After the flood, the only genes for skin color would be those of the eight(?) surviving people, of which five (Noah's direct family) are very closely related.

Today, we have several different skin colors controlled by different genes.

If the population was restarted from Noah's family, explain how the few genes for skin color found in Noah's family's chromosomes became the many we have today, other than mutation followed by natural selection, or, *ahem* evolution?

Of course, the same holds true for Adam and Eve.

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"Well, I guess we're an Ovaltine family."
"MORE OVALTINE PLEASE!"
-American Radio Ads... *gag*... one more reason I'm glad to be above the 49th.

Given the above information, the gene pool would be incapble of expanding without the ability to select certain mutated genes. The problem is, there is no physical law that prevents this process from continuing to the point where individuals can no longer interbreed, at which point, by definition, two seperate species have been created.

At any rate, barring future catastrophe, human evolution, so far as speciation is concerned, has probably stopped. There will never again be a time when human populations are isolated. (Again, barring catastrophe.) We are now capable of choosing our own future, for good or for ill.

P.S. If I sound a bit odd, I just took some nice cold pills.

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It's all about the Pentiums, Baby!
"I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him Money for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support"

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"I told you. You're dead. This is the afterlife. And I'm God."
--Q to Picard, "Tapestry".

Also we called the orginal pair Jack and Diane. We don't know where you came up with Adam and Eve.

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"I came upon a wedding, good old families had contribed.
Bethlaham the bride-groom, Babylon the bride.
Great Babylon was naked, ah she stood there trembling for me.
And Bethlaham enflamed us both, like a shy one at some orgy.
And when we fell together, all our flesh was like a veil.
But I had to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail.
Some women wait for Jesus, and some women wait for Cain.
So I hang upon my alter, and I hoist my axe again.
And I take the one that finds me back to where it all began.
When Jesus was the honeymoon, and Cain was just a man.
And we read from pleasant Bibles, that are bound in blood and skin,
But the wilderness is gathering all its children back again."
excerpt from the song "Last Year's Man"
By Leonard Cohen.

According to even the most level headed, conservative scholars today, Genesis 1-11 (!) is most likely a story used to tell the Hebrew people how life came to be. I'll give a few class notes and then shut up.

Clues to why we think this:

1. The word Adam comes from a Hebrew word meaning 'from the ground'. Eve means 'life-giver' in Hebrew. It can be said that possibly these two Biblical characters did not actually exist.

2. When Adam's sons reach maturity we have a populous Earth that has descriptions that match the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age. Even though they lived a long time back then we did not advance this quickly. This is all there in Chapter 4. The phrase my prof used was "history is telescoped"

All this suggests a "representational/thematic" presentation rather than HISTORY or SCIENCE in our modern, western sense.

The Hebrew people had to be told things in ways they could understand. Genesis was written for them! We are trying to translate a work from an ancient language and culture totally different than our own. Words like (and this shocked me a lot) heavens, fermanent, kind, and day had different meanings back then. If the original writer was here now he/she would have no clue as to our definitions of these worlds and our concept of them. Genesis 1-11 could have been told this way because that would have been the only way the Hebrews could understand creation.

Two thing I want to say though is that the Old testament does not in any way conflict with anything in the New Testament. To use an old Christian phrase, it can be said "God met them where they were at".

Oh... I need to also say Genesis does not fit any desciptions of a near eastern creation "Myth". It is an "Anti-Myth". All magic, cyclinical notions, and consorts of God (and other things) are not present. Genesis (at the very least) told the Hebrews that the creation stories of their neighbors were wrong.

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It's all about the Pentiums, Baby!
"I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him Money for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support"

Actually, there exist Jewish mystic texts (The Quabbala, Kaballa,or however you pronounce it.) Many of the ancient Jews clearly believed in macic and spiritualism. Perhaps Genesis was merely "sanitized for your protection."

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It's all about the Pentiums, Baby!
"I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him Money for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support"

No, "Rah, rah, blasphemy?" Okay, perhaps not, but I recall a quote by a famous someone who said that "the Gods admire man for his blasphemies."

or did you mean
No, "sanitized for your protection?" If so, how do you know? Were you around when the thing was put together, then?
(For a good time, ask your profs about the "P" and "Q" documents. That's from a scholarly theory that asserts that what is now known as "Genesis" was actually a number of differing stories somewhat haphazardly stitched together to form the narrative.)