Question:
Answer:
Monogenism is the doctrine that modern humans arose from a single pair of ancestors.
There is not a logical or scientific way to exclude monogenism. God is the creator of human nature, and it is entirely within his power to create man directly and completely without a preliminary process of evolution or to transform a highly evolved primate into a man in the fullness of age with all the gifts of original justice. In either case, the origin of the first Adam is miraculous (as is the virginal conception of the Second Adam!).
Logic and science cannot rule out miracles, they can only describe the before and after. Indeed, the sounder, ancient concept of science explicitly included beings that are purely spiritual and their causal connection with the observable, material world.
In 1987, scientists first proposed the theory of “Mitochondrial Eve,” based on evidence that the most recent common direct maternal ancestor of all humans alive today lived in Africa about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. The term derives from biblical Eve and mitochondria, a cellular substructure that generates most of the chemical energy to power a cell’s biochemical reactions. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from a mother to her children. The scientists do not claim this “Eve” was the only woman alive at the time, but rather that, unlike her contemporaries, she has an unbroken maternal lineage to all living humans today.
Stacy Trasancos, a chemist who teaches online science and theology courses for Seton Hall University and Holy Apostles College and Seminary, argues that the evidence for Mitochondrial Eve is consistent with our having two first parents from which all humanity descended (35:52ff.), even if science can’t—strictly speaking—prove a religious dogma, given the limitations of the scientific discipline.
“I think the mitochondrial DNA, the Mitochondrial Eve, and the Y-Chromosome Adam,” says Trasancos, “are remarkable findings in the scientific literature.” While these finding don’t point to a first man and a first woman, Trasancos says, “absolutely they point to a population, they point to a very small population” and that “maybe there was a very, very small first population or even just two.”
“But you have to remember that evolutionary science will never, ever, ever, get us to a first man and a first woman,” adds Trasancos, because science cannot propose a theory based on “something that’s never been observed in science before.”
Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis (HG) is the last explicit magisterial statement on monogenism, and the pope acknowledges that God could’ve worked through evolutionary processes to create our first parents:
[T]he Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God (HG 36, emphasis added).
In other words, whatever preexisting matter may have been used by God in the creation of Adam and Eve—including via conception in non-human precursors—humanity’s first parents would have been uniquely and miraculously ensouled by God in conformity with the dogma of original sin (see Council of Trent, Decree on Original Sin, no. 1; Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), no. 390.
For more on this subject, see our tract “Adam, Eve, and Evolution” as well as this article and this article by Trasancos.