text, produced over long periods of time, often out of order. There’s no reason to expect that its verses would maintain continuous linear coherence, for each unit of text to be meaningfully connected to its neighbors. The fact that the verses still cohere across large chunks of the text is surprising, and precisely what Taqi Usmani dubs the Miracle of System: “The style adopted by the Qur’an in its arrangement and system, is, therefore, its most subtle miracle.” [An Approach to the Quranic Sciences, p. 278-280]

In more recent years, it was noticed that the Qur’an’s verses are not only ordered linearly, but also chiastically—such that the first part of a unit of text mirrors its last part, the second part mirrors the second-to-last, and so on; akin to a ring. In his essay in The Muslim World, Raymond Farrin argued that Sura Baqara—the longest Sura of the Qur’an—displays a complicated ring-within-ring structure, in which each part of the Sura not only mirrors its counterpart in a chiastic fashion, but the parts themselves are arranged chiastically. Randhawa and Khan also dedicates a chapter to exploring the ring composition in Sura Baqara in their book, and I find their construction of the Sura’s structure to be more robust. Incidentally, they also have a chapter on the linear coherence in the same Sura—meaning the verses of this Sura exhibit both a linear and a chiastic structure superimposed on each other.

Numerous works have been authored in English that probe such large-scale structural features—both linear and chiastic—in the Qur’an. Randhawa provides a useful list on his blog, but the list was only updated until 2016. Since then more has been published, not least of which is this edited volume on structural features in the Qur’an.

All of this is to make the point that the verses in the Qur’an are arranged in a complex, sophisticated way. The verses in the longest Sura of the Qur’an, for instance, are not only arranged linearly, but also in a ring-within-ring structure; and similar features characterize many other passages in the Qur’an as well. To my mind, this is a much more impressive feat than examples of micro-scale precisions found in individual verses or short passages. The Qur’an’s most subtle miracle, per Taqi Usmani.

As with micro-scale features, I would highly recommend the readers to collect a copy of Khan and Randhawa’s book and read the relevant chapters to really understand how these structural inferences are made.

3.3. Limitations

3.3.1. Literary precision doesn’t entail strong inimitability

“All this precision stuff is very impressive”, you might say at this point, “but is this what the challenge of the Qur’an is? Is this what the poets were alluding to?”

In short, no.

Let’s look at what one of the challenge verses in the Qur’an:

Say, ‘Even if all mankind and Jinn came together to produce something like this Qur’an, they could not produce anything like it, however much they helped each other.’ [17:88]

The Qur’an’s challenge doesn’t just entail an extremely complex, sophisticated book—it entails something beyond the laws of nature (and super-nature, given the allusion to the Jinn). This is also in line with the Qur’an’s expert interlocutors calling it “sorcery” [34:43, 74:24].

The literary precision of the Qur’an, as bewilderingly complex as it may be, doesn’t entail a violation of the laws of nature: Given enough time and effort, it’s not impossible for a human (or a group of humans) to arrange the words and phrases of a book in a very sophisticated way. The Syrian scholar of Arabic Bassam Saeh argued that the precision unearthed by classical and modern scholars of the Qur’an proves that the Qur’an is genius, but not that its miraculous—nothing about these features suggest that jinn and humans gathered together could not have produced the likes of it, which is the Qur’an’s challenge [17:88].

Furthermore, most of the features discussed above are difficult, if not impossible, to be appreciated on an initial, short listen. For instance, understanding the macro-scale features require observing very large sections of the text (e.g., an entire Sura or groups of Suras), something that cannot be accommodated in a brief period. One would need to sit down with the text and patiently dissect its structural and thematic units for the structural complexities to emerge. In addition, some claims of precision in word choice requires comparing verses located in different parts of the Qur’an. This wouldn’t have been feasible to do with the level of exposure Unays and the other poets had to the Qur’an, which is just listening to one continuous (and presumably short) passage. This is not to say that one can’t still appreciate some of the Qur’an’s literary excellence on this level of exposure (e.g., the oaths and verbal idioms, grammatical shifts, etc), but the most striking and drastic examples of literary precision would be missed.

For these two reasons, it’s unlikely that these micro- and macro-level features of precision—impressive as they are—were the reasons why the initial audience of the Qur’an found it to be Divinely inimitable.

3.4. Salvaging the argument from literary precision

3.4.1. But could the Qur’an contain these features naturally?

The Qur’an’s literary features don’t immediately entail Divine authorship, but they might nonetheless be important for a different reason.

We have a pretty good idea about how the Qur’an initially came about: It was primarily an oral text, recited piecemeal by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and the text was compiled without any substantial revision or editing. Furthermore, we also know a fair bit about the life of the Prophet and the community he lived in. Is it possible for a text with such a history to accommodate this degree of micro- and macro-level precision?

Consider just the second Sura of the Qur’an. Sura Baqara has a complex ring-within-ring structure which is formed both by verbal and thematic connections, overlaid on a linear progression of text. How could these features be implemented in a text which was oral, recited piecemeal at different contexts, and didn’t undergo substantial revisions afterwards? Not to mention, the entire text is also shot through with numerous examples of micro-level precision, most notably pervasive grammatical shifts.

It is my belief that if someone acquaints themselves with the work on literary precision cited above—grammatical shifts, chiastic and linear coherence might be approachable starting points—if they read Robinson, Haleem, Farrin, Randhawa, Reda and a few others—they would be reasonably persuaded that these features, considered together, cannot be naturally accommodated in a text with the history that the Qur’an has. One can’t build a ring-within-ring with words, for instance, if said words are recited orally, piecemeal, out of order, and without significant subsequent editing. This is indeed a case where the Qur’an does violate our expectations from the laws of nature.

3.4.2. But could the Prophet have done any of this?

The case can be strengthened further if we incorporate facts about the Prophet’s life into this conversation. I think just based on the broad strokes of his life, one can make the case that the Prophet sincerely believed that he was inspired by God, and the Qur’an that he was reciting was revealed to him verbatim. But if that’s the case, how could the Prophet have gone out of his way to install artificial, mathematically precise patterns in the Qur’an, all the while believing that he himself wasn’t its author? Implementing the structural features that we’ve been discussing above requires conscious planning and forethought. Elevated poetry can come naturally, but not a text with artificial structures of the sort we’ve been discussing.

Additionally, note that none of these features—especially things like ring composition—have been mentioned in the hadith. If these features were put in place by conscious manipulation of the text by its supposed human author, he would make a point to mention this to the people he was aiming to win over—otherwise, what’s the point of all that work if it just goes unnoticed? These features were only unearthed later, after years of dissecting and text-cavation. This again proves that the Prophet couldn’t have installed these features consciously in the text of the Qur’an.

Let’s try to formalize the argument somewhat:

3.4.3. The literary precision argument for the Qur’an’s miracle

• P1. If a book was produced via mode X, it cannot naturally contain feature Y

• P2. The Qur’an was produced via mode X

• P3. The Qur’an contains feature Y

• Therefore, the Qur’an’s origin is supernatural

Where

• X = Oral, piecemeal, minimal subsequent revision; supposed human author’s belief about the text not being authored by himself

• Y = literary precision

The nature of the Qur’an’s initial recitation and compilation alone make it implausible for this level of literary precision to be instantiated in the text. On top of this, when we add in the fact that the Prophet probably sincerely believed in the Qur’an’s divine origin—it’s altogether reasonable to believe that a text like the Qur’an, with the features we’ve been discussing above, couldn’t have been produced naturally. That is the definition of a miracle.

3.4.4. Miracle, but not inimitable

Note what we have accomplished here: instead of asking whether these features of the Qur’an could’ve been produced by anyone in any context, we’ve instead asked whether it could’ve been produced by one person in a specific context. This is not unreasonable. We have a pretty good idea about the historical context of the Qur’an, so it’s only normal that we would place it in that context when asking about its possible origin. However, while these arguments might suffice to prove the supernatural origin of the Qur’an, they fall short of meeting what the Qur’an’s self-professed challenge is.

The Qur’an doesn’t just claim that it couldn’t have been produced by someone like the Prophet, it claims that no one could’ve produced it in any context. Jinn and men could’ve gathered together in a huge collaborative enterprise, harnessing the height of human technology and sorcery alike, and yet we wouldn’t be able to produce something like the Qur’an. This challenge represents a much taller order than the lower bar required to cross for a minimal miracle argument to go through.

This demonstrates that the two following claims are different:

1. The Qur’an has a supernatural origin (The miracle claim)

2. The Qur’an can’t be surpassed in any context whatsoever (The inimitability claim)

These two things are conflated in popular discourse all the time. Muslims deploy arguments that establish (1), the miracle claim; but think they have established (2), the inimitability claim. I think Farid, like literally every other commentator in this space, falls into this trap. This is reminiscent of the motte-and-bailey fallacy: A strong, controversial, and hard-to-defend claim is made, but when it comes to justifying it, only evidence for a weaker claim is furnished. In this analogy, the inimitability claim represents the harder to defend bailey, while the miracle claim to which a retreat is made represents the more modest, easier to defend motte.

Despite this conflation, let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture: we have constructed a plausible case for the supernatural origin of the Qur’an. No small feat. This doesn’t mean, however, that there’s no room for improvement. Both premises P2 and P3 in the argument above could be bolstered further: P2, via more robust investigations into the early history of Islam—particularly about the nature of the Qur’an’s production and the Prophet’s life; and P3, via incorporating statistical analyses into claims about literary precision.

That said, it seems we’re still missing an answer to the question we started this article with. If not literary precision, what did the initial challenge of the Qur’an entail?

4. In quest for inimitability

4.1. Maybe it’s lost to time?

Personally, I’m willing to accept that the Qur’an’s challenge is something that’s lost to history. It could’ve been a miracle specific to its initial audience, who—owing to their peculiar form of literary excellence—could recognize the Qur’an’s radical inimitability immediately, upon a first, brief listen. As with the case of the moon splitting, we are not meant to be firsthand witnesses to this miracle. It’s not necessary for all of the Qur’an’s miracles to be equally accessible to all of humanity—after all, as the last section demonstrates, we can build a convincing case for the Qur’an’s supernatural origin based on its literary precision.

That being said, it’s worth discussing two proposed approaches to capture this elusive feature of the Qur’an. I don’t think the first one is remotely convincing, while the second one shows more promise.

4.2. The Qur’an’s unique literary form or style

4.2.1. The argument, summarized

Arabic literature had a number of literary forms, and the Qur’an’s style doesn’t match any of them—hence the inimitability. As stated above, I don’t find this view convincing at all, at least in the form it’s commonly presented.

The first question to ask about any argument to inimitability is: what about the suggested feature is inimitable in a strong sense?

Hamza Tzortzis, whom we met when discussing the argument from testimony, has been a long-time proponent of this view. According to his construction of this argument, every Arabic expression is either prose (rhythmic or rhymeless) or corresponds to one of the sixteen forms of poetry. The fact that the Qur’an doesn’t, is exactly where its inimitability lies. The challenge then is producing a piece of literature in Arabic that can similarly escape being confined to the established literary forms.

Specifically, these are the three categories that Tzortzis claims characterizes all Arabic literary expression:

1. Poetry, characterized by one of sixteen rhythmical patterns,

2. Saj’ or prose with certain rhythmical patterns, and

3. Mursal, with no rhyme at all, approximates spoken language.

The Qur’an obviously isn’t poetry, in the sense of confining itself to the sixteen established schemes of rhyme, and it’s not conventional Saj’ because even Saj’ has what Tzortzis describes as “accent-based rhythmical patterns”.

4.2.2. Why the argument fails

The difficulty I have with this argument is understanding how it is at all difficult—much less inimitable—to write an expression that doesn’t follow these forms. All a text has to do to not fit into any of these categories is the following:

• Not confine itself to the sixteen rhythmical patterns (rules out poetry),

• Not have the rhythmical patterns characteristic of Saj’ (rules out Saj’)

• Have at least some rhyme and divisions (rules out Mursal).

This doesn’t strike me as a tall order whatsoever: a text that’s not rhythmically arranged but contain end-rhymes could easily fit this bill (think slam or spoken word poetry). Maybe there are deeper layers to this that I’m missing, but Tzortzis doesn’t provide any other promising leads.

For example, if you read his description about how the Qur’an differs from Saj’—roughly, rhythmic prose—it’s because the Qur’an uses a smaller number of rhymes, the rhymes are inexact, and phrases bound by the rhymes are of differing length. All of this basically means the Qur’an is a looser form of Saj’, and doesn’t follow its rules closely (a critic might even say, Saj’ but less interesting). Why exactly is this a challenge—or even impressive? (Tzortzis has one more point to make about the Qur’an’s difference from Saj’, which we’ll get to later).

The main issue here, you’ll note, is that the Qur’an’s style is being characterized negatively—as what it is not, as opposed to what it is, which is exactly what makes the “challenge” of unique literary form appear so mundane. Authors in this field have a tendency to double down on this negative characterization. Sh. Abd al-Wahhab Al-Turayri in his article on the now-defunct IslamToday website (now hosted on this site) writes the following:

It is, likewise, possible for a person writing in Arabic to reach a great level of literary excellence and, in the most moving of poetry and prose, convey the noblest thoughts and sentiments – but nobody has ever done so using the Quran’s particular style. And what an elusive style it has proven to be! The Quran is neither in Arabic prose nor in what is acknowledged as Arabic verse. It is not written in a combination of both prose and poetry, but in neither of those modes. It is unique. At the same time, the Quran is internally consistent in maintaining its unique style. . . .This, then, is the acid test: Write something in the exact same style as the Quran and in doing so produce something of arguably similar quality and sublimity.

(Incidentally, parts of this passage is quoted verbatim in page 79 of One Reason’s 2015 booklet, The Eternal Challenge—without attribution, unfortunately) Note the near-complete absence of detail on what about the Qur’an’s style is miraculous. Similarly Taqi Usmani:

What new principles have been adopted by the Qur’an to create the effect of this permanent sonic rhythm? It is beyond human powers to describe it because words and phrases cannot adequately translate the true effect that pervades the style of the Qur’an. However, anybody having a literary taste and aesthetic perceptions can verify for himself the truth of our statement while reciting the Qur’an. [An Approach to the Qur’anic Sciences, p. 275]

Without more details about exactly what makes the Qur’an’s literary form inimitable, it’s difficult to make progress with this argument.

To his credit, Tzortzis does attempt to outline some features that make the Qur’anic style unique—but they are all examples of different types of literary precision, an argument we already discussed above.

With that said, let’s finally discuss the argument to inimitability that I do find somewhat promising.

4.3. The Qur’an’s linguistic novelty

4.3.1. The argument, summarized

The Syrian scholar of Arabic, Bassam Saeh, advanced a view that we can call an argument from linguistic novelty. Be sure to read his book (a much-abridged version of his original work in Arabic) or at least listen to his lecture here.

The argument boils down to this. The Qur’an, routinely and pervasively, breaks with fundamental Arabic linguistic conventions: the way the language was commonly read and understood. He gives the example of the Arabic verb kana—literally, was—which is repeatedly used to mean “is” in the Qur’an, an usage which is not even employed in the Prophetic hadiths. For Saeh, in any other context, a text that disregards so many of the entrenched rules of a language would be utterly incomprehensible to its listeners, or be considered broken langauge. Not so the Qur’an. Despite being written in a radically different type of Arabic, it’s still not only understood but appreciated as high literature. And that’s what makes the Qur’an inimitable.

Unlike the argument from literary form, I can at least conceptually make sense of why this sort of novelty would constitute imitability. The examples provided by Saeh—and he provides a lot of them—certainly help. Indeed, if someone just blithely started using familiar words to imply unfamiliar meanings, like using “was” to mean “is”, that would certainly confuse me. This strikes me as a universal rule of language and the way humans perceive it, and any violation of this pattern would be hard to explain naturally.

If this view is correct, it also makes sense of the reactions of the Qur’an’s primary listeners, who would be convinced of its inimitability even upon hearing a single, short passage. Since these linguistic breaks are pervasive across the text, they would be present in smaller units of text as well. Furthermore, these breaks would be immediately discernible (who wouldn’t notice it if “was” were used to mean “is”?), without the need for a close reading, much less extensive research.

4.3.2. Does Bassam Saeh’s case succeed?

Unlike the previous arguments discussed in this article, I have no conceptual objections to Saeh’s approach. The issue of contention here is the empirical premise: whether the Qur’an does exhibit pervasive and radical novelty of the sort Saeh is arguing for. Indeed, academics have already criticized some of his findings on grounds of insufficient familiarity with non-Arabic sources.

Regardless, I think Saeh does lays out a research project worth pursuing, and that is significant progress already. However, even if this approach doesn’t succeed—if there ends up being insufficient evidence to establish the Qur’an’s novelty—it is still useful in providing a coherent, plausible explanation as to what the Qur’an’s challenge was, and why its earliest listeners reacted the way they did. Maybe we cannot prove it’s novelty with as much rigor as we’d hoped, but it might still serve as a good candidate explanation. This, in turn, would make the Qur’an’s challenge less mysterious, and the testimonies more believable.

Paradoxically, then Saeh’s argument might not only serve as a standalone argument for inimitability, but also reinforce the argument from testimony discussed above—one that we specifically didn’t high hopes for because of its unintelligibility.

5. Conclusion

We’ve sampled all of the arguments for the Qur’an’s literary miracle and/or inimitability. Here’s a rough sketch of our exploration:

I’ll end this article on a somewhat depressing note. As I’ve been at pains to demonstrate, we do have promising routes to argue for the Qur’an’s inimitability (based on testimony or otherwise), or at least its miracle. These arguments have been circulating for a while now, and there are clear areas where improvements can be made. But Muslims seem to have a tough time working collaboratively to build on each others’ work: these arguments have been made in public for a while, but there hasn’t been a lot of follow-through. This is why the article reads like more like an overarching research program than a set of settled conclusions. Instead of just parroting what came before or re-inventing the wheel each time, maybe we would stand to gain a whole lot more if we work to improve the arguments that show promise.

A massive, all-bases-covered series of blog posts on (almost) everything you ever wanted to know about Islam and evolution.

We’ll discuss biological design, how to navigate the putative evidence for human evolution, the different models proposed to reconcile Islam with evolution, among others. A lot of this stuff will be novel—even when I’m reviewing extant work, the goal is always to synthesize and bring new insights.

I plan to drop the first five parts of the series at the same time. Here’s a rough outline of these parts:

• Part 1. A sweeping overview of (almost) all points of interaction between Islam and evolution and how to address them;

• Part 2. A primer on the evidence for human evolution;

• Part 3. How do we, as Muslims, address the evidence laid out in the part 2?

• Part 4. Possible responses to the solution proposed in part 3;

• Part 5. Top ten wrong and/or unhelpful ways of responding to the evidence for human evolution;

• Part 6 onwards. An excursus on junk DNA.

As you may note, parts 2 through 5 are focused on the singular question of how to explain the evidence for human evolution—in my opinion, the most important yet underrated topic in this field. I’ve previously written at length on this topic, and hopefully this blog series will water it all down for easier consumption.

The episodes after this point will delve into the knotty but endlessly fascinating topic of junk DNA, which I think comprises a particularly difficult type of evidential challenge—thereby furnishing the perfect case study to see if my solution (developed in parts 3 and 4) holds.

However, this topic is substantial enough to deserve its own series of posts. Which brings us to…

What I’m reading:

John Mattick is the world’s leading expert on non-coding RNA and a fierce proponent of ubiquitous functionality of the human genome (which makes him a fierce opponent of junk DNA). His recent book presents as strong a case as one could mount for this thesis. I’m four chapters in—thus far he’s argued that the history of molecular biology has tended to overemphasize the importance of proteins, thereby leading to lasting scientific biases against widespread RNA-mediated functionality in the genome. I’m sure most molecular biologists would agree with some part of this sentiment. I’ll have to read the rest of the book to see if he can make a cogent case for most or all of the human genome being functional.

This book is ideally read along with another recent work by Larry Moran, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of junk DNA:

Moran makes a more evolution-focused case against ubiquitous functionality of the human genome. I’ve read more than half of this book, but will refrain from offering my final thoughts until after I’m done reading both of these to completion.

Mattick’s book is technical and ideally read if you’re (at least) a graduate student in molecular biology, while Moran’s book is directed at a more general audience. Both books are extremely fun and worth reading.

What I’m looking forward to:

There’s a particular argument in the vicinity of biological design that I’ve been curious about, but could never make much sense of. The argument, roughly, seems to state that biological phenomena cannot be reduced to the nuts and bolts of matter, and requires some mysterious source of information to animate it. I’ve read Richard Cameron’s defense of sui generis teleology in living beings and Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire, but I never quite grasped either the biological or philosophical intuition behind the argument. (Incidentally, Subboor Ahmed and Salman Butt, in their recent booklet, have attempted to use arguments by the British physiologist Denis Noble to likewise argue against reductionism, but I think a much stronger case could be developed)

The ID proponent Richard Sternberg has long advocated for a version of this argument—and from hearing him talk all of these years, I think he can make the most biologically-informed case in its defense. I’ve been waiting since forever for him to write a book, but instead we have the next best thing:

This book, while not authored by Sternberg, nonetheless

takes Sternberg’s profound explorations and weaves them into a lively and accessible account of a most remarkable realization: At every moment, we owe our lives to a genome that is more than matter, and to an informational source that is immaterial, transcomputational, and beyond space and time. (from here)

I have it on my Amazon cart, will read and review once I’m done with it.

In brief: I’ve been reading, writing and looking forward to lots of fun and exciting stuff that I can’t wait to share with y’all.

What follows are my thoughts on the overarching argument developed of the book. I found this to be a challenging read, mostly because I was confused about what the premise of the book was supposed to be and its relevance to Islam-evolution apologetics. It’s only after I read through several chapters that I realized what the actual goal of the book was - a critique of certain forms of biological reductionism. To my mind, I think this confusion was caused by the author’s choice to center the book around “Neo-Darwinism” and the particular way Noble, and the authors following him, define it.

In the first part of this brief review, I explain why the stated goal of refuting Neo-Darwinism as defined in the book made little sense to me. I then attempt to reconstruct what the actual aim of the book is, and whether Noble’s arguments have much utility to achieve that end. I conclude with reflections on where this work fits in the broader context of Islam-evolution apologetics. Note that this won’t be a beat-by-beat analysis of every argument made in the book, just the overarching project it pursues.

Refuting Neo-Darwinism is akin to beating a very dead horse

The authors, quoting Noble, ascribe these four pillars to Neo-Darwinism:

(i) [T]he hypothesis that alterations in the structure and function of organisms within a single generation cannot be transmitted through the germ line (henceforth, Weismann barrier pillar);

(ii) the hypothesis that organisms are incapable of changing their own genetic makeup, making causation unilateral and not allowing for the possibility of the environment to affect genes (henceforth, central dogma);

(iii) the hypothesis that an organism is a passive vessel for preserving genes within a pool, and that the behaviour and function of the organism work toward this purpose (henceforth, passive filter pillar);

(iv) the hypothesis that evolution occurs through minor random alterations in genes that are passively favoured through a process of natural selection (random error pillar). [pp. 12-13]

If the premise of the book - debunking Neo-Darwinism - is to have any contemporary relevance, the view has to have widespread agreement among evolutionary biologists working today. And yet, defined as above, Neo-Darwinism is not only dead and irrelevant in today’s academia, but it’s been dead for decades - and all evolutionary biologists would accept this.

This can be seen most explicitly if we look at the fourth pillar which defines the sole engine of evolutionary change: natural selection acting on “minor random alternations”. Way back in 1968, Kimura published evidence to the effect that most genetic variation is "neutral" - i.e., neither beneficial nor detrimental, and therefore effectively invisible to natural selection - in his highly cited Nature paper Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level. Next year, King and Jukes published Non-Darwinian Evolution in the journal Science, with the tagline most evolutionary change in proteins may be due to neutral mutations and genetic drift. These two papers introduced and cemented genetic drift as one of the key engines of evolution, subsequently refined by the work of Kimura's student, Tomoko Ohta.

Around the same time, scientists started to appreciate the outsize role mutations have in generating variations - not just boring, small-effect point mutations (“minor alterations” as stated in the fourth pillar), but large-scale genome rearrangements. This undercurrent was synthesized in Susumu Ohno's influential book Evolution by Gene Duplication; but the role of gene duplications in generating evolutionary novelty has been appreciated for nearly a century - read Dietard Tautz’s Discovery of De Novo Gene Evolution for a readable, if not opinionated, review on the history of this line of thought.

These two ideas - genetic drift and large-scale genome rearrangements as among the major drivers of evolutionary change - have been the mainstay of evolutionary orthodoxy for the past few decades. Every evolutionary biology textbook of note has chapters dedicated to these concepts, every undergraduate-level evolution class teaches them; and every evolutionary biology researcher worth his salt, in attempting to explain natural phenomena, would consider drift or mutation biases as potential explanations. No evolutionary biologist in their right mind would accept natural selection as the only explanation driving evolutionary change.

This is why attempts to refute Neo-Darwinism need a stronger metaphor than just "beating a dead horse". Not only has the horse been well and truly dead for a long time, its corpse has disintegrated into dust. Really, if you want evidence against Neo-Darwinism - all you need to do is pick up an evolutionary biology textbook and read the chapter on drift.

And yet, from reading the book, one gets the impression as if the authors believe Neo-Darwinism is still thriving in contemporary evolutionary biology academia. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

These claims are surprising for large swathes of the scientific community to whom Neo-Darwinism remains as indispensable a theory today as it was when it was first formulated. Neo-Darwinism—defined loosely as Darwinism coupled with Mendelian genetics—forms the cornerstone of modern evolutionary theory. This centrality of Neo-Darwinism has led to it being the subject of countless peer-reviewed articles, classroom exercises, and seminars in lecture halls over the past century. [p. 5]

Likewise in one of the concluding chapters of the book:

Beginning with biochemistry—and having been proselytised like the rest of my cohort into the central dogma of Neo-Darwinism—I was once a believer of the school of thought I now write against. [p. 83]

Unless this brother went to school at least thirty years ago - both of these quotes are completely at odds with how evolutionary biology is taught in textbooks and classrooms, or how research in this field is conducted.

Why not use stronger, more widely accepted arguments to refute Neo-Darwinism?

Despite all of this, say we’re still on board with the book’s stated project. How would one go about refuting Neo-Darwinism?

As mentioned above, the easiest, most accessible way of understanding why Neo-Darwinism is wrong is to read an evolutionary biology textbook written some time in the past couple of decades. You could read the chapters on genetic drift, gene duplication, symbiogenesis, mobile genetic elements - any chapter adjacent to these avenues would quickly disabuse you of the fourth pillar of Neo-Darwinism.

However, despite the plentiful abundance of these tools, the authors instead choose to use arguments made by a British physiologist who, as I understand, doesn’t have any direct expertise in evolutionary biology. Some of his ideas are controversial, but even if they weren’t - there are much more potent and widely agreed-upon options to use if the goal was to just disprove Neo-Darwinism. Concepts like drift and gene duplication, for instance, not only have a long legacy in evolutionary biology, but enjoy an unprecedented level of support today; due in part to the proliferation of experimental evolution and next-generation sequencing techniques.

So if we take the book’s stated aims at face value, the authors seem to be attempting to refute a dead and buried concept in evolutionary biology, and not even doing that in a particularly convincing way.

At this point, I was understandably confused about the theological relevance of this project. Neo-Darwinism is often framed as the antithesis to Intelligent Design, which in turn is popularly taken to be the only way to defend a design argument based on biological phenomena (but see the concluding section of this review). In that particular dialectic context, maybe refuting Neo-Darwinism would serve to aid the case for design. However, if Neo-Darwinism is completely outdated in modern evolutionary biology, as I’ve demonstrated - what would even be the point?

All of this led me to suspect that the authors are trying to do something other than their (and Noble’s) stated aims.

The actual aim of the book is to refute mainstream evolutionary biology

Here’s what I think is happening. When the authors say “Neo-Darwinism”, they don’t actually mean it to entail those four pillars I quoted in the beginning, an outdated paradigm that has no room for non-Darwinian drivers of evolution. Instead, they mean something more akin to “mainstream evolutionary biology”. This should explain why the authors think Neo-Darwinism is as popular in academia as they do; because they’re using that term to refer to the conventional evolutionary paradigm.

This is also in line with how Neo-Darwinism is sometimes defined outside the book. While Neo-Darwinism came to prominence in the first half of the twentieth century, some authors think of it less as a set of concrete ideas and more of the general research program adopted by evolutionary biologists. Such a view would incorporate newer developments in the field, including genetic drift and genome rearrangements. Pigilucci and Muller (2010), for instance, define the “modern synthesis” (taken to be virtually synonymous with Neo-Darwinism by the authors) as the following:

The major tenets of the evolutionary synthesis, then, were that populations contain genetic variation that arises by random (i.e., not adaptively directed) mutation and recombination; that populations evolve by changes in gene frequencies brought about by random genetic drift, gene flow, and especially natural selection… [Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, p. 9]

I think this analysis is correct - the authors are conflating “Neo-Darwinism” with mainstream evolutionary biology, and that’s what leads to confusion.

This also explains why, instead of using the more widely discussed phenomena like genetic drift or gene duplication to respond to the threat of Neo-Darwinism, they’re relying on the ideas of a figure who can be read as being anti-mainstream. Noble certainly has ideas that are controversial - for example, his argument that genes have no privileged causal role in the functioning of an organism. If the goal is to challenge the mainstream, it makes sense why these arguments would be preferable to textbook arguments like drift.

With that re-framing in place, what precisely are the authors trying to achieve by utilizing the arguments of Noble against mainstream biology?

The more specific aim of the book is to refute biological reductionism

Noble’s main arguments aren’t even against evolutionary biology per se, but against a particular reductionist conception of biology. Of course, a re-conceptualization of what biological phenomena are would affect how we think about how such phenomena came to be. In that way, his work does have relevance, albeit indirect, to evolutionary biology.

I submit this is the actual goal of the authors: defending an argument against reductionism. This impression is peppered throughout the work, in excerpts like the following:

There is no mind in Dawkins’ deterministic, fatalistic worldview—only body. Therefore, no gene ‘thinks’—thought is an illusion, as are your feelings, hopes, and human rights—all that exists are genes that have a survival advantage and thus propagate. [p. 23]

This mechanistic reductionism we see in the mind of Dawkins and those like him is nothing new. It is a wish to reduce anything and everything to simple physical processes. [p. 29]

By refuting the particular brand of reductionism championed by Dawkins, the authors hope to secure a victory in favor of something akin to anti-physicalism, where not everything is reducible to matter. If biology is little more than nuts and bolts bumping into each other, the prospects of an evolutionary explanation of biological phenomena look more promising. This is why a non-reductionist view of the world arguably fits better with theism than naturalism, and you have the makings of a design argument.

Dawkins, the thinker in the crosshairs of the book, sometimes promotes a very austere form of reductionism according to which all of biology is reducible to DNA sequences of an organism. Here’s one of his quotes from the debate he had with Noble:

Suppose you put Denis’ genome in a petri dish and keep it going for ten thousand years. Well, it wouldn’t keep going; it would decay, as you rightly say. However, the information could be preserved on paper. You could actually write it down in a book, or you could carve the A, T, C, and G codons in granite and keep it for ten thousand years. Then, in ten thousand years, type it into a sequencing machine, which we already have, and it would recreate an identical twin of Denis Noble. [Quoted in Death of Neo-Darwinism, p. 17]

In the eyes of the authors, Noble’s work provides a strong counter to this type of thinking.

This re-framing of the book’s aim makes more sense to me, but it still strikes me as problematic for at least two reasons.

Again, why not use stronger and more widely accessible arguments?

Firstly, if the goal is to refute the sort of gene-reductionism that Dawkins is promoting above, to my mind one could use far stronger and “textbook” pieces of evidence than those in Noble.

Consider what happens following the fusion of the sperm and the egg. During the earliest phases of animal development, the fate of the new organism isn’t determined by its own genes, but instead the mother’s RNA and proteins found in the egg cell. Depending on the egg cell environment and its RNA/protein profile the fate of the developing organism may vary - meaning, the biological information making up the organism is partially specified by factors other than its genome. This is an extremely well-attested phenomenon - I just looked up “maternal-to-zygotic transition” on the biology paper database PubMed, and found 412 articles, 156 of which were reviews.

This is part of the reason why Jurassic Park will always fail in real life: There’s been talk of bringing back extinct animals (e.g., woolly mammoths or thylacines) from their DNA sequences found in fossils, but such attempts will never be able to re-create the actual animal. Even if we manage to reconstruct the complete genomes of extinct species’ from their fossil remnants, as we learned above, biological information is also imparted by the embryonic environment where development happens. Mammoth and thylacine DNAs might exist, but their egg cells and embryos don’t - so scientists would have to rely on embryos of their living relatives. This might get us close, but without a mammoth egg cell to house the new DNA, some of the biological information that constituted the original animal has been lost forever. Contra Dawkins, DNA sequence alone can’t specify everything there is to an organism.

Indeed, if you listen to the scientists in charge of these projects - they never claim to be able bring back these extinct animals exactly. Andrew Pask, one of the main researchers involved in sequencing the thylacine genome, speaks of bringing back “a de-extincted thylacine-ish thing”.

Is Noble a good response to biological reductionism?

Recall that in order for the book’s argument to be of any use to apologetics, the authors need to demonstrate that any attempt to reduce biological phenomena to purely physical stuff would fail. However, while Noble is associated with biological “holism” (as opposed to reductionism), he’s hardly the sort of reduction-denier one would need him to be for such an argument to succeed. Indeed, it’s true that Dawkins does reduce all biological phenomena to bits of matter - but so does Noble, just to different bits of matter:

We don’t need convincing that, at the molecular level, molecular processes are all there are. But, to reiterate the theme of this book, that does not mean that we are nothing but a bunch of molecules. Structures and processes at a higher level simply are not visible at the molecular level. . . While vitalism no longer finds favour amongst biologists, it is very much alive and well elsewhere in society. I would like to convince some of my readers in this camp that what they may be looking for in seeing life as a whole rather than the sum of its component parts may well be satisfied by the systems biological approach. Life is wonderful enough. We don’t need to endow it with mystery to appreciate that. [The Music of Life, p. 77-78]

In reviewing the debate between proponents of biological reductionism and holism, the chemist Addy Pross summarizes things this way:

[A] moment’s thought reveals that a reductionist philosophy is at the heart of holism as well. The holistic systems approach to understanding the complexity of a biological system continues to reduce the complex system into simpler elements, though placing greater emphasis on the complex nature of the interactions between those elements. In other words the holistic approach merely preaches a more elaborate form of reduction, one that recognizes that causal relations within a system can be more complex than those implied by a simple bottom-up causal chain. [What is Life? p. 53]

Based on his own words and how other experts have read him, therefore, Noble is just as much a reductionist as Dawkins is, except he reduces things to a more complex, variegated assemblage of matter. But no side of the debate claims that biological phenomena, at bottom, is anything more than physical stuff.

Without further development, therefore, I’m not entirely sure whether Noble’s arguments take us away from physicalism or naturalism.

Concluding remarks: steelmanning, and perhaps a better way forward

Thus far I’ve been discussing the shortcomings associated with the book’s project, but I wouldn’t discount it entirely. I think there might be something to the new science of systems biology and seeing organisms as irreducible wholes that sits more comfortably with theism than naturalism. Michael Denton, a prominent proponent of biological design arguments, wrote in defense of the first premise of this argument. More recently, Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire has made an extended case for organisms possessing intrinsic teleology on similar grounds. This also overlaps with Thomistic notions of souls, defended in modern times by philosophers like Edward Feser and J. P Moreland (see chapters 6 and 7 of The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism). The idea of no privileged level of causation in biology, to the extent organisms can only explained as a whole - might have theism or design-relevant consequences that are worth exploring further. I would totally be on board with a project that aims to develop these themes.

There might be a more involved argument the authors are trying to make, one that doesn’t require ruling out biological reductionism. The Intelligent Design proponent Emily Reeves has argued that emergent biological properties - the sort Noble gestures at - cannot be explained by naturalistic evolution, something that calls to mind Michael Behe-esque objections to evolution. It’s hard to comment on the prospects of this argument without further development, and I welcome efforts to to that end.

With that said, I do feel like when defending biological design, maybe it’s worth exploring arguments that have a stronger legacy and are generally more accessible. If it were up to me, I would probably pay more attention to the arguments made by Michael Denton in his Privileged Species book series, which are a collection of fine-tuning arguments made specifically about human survival and flourishing on earth. The theologian Rope Kojonen has likewise defended an argument which claims biological evolution leading to complexity requires fine-tuning.

These arguments don’t go against consensus views among mainstream biologists, are generally easier to understand, and can ride on the coattails of the more familiar cosmological fine-tuning argument. I think these represent more fertile grounds to explore when it comes to defending design in biology.

Here’s the abstract:

"Islam and Blackness" by Dr. Jonathan Brown essentially puts on a clinic on how to address putative ethical objections against Islam. In responding to the charge of racism - more specifically, anti-blackness - brought against the religion, the author surveys both scriptural proof-texts and relevant aspects of the legal tradition. Not only do I think the book is ultimately successful in fending off the anti-blackness charge, but it is also nearly unprecedented in its broad conceptualization of Islam: the Qur’an, the Prophetic hadiths, and, crucially - Islam’s rich legal tradition; especially laws concerning marital suitability. This article explores the book's argument with a special focus on this neglected aspect in prevailing Islam-ethics discourse. With that said, I think the book suffers from something of an identity crisis in not knowing whether its audience is supposed to be the humanities academic, or the educated (Muslim or non-Muslim) layperson. This leads to significant tonal and structural unevenness in the book, which I suspect contributed to the lack of reception and acclaim that it would have otherwise deserved. In short, Islam and Blackness is a pioneering contribution to Islamic discourse that should be emulated in future work, but ideally also streamlined with a narrower focus.

Alhamdulillah, I’ve recently finished writing the first draft (of some 87 possible drafts) of my essay-length response to this issue. While the document is on my Academia page, I will only start public dissemination after another round of revision and re-write. In the meantime, I thought I should post an extended abstract in advance to generate constructive discussion.

Abstract

According to the mainstream understanding of Islam, humans were created from a single original pair who, in turn, were created miraculously without parents or any evolutionary history. But if that is the case, why does there seem to be scientific evidence for our shared ancestry with non-human animals? This is the question this essay aims to address. The central contention defended here is this – the evidence for common descent of humans and other creatures only looks strong if we myopically focus on a subset of data about the human constitution. However, if we consider the total evidence about the human constitution and our place in nature, not only does the case for common descent start to look weaker, but another plausible theological explanation for our origin suggests itself. With this competing explanation in view, we no longer remain justified in accepting the common descent view of human origin. The essay develops a theological account of human origins that attempts to explain the data at least as well as its evolutionary contender.

I first contextualize the problem in the broader arena of Islam-human evolution interaction, and present a detailed statement of the data commonly taken to be evidence for common descent. I then survey a list of responses that has been offered to address this evidence. While I find each of them to be inadequate in addressing the challenge, they nonetheless help us identify the contours of a possible good explanation. We then embark on our quest to identify such an explanation, starting with a discussion on the burden of proof such an explanation would need to meet in order to undercut common descent. I argue that, in view of the burgeoning evidence for human exceptionalism, an account of human origins that is evidentially equivalent to common descent need only be plausible, not definitive. The rest of the essay uses resources from Islamic scripture and theology to construct one such plausible explanation. In this way, it is continuous with the project of providing theological explanations for other putatively puzzling features of a world created by God: for example, the existence of suffering.

In constructing this explanation, I consider and defend three design goals and preferences God has for the creation of earthly biodiversity: (i) God wants to create an earth where humans can survive and flourish; (ii) make scientific and technological progress; and (iii) all other things being equal, God prefers to create via the instrumentality of natural laws that He created and sustains. I argue that not only are these goals independently motivated from scripture and theology (as opposed to being ad hoc), they also enjoy a level of support from recent progress in science and analytic philosophy. I then explore how a biodiversity brought about within the constraints of these design goals would look, and discover that it would exhibit features that are otherwise taken to be evidence for common descent. I conclude that such an alternative, independently motivated account of human origins that can plausibly explain the data provides an undercutting defeater for a common descent view of human origins.

I end with a discussion on an objection to this account: why didn’t God design humans and earthly biodiversity in such a way that doubts about our origin would never arise, even when we look at a subset of the data? In response, I argue that this could not have been achieved without significantly compromising on the other aforementioned goals in God’s design plan. To demonstrate this point, I look at what are considered the two strongest lines of evidence for human evolution: extinct hominids and junk DNA; and show that removing these features within the constraints of God’s other design goals do not lead to a decrease in the evidential strength of common descent.

I think this emphasis on scientific antirealism is somewhat unique among Muslims, as popular science-religion reconciliation projects undertaken by other faith communities - like the large tent of Young Earth Creationists, Old Earth Creationists like the Reasons to Believe ministry, or the Intelligent Design movement (although they don’t associate with religions) - do not really opt for antirealist views of science. Or at least, it’s not as front and center. I was always curious as to why Muslims in particular ended up adopting this view.

On one hand, the motivation isn’t hard to understand. For any faith community, there must exist a way to navigate potential conflicts between science and religion. Even for a religion revealed by God, it’s inevitable that the human knowledge-seeking enterprise might mistakenly stumble into conclusions that contradict God’s word. In these situations, the believers need a strategy to resolve these tensions. Perhaps the most plausible immediate impulse on part of the believer is - well, human knowledge-seeking tools have inherent limitations, but God has the full picture, so we shouldn’t be perturbed by potential conflicts. This sentiment is extremely common among the masses. Popular preachers often sloganeer about the limitations, unstability and fragility of scientific knowledge, and how believers shouldn’t bat an eye when scientists contradict scripture. One might argue that a philosophically literate scientific antirealism is just a sophisticated “fleshing out” of that impulse.

On the other hand, it’s still interesting that this approach has been so singularly influential in Muslim da’wah, to the extent of effectively sidelining approaches to science-religion reconciliation other faith communities make use of. This is even more interesting given just 15-20 years ago, da’wah was very science-forward. A lot of positive apologetics was based on putative claims of scientific prescience in the Qur’an and hadiths, and claims of science-religion contradiction were taken seriously and evaluated at a case-by-case basis. So what caused this shift in approach?

I suspect this might have been the result of a bottleneck effect. There are only a handful of large da’wah/apologetics institutes catering to the English speaking world, and they have an outsize role in shaping the Muslim discourse. About a decade ago when discussions of Islam-evolution reconciliation broke out in the west, IERA’s Hamza Tzortzis published an essay opting for a thoroughgoing scientific antirealism to respond to the challenge of evolution. I think that essay, and subsequent material published by IERA and other prominent da’wah organizations, shaped evolution-adjacent religious discourse for the years to come. Subboor Ahmed, one of the prominent voices in this niche, seems to support this hypothesis in the beginning of this interview.

This essay is not about whether scientific antirealism is good or bad for da’wah - that is a complex topic better shelved for another day. That said, I think few would deny that scientific antirealism is an unintuitive way of thinking about science. At least some scientific observations seem continuous with, and systematized versions of, our everyday modes of reasoning. So whatever warrant we grant to such everyday reasoning must, to some extent, transfer to scientific reasoning as well. I think this shows that scientific antirealism is something of a skeptical maneuver, and the antirealist bears the burden of proof to give us positive reasons for accepting his view.

For now, I want to make a distinction between adopting an antirealist attitude to scientific theories in general, vs. adopting antirealist construals of particular scientific theories (general vs. specific antirealism). In case of the former, the antirealist is skeptical of features ubiquitous in any scientific reasoning - induction, simplicity as truth-tacking, underdetermination of theory by data, what have you. However, there is a more moderate form of antirealism, where one refuses to accept realist construals of certain theories only in certain cases, and that too because of issues particular to that theory. On this view, we take realism as our point of departure, and then evaluate each scientific theory at a case-by-case basis to figure out whether the relevant data justifies a realist construal or not.

In their book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, philosophers William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland suggest these tentative criteria by which realist vs. antirealist construals of particular theories are to be evaluated:

[O]ne should interpret a scientific theory in realist terms unless one or more of the following obtain:

1. A realist interpretation conflicts with a rationally well-established internal or external conceptual problem, but an antirealist view does not.

2. The history of theories in this area of study has exhibited a large proportion of theory replacements versus refinements, and thus there is no clear progress in converging on a widely shared theory in the area of study.

3. Nonrational factors can account for much of the theory’s acceptance by the scientific community.

4. The main virtue of the theory is its empirical adequacy, and its more metaphysical, theoretical aspects can be understood as unnecessary, excess metaphysical baggage in our attempt to explain the success of the theory.

5. The theory has continued to be accepted largely through the use of inappropriate, ad hoc adjustments. [p. 343]

Despite my reservations about the more radical versions of scientific antirealism and its use in da’wah, criteria like this strike me as altogether reasonable. This also opens up room for conversation between realists and antirealists in how we reconcile science and religion, should substantive conflicts arise. Finally, such an approach also seems to cohere with how reason-religion conflicts were traditionally handled by Muslim scholars - instead of thinking of “reason” or “science” as one big source of knowledge with uniform epistemic status, their prescription was to evaluate pieces of this enterprise at a case-by-case basis.

Today, I’ll be going through brother Daniel Haqiqatjou’s 2014 essay on human evolution, specifically the issue of similarity between human and chimp DNA.

Thus far in this series on Islam and human evolution, we’ve discussed Dr. Nazir Khan’s strategy of defusing the inference to common descent by appealing to human exceptionalism, and Dr. Yasir Qadhi’s skeptical theistic approach. While we extracted some benefit from both views, the interim conclusion underscored need for a compelling and plausible alternative to a common descent inference - basically, a theological story to explain the extent and nature of similarity that exists between humans and other creatures. In that continuity, my initial plan for today was to review Dr. Todd Wood’s 2006 essay on human-chimp DNA similarity, where he constructs and evaluates several such explanations, ranging from common design, shared nutritional requirements, inference to a unique creator, and so on. In reading the essay, however, I discovered that a substantive section in the essay - the meaning of DNA similarity between two organisms - had a large overlap with a discussion in br. Daniel’s 2014 essay on the same topic. The issue is significant enough to merit its own discussion, and it would also contribute to my continuing project of evaluating influential Muslim solutions to the problem.

Br. Daniel’s goal is to undercut the argument from DNA similarity to the shared ancestry between humans and apes; to which end he makes two arguments:

1. Human-chimp DNA similarity isn’t as high as popularly cited or believed,

2. Even if humans and chimps are similar in terms of their DNA, this similarity doesn’t really mean anything significant.

According to the typology we set out in the first article on this series, this is meant to address the second problem posed by human evolution - that of explaining the putative evidence for common ancestry.

Of the two points raised by br. Daniel, the first one shows promise in addressing some arguments from gratuitous similarity to common descent, but still leaves a substantial core of the case untouched. This is perfectly fine - he himself admits in this essay that it’s not meant to be an end-all-be-all takedown of all lines of evidence to common descent, just the one that’s most prominent in popular discourse. The second one is perhaps more interesting - although his particular argument needs additional work, he touches on a very important thread that I think is worth pulling at. We’ll be spending the rest of the article pulling at that thread, explore the overlap between this suggestion and the one made in Dr. Wood’s essay, dredge up relevant discussions in philosophy of biology in the process, and see if any of that takes us somewhere interesting.

In brief, these are the claims I’ll be defending. First, br. Haqiqatjou is indeed successful in stating that the similarity between human and chimp genomes is possibly much lower than 99%. Second, genome similarity is not equivalent to organismal similarity - in fact, organismal similarity is hard if not impossible to quantify. Third, it’s plausible that there’s substantial biological differences between humans and our closest lookalikes in biology, even among extinct hominids. However, fourth, this fact alone doesn’t really address the core thrust of the common descent inference. That said, and fifth, once we have a general theological explanation of the similarity between humans and chimps, the claim of substantial biological differences does play an interesting role in the dialectic. All in all, as in the previous article, we realize the importance of compelling alternative explanations to common descent - which we will start exploring from the next article in this series.

Are the human and chimp genomes really 99% similar?

Again, It’s important to note at the outset what br. Daniel’s goal is: he’s speaking not just to the best possible case for common descent that could be made, but also - indeed, primarily - popular representations of such a case. As such, a substantial part of his essay is dedicated to addressing perhaps the most common talking point in favor of shared descent between humans and apes, the claim that there is a 99% similarity between humans and chimp genomes. As alluded to above, he has some interesting insights about the meaning of this similarity which we’ll get to later, but his more accessible arguments are against the 99% figure itself.

Before we get into this, I need to mention that br. Daniel’s essay, unlike the ones we discussed thus far, makes a real effort to discuss the brass tacks of biology. I think his points on DNA sequence alignment and inferring percent identity scores is quite solid, all the more impressive considering he’s writing as a non-expert. Briefly, and perhaps simplistically, his objections can be understood in the following way. In order to get percent identity values between two genomes - or indeed, any two sequences of DNA, RNA or amino acids - really, any string of text - they must first be mappable. Meaning, they must already have some degree of similarity so we can align them one against the other, count up the number of matches and mismatches, and pull statistics on their overall similarity. Imagine how meaningless the following question is: what fraction of Hamlet and The Great Gatsby are identical to one another? Such a question would only make sense if we were dealing with two texts that already had some similarity to begin with, like two imperfectly hand-copied versions of Hamlet. In such a case, we can hold up the two versions line-by-line against each other and compare differences. The same applies to genomes - to make any meaningful statement about their similarity, we need the two genomes to be in alignment. However, in case of humans and chimps, a non-negligible part of our genomes have absolutely nothing in common, making such side-by-side comparison impossible.

Secondly, parts of the genomes of both species might have roughly the same sequence, but they might be arranged differently. The sequences might be present in more or fewer copies, they might have the same or different orientations in the genome, etc; and such structural rearrangements are difficult to express in terms of a number. After all, how many points would we take off the similarity score if we find that a 20,000-nucleotide stretch is present in 1 copy in humans but in 3 copies in chimps? How would we score it if it’s “inverted” in its orientation in the human chromosome compared to the same chromosomal region in chimps? What if the stretch is found broken up into two parts in two different places in the human genome, but they’re contiguous in the chimp one? These structural differences are hard to represent numerically. Going back to our book comparison example, how would we numerically evaluate pages being out-of-order or present in different copies between the books? Even in cases where human and chimp genome segments map and are comparable, we still have to make assumptions about how many points we take off, for example, for an insertion or a deletion.

It’s important to note that these arguments are, to their merit, not originating from Br. Daniel. Such reservations have been echoed by mainstream scientists and creationist geneticists alike, although many if not most claims made by the latter have been addressed. A more convincing treatment of the topic comes from the Queen Mary University evolutionary biologist Richard Buggs, whose scientific credentials are beyond reproach. His reasoning is straightforward, transparent and accessible: basically, he downloaded the latest alignment files between human and chimp reference genomes and pulled these statistics:

4.06% [of the human genome] had no alignment to the chimp assembly
5.18% was in CNVs [copy number variations] relative to chimp
1.12% differed due to SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms - basically, a single change in one base of DNA] in the one-to-one best aligned regions
0.28% differed due to indels [insertions or deletions] within the one-to-one best aligned regions

The percentage of nucleotides in the human genome that had one-to-one exact matches in the chimpanzee genome was 84.38%

He compares this to statistics pulled from older versions (“assemblies”) of the genomes, and shows that improvements in genome quality only leads to marginal gains in the fraction of “one-to-one exact matches” between the two. This doesn’t, however, mean that human and chimp genomes are 16.62% “different”, just that 84.38% is the percent identity for the regions that we can meaningfully compare.

This seems to represent something of a crystallization of br. Daniel’s arguments (although he has other arguments in this effect as well). Dr. Buggs takes all of the assumptions in comparison into account, and finds that when we discount the non-comparable parts - we get a significantly lower figure than popularly advertised.

It seems like as far as his immediate project goes - undercutting the 99% similarity between human and chimp genomes - br. Daniel succeeds, since the figure can seemingly be taken down to as low as mid-80s. But what does “84% genome similarity” even mean, especially in the context of a common descent inference? We will be discussing this in the next section, but a caveat is first in order. The relevant premise for the common descent inference is not that humans and chimps are very similar in their genomes, but more generally - humans and other animals are extremely similar. The reason we discuss this in the context of chimpanzees is because they are our closest living lookalikes, so the case looks more compelling for chimps than it does for gorillas or bonobos. Emphasis on living. The distinction of non-human creatures with the highest degree of similarity to humans would go to a member of the extinct hominids, which in turn depends on which hominid species (plural?) we consider to be Adamic (a type 3 problem). For a range of reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, I don’t think one could claim that Australopithecines or even the very early species in the Homo genus can qualify as children of Adam. As such, the strongest form of an overall similarity-based argument for common descent would have to look at genomes of these extinct hominids - ones with an even higher degree of DNA similarity with us - not chimpanzees. So the chimp-human genome similarity figure, whatever it is, isn’t “as good as it gets” as far as common descent is concerned. The most compelling figure a common descent proponent would use in defense of their case would be even higher.

Be that as it may, we should now ask the more important question:

What does DNA similarity even imply?

As an introduction to this topic, let’s explore and evaluate br. Daniel’s understanding of this issue. By my lights, he seems to imply that there are two types of DNA similarity - one that’s useful for a common descent inference, and one that isn’t. Consider the analogy he presents:

[W]e would not be too incredulous if it were claimed that the technology in an Apple iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy are 99% similar. They are both smartphones of a similar size with similar functionality: making calls, connecting to the internet, supporting applications. There is going to be a high degree of overlap just because these functions require essentially the same hardware: microprocessors, wifi modules, cameras, touchscreens, mics, speakers, etc. . . Thus, the claim that the iPhone and the Galaxy are 99% percent alike would not mean much, especially if it turns out that an iPhone and a breadmaker are 60% alike. But if it were claimed that the iPhone and Galaxy are 50% more similar than the average similarity between any two smartphones, then that would imply something significant and unobvious, e.g., either Apple or Samsung is stealing the other’s phone design.

The idea here is, a degree of similarity between two things is necessitated by their shared form and function. For example, if two creatures possess similar eyes, we would expect them to share similar eye-coding genes. It’s only when the genetic similarity is over and above what’s expected on their shared form and functions - gratuitous similarity, one wants to say - is when a common descent inference might become relevant. However, for humans and chimps, it’s impossible to know as of yet what that level of non-gratuitous similarity cutoff is. Without knowing what level of similarity is gratuitous and what is necessitated by shared function or structure, the common descent inference can’t even get off the ground.

There’s something super interesting in the direction of his prodding - and we will be returning to that shortly - but I should briefly point out this argument in itself needs other premises in order to succeed.

A version of this argument is also cited in Wood (2006): “[T]he anatomical similarity of humans and chimpanzees should imply a molecular similarity as well”. The obvious question this raises is, if shared genotypes are entailed by shared phenotypes, then the common descent inference simply shifts up one level: well, why are humans and other creatures so similar in terms of their phenotypes? Why did God create animals not just with similar functions as humans, but also a strikingly similar physical form - to the extent they require the same complement of genes to encode those features? Wood responds to this view similarly when he says

[The argument] merely shifts the problem to the anatomical level. The question remains as to why God created an animal that is so similar to humans.

So it doesn’t seem like appealing to shared functionality or form defuses the surprise invoked by shared genetics, but only re-directs our surprise at the shared functionalities themselves. The reason the smartphone analogy doesn’t entirely apply is that the makers of smartphones - humans living in the post-industrial context of the 21st century - need these devices for a set of very specific purposes, and they can only make them using the resources and pre-existing technology available in their contexts. Within these constraints, it’s possible that humans would end up independently making two different smartphones that have deep technological similarities. After all, given where we are and how technology has progressed so far, there’s only so many ways we can make devices which fit the form and functional bills. However, it’s not immediately clear that such constraints apply to God. God certainly didn’t need to create humans and chimps with the same body plan, and He wasn’t limited in the ways in which such creatures can be made. There are other gaps in this line of logic - for example, even a shared function or form can be underdetermined by genetics (i.e., God can use different genotypes, at either amino acid or nucleotide levels, to encode the same functions) - but I think the point is made without needing to open that can of worms.

What we can learn from this brief excursus is the same lesson we learned last time: we need to be able to tell a theologically compelling story - a theodicy - as to why God would make non-human creatures that look so similar to humans. I think this is a subtext of Br. Daniel’s argument:

The logic here is that we should expect a high degree of gene overlap between organisms that are anatomically similar. This is because, in the most basic sense, an organism’s phenotype is simply an expression of its genotype. Therefore, similarities between phenotypes should translate into similarities in genotypes to at least some degree. For example, cats, dogs, chimps, mice, and humans all have similar circulatory systems, gastrointestinal systems, respiratory systems, reproductive systems, immune systems, metabolic systems, and too many other parallels to list.

The fact that he doesn’t see any problem - as in, any indication to common descent - with God creating phenotypically similar organisms, seems to suggest that he believes God indeed has good reasons to create them. We will talk a lot more about such prospective explanations from the next post onwards. But for now, let’s return to our general investigation of what DNA similarity even means.

Does genome similarity imply organismal similarity?

Let’s now consider what genome similarity does not mean. Here’s another excerpt from Dr. Wood’s essay on the similarity between humans and chimps:

The Bible teaches that God created adult organisms and presumably even complete ecosystems by covering the land with plants. Thus, the Bible favors a holistic perspective of organisms. Modern molecular biology has favored the opposite perspective: that life is the complicated interaction of molecules and that DNA is the “code of life.” If the molecular viewpoint is correct, then the differences between organisms that really matter are indeed the differences in the DNA. If a holistic perspective is correct, then perhaps differences in the DNA are not paramount to understanding organismal differences.

By “molecular viewpoint”, Dr. Wood means a reductionist view of biology whereby an organism is completely reducible to its genome. We can think of this view as the genome being a zip file for the organism - all the information needed to make the organism is encoded in the DNA in compressed form. As he points out, if this view is correct, then humans and chimp genomes being 84% similar would mean humans and chimps as a whole are 84% similar.

However, today we know this to be patently false. With the advent of the field of epigenetics, we now know that a significant amount of information needed to represent the organism comes from sources other than the DNA. At a basic level, DNA is most usefully understood as a “parts list” for the organism, if even that. Of course, specifying an organism requires a lot more than the parts list - you’d need information about which part goes where, when each part is produced, when to stop producing, are the parts to be modified in certain contexts, and so forth. These specifications are supplied by the environment both inside and outside the cell. As a molecular biologist myself, I can happily spend hours on this one topic, but suffice it to say that the claim that the DNA doesn’t represent the “blueprint” or a “compressed file” representing an organism is not a controversial thesis. For an accessible introduction to the topic of epigenetics and how stronger forms of DNA/genetic reductionism is false, consider picking up Dr. Nessa Carey’s lovely book on the topic.

What is controversial, however, is the radical next step of saying that an organism is irreducible not just to its genome, but to any of its parts or some combination thereof whatsoever. This view - organicism - is defined in various ways, but some overlapping tenets of it include:

• The “blueprint” for an organism - a repository of all the information required to make it - is the organism itself, not any part or subset of it. “[The] unity [of the organism] is not decomposable without loss”, per E. S. Russell (quoted in this paper).

• The parts of the organism don’t cause the whole; rather, the organism itself is causally/ontologically prior to each of its parts.

• The organism is strongly emergent and cannot be reduced to its constituent parts.

This is a rather radical way of thinking about biology, and I myself am thinking my way through it (this is a gentle introduction to the concept). However, for our purposes, all we need is the tamer (and, thankfully, uncontroversial) premise of the organism being irreducible to its genome. The genome contributes to an organism’s information content, it’s a substantial part of it - but not all of it. To go back to our zip file analogy - if we do manage to compress all of the information in an organism down to a zip file, that file would contain substantially more information than just the genome sequence. The genome, then, is nothing more than “an organ of the cell” among other such organs, in the words of the incomparable Barbara McClintock.

How is any of this relevant to the human-chimp DNA similarity discussion we were having? Consider the difference between these two statements:

• The human and chimp genomes are 99% similar.

• A body part is 99% similar between humans and chimps.

Granted, the genome is much more than a body part - it’s present in every cell except erythrocytes - but regardless, it does go some distance in contextualizing what genome similarity means. The upshot of this being, humans and chimps - or even extinct hominids - aren’t as similar to humans as we might be led to believe by a genome similarity figure, even if the figure is very high. As an extreme illustration of this, Dr. Wood in his essay mentions that even if human and chimp genomes were 100% identical, that would still leave space for considerable difference between the two.

Humans are recognizably different from all other living creatures

I think it’s safe to say that it’s impossible to reduce the extent of our similarities down to a number. How do we, for example, score the difference between RNA expression patterns? The extent or amount of DNA methylation? Of protein interactomes? Of the cellular and extracellular lipid profiles? Of behavioral features, like controlled fire use, much less language? It’s incredibly difficult to reduce these features down to numbers - especially since they aren’t compressible to a string of nucleotides - and strictly impossible to objectively assign weights to them to get one figure representing overall similarity or difference. As such, there remains space to claim that humans are considerably different from anything else in biology, including those creatures who look most similar to us.

Intriguingly, a cautious justification of this view comes from provocative new research in anthropology. In his recent book, Dr. Gregory Forth defends the interesting claim that one non-human hominid species long thought to be extinct, the Homo floresiensis (“hobbits” in popular imagination), might still be around in the forests of Borneo. Dr. Forth makes his case based on widespread corroborated testimonies of indigenous tribes living in Indonesia, and provides (to my mind, at least) convincing responses to claims of these being mythical beliefs. For the point we’re making though, we don’t have to necessarily believe hobbits are alive today - it would suffice if these reports represent veridical memories of past encounters with such creatures. H. floresiensis are descendants of H. ergaster, firmly occupying a branch of the Homo genus - and therefore much “closer” to modern humans in terms of similarity than chimps. As such, the reports of H. floresiensis are the closest we’ve ever gotten to actual descriptions of our closest lookalikes. Despite this, it’s very interesting that these creatures are almost never described as being “humans” in the tribal accounts. This seems to suggest that modern humans can easily and consistently tell apart other creatures from humans, no matter how close they are to us in terms of DNA or even anatomical similarity. I’m still making my way through Dr. Forth’s fascinating book (listen to this interview for a summary), but this does seem to suggest that humans as a group are recognizably different from any other creature. We can’t put a number on that amount of difference, but it’s to a degree that’s recognizable.

How does this affect the case for common descent?

Let’s take stock: thus far, we’ve realized that the similarity between human and chimp genomes is significantly lower than 99%, possibly in the mid-80’s. Secondly, by questioning its equivocation with organismal similarity, we’ve established that it’s possible for there to be substantial differences between humans and non-humans. However, it’s hard to see how this alone significantly affects the overall case for common descent, for two reasons.

First, even if the human constitution isn’t strictly reducible to the genome, the fact that human and non-human genomes are so similar - even if it’s in the low- to mid-80’s - still calls out for an explanation. Indeed, the strongest arguments for common descent doesn’t come from overall similarities between organisms, but certain aspects of the similarity which strike us as particularly gratuitous. An example would be shared sequence and positions of particular DNA elements like the endogenous retroviruses (see this video for a short summary of the case - and the previous article on this blog for a brief and incomplete evaluation). I think the foregoing discussion only serves to weaken a particular argument for common descent, while leaving the stronger ones unscathed.

Second, in contexts other than human evolution, we would accept the common descent inference based on a high degree of genome similarity alone. Perhaps the most notable example in recent memory is the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2. The fact that the viral genome had a similarity of 96% with a previously known coronavirus identified from bats led us to confidently infer that these two viruses had a shared origin (for those partial to lab leak explanations - even lab leak proponents agree that the virus had its origin in bats, but it might have been modified since then). A similar line of reasoning led researchers to conclude that the origin of AIDS was from naturally occurring Simian retroviruses, as opposed to contamination from Oral Polio Vaccines (the so-called OPV/AIDS theory). Even if you don’t buy that explanation, we generally accept that a high degree of DNA/RNA/protein similarity between two biological agents - be they viruses or dog breeds - is indicative of common origin. In doing so, we do not claim that an organism is reducible to its genome or that 96% DNA similarity means 96% overall similarity, just that such a degree of similarity in an important part of the organism calls out for an explanation. Absent any alternative explanation, we should opt for shared ancestry.

It seems we keep ending up in the same position: the importance of an alternative explanation or theodicy for the extent of similarity between humans and non-human creatures, especially apes. That’s next post business, but for now, it is important note that there is one way in which the foregoing discussion affects the common descent dialectic.

One utility of questioning the DNA similarity/DNA-organism equivocation

Even without an explicitly fleshed out story to this effect, I don’t think it’s particularly hard to see why God would make creatures that are similar to humans. Dr. Wood’s essay surveys a number of such explanations, e.g.:

• Certain forms of a common design hypothesis state that a Creator with the goal to make different types of organisms would re-use the same code in different design contexts, as opposed to re-inventing the wheel each time (for the sake of elegance or efficiency).

• In order to consume nutrients from the environment and produce energy, the environment needs to be at least somewhat similar to our bodies. In other words, it’s useful for the rest of biodiversity to be made up of the same building blocks as we are, so when we eat food, our bodies can break them down into constituent blocks and incorporate them into our own body. This would not have been achievable if we inhabited a world with a starkly different constitution to us.

• Similarity across the biological realm points to a singular Designer behind all of them. Thus Paley:

  Of the “Unity of the Deity”, the proof is the uniformity of the plan observable in the universe . . . New countries are continually discovered, but the old laws of nature are always found in them: new plants perhaps, or animals, but always in company with plants and animals which we already know; and always possessing many of the same general properties. We never get amongst such original, or totally different, modes of existence, as to indicate, that we are come into the province of a different Creator, or under the direction of a different will. In truth, the same order of things attend us, wherever we go.”

While these suggestions are interesting, and we’ll definitely dissect them in the articles to come, it’s important to note that such explanations only suffice to account for very general similarities in nature. For example, the common design explanation accounts for why some creatures in nature resemble humans, but not why the pattern of similarity forms a nested hierarchy including humans - one putatively best explained on common descent. Likewise, the second explanation shows the need for a shared biochemical language across different creatures - that we need to be made of nucleotides and amino acids, for example - but not the extent of biological similarity we in fact observe. At one point, the discussion becomes about the extent of similarity and not just its existence. God allowing some similarity between humans and non-humans isn’t the problem, the problem is there’s too much of it. In response to the third suggestion above, for example, Dr. Wood writes the following in his essay:

If there were no nonhuman primates, humans would still be recognizably mammalian and therefore revealed as part of the design of a single Creator, but humans would also stand out as special mammals not closely similar to any other particular group of mammals [thereby defusing the common descent inference].

For him, the problem isn’t that mammals exist - who are very similar to humans - but that the primate lineage exists, which consists of members even more similar. The humans aren’t just very similar to other creatures, but almost maximally so. We could not have been more similar. This degree of similarity is better explained on common descent than on any of the theological explanations above. To put this in a theologically potent way, God could’ve made us significantly dissimilar to the other creatures - like getting rid of the rest of the primate lineage, for example. In such a world, doubts about the true origin of humans and our ancestry wouldn’t have arisen to begin with. So why didn’t He?

This is where our original discussion about genome similarity not tracking overall organismal similarity, and in fact humans being recognizably different from other creatures, has a place in the dialectic. As the interlocutor demands, human beings are indeed significantly different from other creatures - so much so that no one would mistake a non-human hominid for a human. So God did make us significantly different and unique, just that the point is easy to miss when we equivocate between genome similarity and organismal similarity. Maybe, pace Dr. Wood, the common descent proponent would still declare victory in a world where the other members of the primate lineage didn’t exist, just based on the level of similarity between humans and our closest non-primate lookalikes.

Whether such a response is promising would have to wait until we do a more comprehensive analysis of the theodicies for human origin. That and others in next post.

Today, we’ll be analyzing Sh Dr. Yasir Qadhi's essay on human evolution. Although this essay forms the first part of a two-part series on the Yaqeen Institute website (the second part being Dr. Nazir Khan’s essay, reviewed here), I think the two essays are substantially different in terms of goal and strategy.

In attempting to address the problem human evolution poses to Islam, Dr. Qadhi offers two substantive contributions. First, he presents a scenario of human origins which, according to him, can be theologically acceptable while at the same time not conflicting with any scientific data. Theological difficulties aside (see the last section of this article), I’ll show that the success of this approach depends on our view of the characteristics of Adam (peace be upon him) and his children, and more importantly - how drastically we differ from other hominins. Without settling that question first, it’s not clear whether his solution actually escapes scientific falsifiability. However, that takes us far afield into scientific predictions of Adamic origins (the third issue in our typology of problems), which is an extremely substantive discussion beyond the scope of this article, or even any one article. That wrinkle apart, it is nonetheless inarguable that Dr. Qadhi’s approach does substantively reduce the conflict between scientific evidence and Islam, while not eliminating it completely.

However, showing that the putative evidence for human evolution doesn’t logically contradict Islamic teachings is, I think, the less important bar to clear. There still remains the question of why, if Islam says humans didn’t evolve, we nonetheless find scientific evidence supposedly suggesting that we did (corresponding to the second issue we discussed in our typology). This problem is often phrased in terms of divine deception, and I will spend most of my time in this article discussing Dr. Qadhi’s solution to it. We’ll discover that while Dr. Qadhi does point out something important and consequential about common descent inferences, that observation in itself doesn’t defuse the challenge. However, analyzing his article is valuable because, while it might not provide an optimal solution, it nonetheless highlights the precise type of solution required to solve this problem. Following the practice of philosophers of religion working on the archetypical theological problem - the problem of evil - I’ll be calling such a solution a theodicy. We will end by scrutinizing a potential theological difficulty with Dr. Qadhi’s scenario, which further shapes the types of theodicy required to address this problem.

As is hopefully becoming apparent from this outline, Dr. Qadhi’s article ended up proving extremely useful as a springboard to launch into the rest of this project.

Before entering the main discussion, I should briefly mention that Dr. Qadhi spends some time discussing philosophy of science and its relevance to the problem at hand. This approach isn’t unique to him - indeed, it’s safe to say that the most popular way of addressing human evolution in Muslim discourse has been to opt for some form of antirealism about scientific theories. This is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion in its own right, and I want to reserve a separate article to dissect the use of scientific antirealism in this context. The scope of the present review, however, is already pretty big as things are, so we won’t be discussing philosophy of science here (unless I absolutely feel like it).

With that said…

A story that’s impossible to falsify

In the first part of the essay, Dr. Qadhi spends a substantial amount of time establishing the fact that according to Islam, it’s impossible to maintain that humans evolved from non-human animals. On the other hand, he’s also someone who seems to take scientific evidence seriously. Given these dual commitments, the first order of business for Dr. Qadhi is to propose a scenario that avoids a logical contradiction between what Islam says and what the scientific evidence purportedly say, by being “cognizant about what scripture does not say and what science does not exclude” (emphasis in original). Here’s his attempt:

. . . [O]ne can certainly imagine a scenario wherein hominid species were gradually evolving on earth, and right at the point when evolutionists would predict the emergence of modern humans, God miraculously inserted the children of Adam. Let us suppose that these ‘Adamic species’ are biologically, anatomically, physiologically, and genetically indistinguishable from the would-be species one would have predicted to have emerged based on the preceding population of species in evolutionary history. They appear to occupy the exact same position on the phylogenetic tree. The occurrence of such a scenario is theologically plausible and would be impossible to disprove empirically since it is a metaphysical assertion. . . This example can be understood with analogy to a set of dominoes, representing the sequence of events in evolutionary history. Just as one domino topples the next, one species gives rise to a new species, as selection pressures continue to diversify populations and favor advantageous genes. The dominoes branch out, forming divergent branches of a phylogenetic tree. However, the final domino of one branch, representing humans, is not toppled by the preceding domino but instead is placed down in a manner indistinguishable from if it had been knocked down. An onlooker arriving at the scene and surveying the evidence would surely conclude that this domino was affected by the exact same process that caused all the others to topple.

As is apparent, the motivation here is to propose a scenario that is both scientifically unfalsifiable and compatible with the explicit claims of scripture. We will have occasion to explore whether it succeeds in the second aspect, but for now the story, as presented, needs some commentary.

What scientific predictions follow from Adam’s existence?

Let’s first understand what the “dominoes” in Dr. Qadhi’s story refers to. From his “Adamic species” description, it seems like the dominoes represent species. So the species preceding humans came about naturally - through a process of evolution - but the species of Adam was created supernaturally, through the miraculous creation of Adam and Eve (peace be on them) on earth. The reason this story is difficult to parse is, Dr. Qadhi doesn’t really tell us in what ways the modern humans would’ve differed from hominins that preceded us. Would there be a substantial “biological, anatomical, physiological, and genetic” gap between us? In which case, we need to re-consider whether this view can indeed escape scientific falsifiability, because evolutionary theory, by and large, can only accommodate incremental changes, not giant leaps. Of course, certain mutations can have significant effects - Chomsky proposed a single-step Merge mutation that bestowed a subset of modern humans with the capacity for thought and language. However, we would still need to have a discussion about how different humans would need to be from hominins to be theologically palatable, and whether that degree of change can be achieved with a single or a very few number of mutations.

Perhaps what Dr. Qadhi attempts to evade here is not the brunt of evolutionary theory, but the evidence marshaled in favor of it. Sure, the theory predicts that species merge seamlessly into one another, but the material evidence for evolution - paleontology and genetics - can be fragmentary. There could’ve been events in earth’s history, even significant ones, that evade the streetlight of evolutionary investigation. Perhaps, upon examining fossil and archaeological remains of extinct hominins and humans, we would detect a biological and behavioral gap substantive enough to accommodate a plausible account of differences between children of Adam and pre-Adamic hominins. But this is still a prediction of the Adamic origins scenario, one that can be potentially falsified with scientific evidence.

Put differently, the existence of an ontologically different Adam predicts an “evidential gap” corresponding to a discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and whether Dr. Qadhi’s story can avoid scientific falsifiability depends on how big, and of what kind, that gap is. Going back to our typology of the challenges posed by human evolution: this is a category 3 problem: the potential scientific conflicts with predictions following from the Adamic creation story.

In the current series of articles, we are focusing more on the category 2 problem of divine deception, and wouldn’t benefit from getting sidetracked by category 3 just yet. Let me nonetheless briefly mention that while it is questionable whether this strategy avoids scientific falsifiability altogether, there is no question that it lessens the degree of such conflict considerably. If one can grant the existence of pre-Adamic hominins that resemble us closely, with the pattern of similarity forming a nested hierarchy predicted by common descent, then it seems like a lot of the putative evidence for evolution would pose no problem for the Muslim. Some of it still might, but a lot of it would not.

If we didn’t evolve, why is there evidence for evolution?

If successful on scriptural grounds - we’ll get to that later - the scenario proposed by Dr. Qadhi shows that there is no logical contradiction between the evidence for human evolution and scriptural teachings on human origins. However, this raises another question – why would God choose to create humans this way?

To sharpen this concern a little more, consider the original abductive argument for common descent:

1. The surprising fact of biological similarity is observed.

2. If common descent were true, this fact would be a matter of course.

3. Therefore, this fact provides some evidence that common descent is true.

In response, Dr. Qadhi would say something like the following. While biological similarity is not surprising on common descent, it’s not surprising on the Islamic account of human origins either. If God arranged things such that human biology resembles what we would expect on evolution anyways, it would no longer be surprising to find the putative evidence for common descent. This means common descent is not superior to Adamic origins as an explanation.

However, note that the scenario Dr. Qadhi presents is not in scripture – allowed by it perhaps, but definitely not suggested by it, much less mentioned in it. Meaning, given the Islamic account of human origins alone, we should not necessarily expect God to create humans in this evolved-like manner. The surprise now is no longer about why there is evidence for common descent, but instead about why God would create humans in a way that leaves evidence for common descent.

Dr. Joshua Swamidass writes the following in his reflections on a human origins scenario similar to the one proposed by Dr. Qadhi:

Is [such a scenario] possible? Absolutely. Perhaps it is even true. But why would God do this? Why would He choose a creative mechanism that is so easily understood through the lens of common ancestry? Why was evidence against evolution not part of His design goals? Maybe the theologians can help us here.

What I’ve been trying to flesh out in so many words is more popularly, and perhaps irreverently, called the divine deception objection. If God arranged things in creation in such a way that it goes against His claims in scripture, does that not amount to deception?

Note that these concerns apply not just for human origins, but for any putative claim of science-religion conflict. Suppose, for the sake of argument, scripture made the claim that no animal on earth ever went extinct. We eventually discover fossils, realize these are animal remnants, and draw the conclusion that there were animals that once lived on earth that are no longer around. This seems to present a straightforward conflict between scripture and science. I don’t think our concerns would really be allayed if someone said – well, even though the fossils look like animal remains, they are in fact skeleton-shaped rocks that God placed on earth. This hypothesis accounts for the evidence just as well as the extinction hypothesis – after all, if God did place skeleton-shaped rocks on earth, we would expect the data to look the same.

While the analogy is somewhat contrived, I think the skeleton-shaped rock hypothesis is not too far from an evolved-looking human hypothesis. In both cases, our surprise is not allayed, and we are left wondering – why would God do that? Why would God create in such a way that naturally leads one to an anti-scripture conclusion?

Dr. Qadhi’s response to divine deception

In response to this, Dr. Qadhi writes the following:

An opponent of religion might object that it is deceptive for God to create human beings to resemble other biological organisms in a manner compatible with evolution. But this is a bizarre objection for an anti-religionist, since it represents a weak theological objection (regarding what God would or would not do) rather than a scientific objection. Moreover, from a theological standpoint, there is nothing deceptive whatsoever about God informing us through scripture of our heavenly origin while reminding us biologically of our terrestrial sojourn. Moreover, patterns abound in the creation of God, whether the Fibonacci sequence in the petals of a flower or in human anatomy, or the golden ratio, or the presence of symmetry, tessellations, fractals, and so on. If the creation of God routinely demonstrates recurring patterns, then biological resemblance is an expected feature of human beings. Just as theological conclusions do not arbitrate the validity of pieces of empirical evidence, biology has no means to arbitrate theological conclusions about what God would or would not do.

The four responses I can make out here are:

1. This charge is based on assumptions about what God would or would not do, and is therefore theological, not scientific.

2. There is no deception on God’s part, since He explicitly told us how we were created in scripture;

3. Our biological similarity with the rest of creation reminds us “of our terrestrial sojourn”;

4. God often create things in a pattern, so it’s not surprising that we should find a pattern of biological similarity between humans and non-humans.

I don’t think (2) and (4) are relevant to this discussion. For (2), the fact that God informs us of facts in scripture is exactly the problem, not just in the case of human origins but any putative science-religion conflict. For (4), the question isn’t why God created humans in a pattern, but rather, why God created humans in a specific pattern, one that seems to go against scripture. The point in (3) about biological similarity having a didactic function – reminding us of our “terrestrial sojourn” – is interesting, and we will return to this at the end of this article. That leaves (1).

Let’s take stock of the dialectic thus far. In his article, Dr. Qadhi’s scenario accepts the putative evidence for common descent, but doesn’t accept the inference to it. There is indeed a logical gap between the truth of a theory and the evidence adduced to support the theory, and much of the realism-antirealism debate in philosophy of science is dedicated to when, if ever, such inference is justified (Dr. Qadhi alludes to this in the penultimate part of his essay). To justify his reservation, an alternative scenario of special creation of humans is proposed that explains the data just as well. In this situation, in order for the common descent inference to go through, this alternative special creation hypothesis must be refuted. The proponent of common descent brings up the divine deception consideration to meet this challenge. However, according to Dr. Qadhi, this response is not satisfactory because it requires us to speculate about what God would or would not do. Thus far in the dialectic, it seems like the truth of common descent stands or falls on the success of this theologically motivated objection.

Common descent inference is theological

The idea that the scientific idea of common descent requires a theological premise might strike one as odd, but this is quite apparent once one reads the literature, especially the popular presentations of the evidence for evolution.

I suspect that the readership of this Substack has heard the phrase “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. This sentence, oft-quoted in the context of creation-evolution debates, is the title of a journal article by the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky. The paper itself has been cited with abandon, and it’s often one of the first assigned readings in an evolution class to acquaint folks with the evidence for evolution.

When I first read this paper a few years ago, I was surprised at how theological it was. The author professes quite clearly that he’s a believing Christian, going so far as to say that he’s a creationist and an evolutionist – meaning, he believes evolution is God’s preferred way of creating biodiversity (a position we’d call theistic evolutionism nowadays). As for the arguments for evolution themselves, virtually all of them are in the general shape of – we find pattern X in nature, X can be explained by process A or process B, but process B is impossible because – and this is the relevant part – God would never do it that way. In this context, process A is natural evolution, process B is supernatural fiat. Here are three quotes to this effect from the article:

[B]ut what a senseless operation it would have been, on God's part, to fabricate a multitude of species ex nihilo and then let most of them die out!

Was the Creator in a jocular mood when he made Psilopa petrolei for California oil-fields and species of Drosophila to live exclusively on some body-parts of certain land crabs on only certain islands in the Caribbean?

[Creationists] must insist that He [God] deliberately arranged things exactly as if his method of creation was evolution, intentionally to mislead sincere seekers of truth.

And so on. God wouldn’t do things this way, the argument goes, so things must not have happened this way. The argument the paper seems to be making is unmistakably theological.

For a more contemporaneous example, consider this popular video arguing for the shared ancestry between humans and chimps. This will also help us evaluate the dialectic as it applies specifically to the evidential case of human evolution.

In brief, the video presents an example of what I sometimes refer to as the problem of gratuitous similarities. Endogenous retroviral sequences (ERVs) are elements in the genome that are shared between humans and chimps. Not only do these sequences maintain a degree of similarity between humans and chimps, but they are also found in the exact same spots in the genomes of both organisms. Plus, not many of them have been proven to be functional. In fact, since these elements resemble carcasses of viruses that once infected the host, it’s reasonable to assume prima facie that at least some of them are exactly what it says on the tag – broken, non-functional remains of viruses, not functional genetic elements. But even if they do turn out to be functional, it’s difficult to argue that these exact sequences in these exact genomic locations were necessary for functionality of this sort. Meaning, this similarity between humans and chimps is gratuitous – it cannot be explained by appealing to their shared utility alone. This is also called non-adaptive similarities in the literature: the similarity in itself has no adaptive benefit.

After laying out this data – and as Dr. Qadhi does, let’s grant for the sake of argument that it’s solid – the video moves in for its central argument. It’s worth quoting this section in full:

If humans and chimps share a common ancestor and if at least some of the infections we find in our genome occurred before the chimp-human split, we should find the same virus genes in the exact same locations in both human and chimp genomes. In contrast, if humans and chimps are not related, they should not share the same history of virus infections. . .

[Scientists] found that [humans and chimps] share . . . two hundred and five [endogenous retroviral insertions] out of two hundred and fourteen [insertions] for this particular virus group. This makes perfect sense if we consider the evolutionary view of life. The two hundred and five viruses were inserted some time before the chimp-human split. . . In contrast, if we want to believe the fixed species view, we’re forced to conclude that these viruses are simply shared by coincidence. When we do the math . . . the chance of this happening by coincidence is less than one in [5.88 X 10^1418]. This evidence should be enough for the most reluctant yet rational person to carefully set aside the fixed species view. . .

What we’ve seen here is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other lines of DNA evidence available, together they demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that humans and chimpanzees did evolve from a common ancestor.

The “fixed species view” is code for Divine special creation – after all, unchanged species don’t just appear all of a sudden, they have to be miracled into existence supernaturally. I assume the video kept this language out of their presentation to remain religiously neutral.

The argument made here is Dozhansky’s theological approach on steroids. To see this, let’s consider the odds they mention at the end of their video, that of similar human and chimp viral elements lining up by coincidence. Why are we calculating odds for this view? Because this is what the video believes a “fixed species view” would predict: If humans and chimps were indeed fixed species (i.e., if they were miraculously brought about in that way), their retroviral elements would be random, meaning their lining up in the way that they do would be nothing but a brute coincidence. Of course, these odds look pathetic compared to common ancestry, especially since we know how retroviral infections happen and are retained through generations.

If you think about it, this is some pretty heavy-handed theological speculation. The video isn’t just claiming that God – the presumable Author of “fixes species” - would decidedly not create humans and chimps with shared endogenous retroviral elements, but goes one step further to claim if God created us, such elements would be randomly strewn about in our genomes.

Such theological speculations are not mere rhetorical flourishes adopted by Dobzhansky or modern YouTubers – it is, in some ways, central to the logic of a common descent inference. In their paper on the topic, Stephen Dilley and Nicolas Tafacory survey a large number of textbooks in terms of how they present the evidence for common descent, and find that in all cases, some theological premise is used in service of the argument (either the probability of God producing the biological data is low or indeterminate). More recently, Cornelius Hunter analyzed Darwin’s original argument for common descent to demonstrate that theological premises were always a part of the inference.

In fact, this point should be obvious and uncontroversial even without looking at these or other papers. Although I framed the common descent inference as an abductive one, it is also, crucially, an inference to the best explanation – it derives its evidential strength from the fact that it explains the data better than its alternatives. And that list of alternatives contains a special creation hypothesis as well – the idea that God arranged humans and non-human creatures in a way that seems to give the impression of common descent. To move forward, the proponent of common descent must show its explanatory superiority over this. This might not be apparent given methodological naturalism, which a priori rules out appeals to the supernatural; but becomes obvious once we flesh out the internal logic of such inferences. This is why the philosopher Elliot Sober, in his book on deriving the logic of evolutionary inferences, dedicates an entire chapter to refuting arguments from design on grounds of the indeterminate probability of theistic hypotheses. Only after this groundwork has been set does he go ahead and complete inferences to common descent. This is also why, in discussions of evolution outside scientific journals (textbooks, YouTube videos, or journal articles aimed at the public), proponents make these theological premises explicit.

But what’s wrong with theological objections?

It seems like Dr. Qadhi is indeed right when he says the divine deception objection, whose success is required for the common descent inference to go through, sneaks in theological premises. However, it’s left unclear what the consequence of that is. Is it necessarily a bad thing for an inference to have a theological premise? Are all theology-based arguments necessarily unsound?

It doesn’t seem that way. Imagine, if you will, that we find a pawprint in the sand, and want to conclude that this has been made by an animal with paws. Now imagine the irritation we must feel if our pedantic philosopher friend appears from behind the bushes and says – ah, but is it not possible that God supernaturally arranged the local structure of the sand in such a way which would resemble a paw? Are you really warranted in moving ahead with the pawprint hypothesis before refuting the special-paw-shaped-sand-hole-creation hypothesis? One might argue that we’re doing something very similar in the case of the common descent inference.

What has gone wrong here? These arguments - all scientific arguments? - have a potential theological premise to the effect of “this has not been miraculously arranged this way by God”. Yes, in making the pawprint case – and the fossil case – and the common descent case – we are making the assumption that God would not arrange the world such that we mistake fake fossils, or fake pawprints, or fake signs of evolution for genuine ones. The problem, however, is without further context - without additional reasons to suspect such activity on part of God - such theological objections are weak, ad hoc, and not worth taking seriously. Alternatively, by assuming that a paw print in the sand has indeed been made by natural forces and not miraculously arranged by God, we are making the right theological call.

It seems like just pointing out that an argument has theological premises is not enough - we would also have to show why those theological premises are weak.

How to deal with theological objections: problem of evil as case study

Another way of seeing the same point is to think about how Islam and its scholarship have chosen to dealt with other theological objections.

Perhaps the most renowned anti-theistic argument – the problem of evil – is as theological an objection as it gets. It relies specifically on the premise that we would not expect an All-Powerful, All-Good God to subject His creation to seemingly pointless suffering - so, yes an assumption about “what God would or would not do”, as Dr. Qadhi puts it. Regardless, Muslim scholars and preachers at large do take (at least some version of) this argument seriously, and - based on verses of the Qur’an and Prophetic Hadiths – attempt to explain why God would allow suffering in His creation. This is in spite of the argument containing considerations about God’s actions and motivations. This practice is very widespread - Muslim academics, scholars and preachers of the past and present have produced a lot of material on God’s reasons for allowing evil.

The Islamic treatment of the problem of evil teaches us two relevant lessons. First, just because an argument contains a theological premise, doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking seriously. The question to ask, instead, is whether that theological premise is reasonable or unreasonable. A theological objection can be strong or weak, and in case of the former it is worth taking seriously.

Second, we should take note of the burden of proof we accept in our treatment of the problem of evil. The Qur’an, for example, vividly draws attention to our lack of knowledge about God’s wisdom and the inner workings of His plan in the story of Khidr in Sura Kahf. This tells us our inferences about God’s plan or motivations would always be limited. We might think an instance of suffering is undeserving, but maybe it is required to secure some greater good or prevent some greater evil. This line of response overlaps with “skeptical theism” considerations in philosophy of religion, and the point is to defuse the force of our inference by appealing to the existence of plausible alternative explanations.

But Islamic scriptures do more than just this, they also provide positive explanations as to why suffering happens. It could be because life is a test of virtue [67:2], because suffering expiates sin, or so we realize the consequences of our actions and return to the right path [30:41]. Such references to explanations for suffering - called theodicies in the literature - are abundant in Islamic scriptures and scholarhip.

The need for a theodicy for biological similarity between humans and non-humans

These reflections provide a gold standard for how to deal with theological objections in general, including the one relevant to human origins.

First, as in skeptical theism and the story of Khidr, we could point to relevant factors that give us pause in drawing inferences. Applied to the problem of biological similarity, we could ask - are we justified in saying there’s no other plausible explanation for the shared similarity between humans and animals other than common descent? Are there relevant factors that might give us pause in this inference? I promised in the beginning that I wouldn’t bring up philosophy of science in this article, but I can’t help but notice the overlap between this discussion and that of the problem of unconceived alternatives. Basically, this radical idea suggests that we can’t trust the truth of any scientific theories because there’s always the possibility that we might be overlooking plausible alternatives. I’m not proposing something as radical in case of the inference to common descent, just asking whether there are reasons relevant to human origins that might give us pause in drawing conclusions.

Interestingly, we saw just such a “skeptical theistic” response to common descent in the last post on this blog. We demonstrated that human exceptionalism - at least certain forms thereof - leads us to suspect that we might not have the whole picture about human origins, and we might be missing plausible alternatives to the theory of common descent.

Second, as in the many passages in the Qur’an and Hadiths that provide theodicies - explanations of why God allows suffering on earth - we would also want to provide a “theodicy” of why God might want to allow such similarity between humans and animals.

There’s a half-sentence in Dr. Qadhi’s essay that makes me feel like, at some level, he gets it (emphasis mine):

Moreover, from a theological standpoint, there is nothing deceptive whatsoever about God informing us through scripture of our heavenly origin while reminding us biologically of our terrestrial sojourn.

At the very end, it seems like Dr. Qadhi comes within a stone’s throw of seeing the need for an explanation of human-animal biological similarities. Such similarity, he seems to suggest, has a function, that of “reminding us biologically of our terrestrial sojourn”. In itself, it’s kind of difficult to parse what it means - maybe by making us similar to other earthly creatures, God is teaching us that earth is our (temporary) home, and the rest of creation our neighbors.

We will have occasion to explore these and other theodicies for biological similarities in the upcoming parts of this series, but I wanted to briefly highlight that the point of a theodicy doesn’t seem to be altogether lost on Dr. Qadhi. The same can be said about the “pattern” explanation he alludes to, but I don’t think that’s convincing.

How to provide a theological explanation for biological similarity

This realization about the need for a theodicy of biological similarity forms the shape of the rest of this project. In subsequent articles, I will be examining a wide range of explanations as to why God would create such similarity between man and animals suggested in the literature, and attempt to develop my own comprehensive theodicy. Before we wrap up, we should take note of one other concern about Dr. Qadhi’s scenario that’s worth exploring further. This brief analysis will inform the type of theodicy we should be adopting.

On Dr. Qadhi’s proposed scenario, God seems to (seems to - because Dr. Qadhi doesn’t mention this explicitly) have “based” the human design closely on non-human hominids, who, in turn, have evolved from lower organisms. There’s something grotesque about this suggestion - why would God need to rely on animal biology to make humans? Why would “the best of forms” as God calls it [95:4], the form He put together with His own hands [38:75], have to be modeled after the design of other living things on earth - ranging from vermin to primates? Does this not strike one as debasing the honor of Adam and his children? Is such a picture really all that different from just accepting that we evolved from lower primates?

I think this is an extremely significant challenge, but we need to distinguish between two things:

1. There are similarities in the design of man and beast.

2. God based the design of man on that of beasts.

I suspect (2) is objectionable, but (1) is not. The fact that humans and animals are similar in their biology has been known since antiquity, and one could say the Qur’an has a suggestion to this effect as well [6:38]. However, to say that this similarity is because God based the design of man on non-human animals strikes one as problematic. If anything, a Muslim would want to affirm the opposite: the Qur’an says that the rest of creation was made for, or in service of, humans [2:29, 45:13]. So the account of biological similarity between humans and animals would ideally go the opposite direction: God “modeled”, in some way, the rest of creation - including the beasts on earth - after the design of man. Perhaps the similarity we share was required to serve man in some way. In this explanation, it is man that takes causal priority - God might have created humans later, but He fit the design of the universe around us - so we could exist and flourish [41:9-12], not the other way around.

These reflections show the ideal shape of a theodicy that explains human-animal similarities. If we want to provide a theological explanation for why God created humans to be so similar to the rest of biology, that explanation must be anthropocentric - somehow, this shared similarity was required, or at least a consequence of, God’s decision to create Adam and place his progeny on earth.

That’s the “future prospects” part of this discussion, which we’ll get started on from the next article.