Q&A: Letter from M…
Letter from M…
Question
Hello Rabbi,
How are you?
1. I wanted to ask you, please, what happened with the book by that American who wanted to “prove” various things through research in evolution, and in response you wrote the book “God Plays Dice.” Was his view accepted to the point that they actually teach it in American schools, or was the idea shelved? What is happening here in Israel? And in general, what is happening today in the wider world regarding the theory of evolution?
2. I don’t remember whether I ever asked you this question before, so if I did, sorry for asking again. How can it be that from one people—who, if I understand correctly, in the Second Temple period looked the same—within 2,000 years, which seems to me a relatively short time, those same Jewish people became partly Russian and partly Ethiopian and partly Polish and partly Iraqi? And not only did skin color change, which maybe can be explained by climate, but facial features changed too. How can that be?
Thank you very much
Answer
1. Dawkins’s books (he is British) are bestsellers and are very popular, influential, and widely read. Evolution is taught everywhere, but the question is whether it is taught together with the claim that there is no God. That varies, but it seems to me that in quite a few places people are at least being steered toward that conclusion.
2. I assume a small part of it is evolutionary processes (in a given place there are survival advantages to the local form), but the amount of time that has passed is too short for that. It is more likely that this is mainly due to intermarriage and converts who married into the Jewish community.
Discussion on Answer
First of all, after a few generations of mixing, it is definitely plausible that each of us has a convert or female convert somewhere in our ancestry. Second, not all of us have characteristic facial features.
A large part is rooted in evolutionary selection processes:
Skin color changes very quickly once even a small number of outside genes enter the gene pool, if the environment has a strong preference based on skin color.
Especially when you take into account that in such an environment, people with the more suitable color get more marriage matches and matches with more economically established families (sexual selection).
Rabbi, so what you’re basically saying is that we are all descendants of converts?