Page 314 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

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CHAPTER 22 GENESIS CREATION STORY AND RECENT COSMOLOGICAL FINDINGS—…
CHAPTER 22 GENESIS CREATION STORY AND RECENT COSMOLOGICAL FINDINGS—… 293
day, when the sun was not yet. Jewish scholars have addressed this challenging
mystery, and gave it various interpretations (mostly symbolic and allegoric). We
would ignore this day (the only day which is inconsistent with the order mandated

by the scientific timeline), and assume that the biblical description for the fifth

day, regarding generation of life in the water and “above the Earth,” relates to first
formation of life on Earth.

It is extremely difficult to provide dating for first appearance of most forms of

life on Earth. We assume here that two ingredients are essential for all forms of
life as now known: living organisms are multi-cellular and sexually reproduced.
An excerpt from Wikepedia, the free encyclopedia, representative of other sources,
summarizes first signs of life, as just characterized, and their timeline (Source:

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_
evolution; MA means “million years ago”):

• 1200 Ma: Sexual reproduction evolves, leading to faster evolution. While
most life still exists in oceans and lakes, some cyano-bacteria may already
live in moist soil by this time.
• 1000 Ma: Multi-cellular organisms appear, initially colonial algae, and
later seaweeds, living in the oceans.

Both these time-dating estimates rely on references from 2005 (see details in
the afore-cited source).
A related source for the former dating (sexual reproduction) is an article
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_
reproduction#Origin of Reproduction):

“The evolution of sex is a major puzzle. The first fossilized evidence of sexually
reproducing organisms is from eukaryotes of the Stenian period, about 1.2 to 1
billion years ago. Sexual reproduction is the primary method of reproduction for
the vast majority of visible organisms, including almost all animals and plants.
Bacterial conjugation, the transfer of DNA between two bacteria, is often mistak-
enly confused with sexual reproduction, because the mechanics are similar.”
A related source for the latter dating (multi-cellular life), yet from the same
source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular organism):
“The oldest known taxonomically resolved multi-cellular organism is a red
algae, Bangiomorpha pubescens, found fossilized in 1.2 billion year old rock
from the Ectasian period of the Mesoproterozoic era.” This figure is also quoted

by White (2007), in a table reporting “Significant dates in the history of the
universe”.