Eve, Evolution and the Origin of Mankind

Whether you believe in Genesis or evolution, a woman’s decision is at the centre of our origin. Eve eating the apple, the process of sexual selection — the commonality between the two is the decision to choose not what’s good enough, but the best. Those who see in Eve only a misogynistic myth give too much credence to the traditional interpretation of the story. Eve is only the villain if you believe that obedience is a supreme virtue. If, however, you believe in the pursuit of knowledge, self-determination and progress (which, in WEIRD societies, most of us do), then Eve seems more like a hero.

Another criticism of the Genesis myth (and myth in general) is that it is fundamentally untrue. This is Cat Bohannon’s argument in her recent book Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. In it, she writes that the difference between her account (which posits many Eves) and that of Genesis is that hers is ‘true’:

That’s the real problem with origin stories like the one in Genesis: our bodies aren’t one thing. There’s no one mother of us all. Each system in our body is effectively a different age, not only because the cellular turnover rate differs between cell type and location (your skin cells are far younger than most of your brain cells, for instance), but also because the things we think of as distinct to our species evolved…