Life of Adam and Eve: see Adam and Eve, Life of.

Eve [Heb.,=life], in the Bible, the first woman, wife of Adam and the mother of Cain, Abel, and Seth. Fashioned from Adam's rib, she was beguiled by the serpent into eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. Eve then tempted Adam to eat, whereupon they were banished from the Garden of Eden. See also Lilith.

Eve, in genetics, popular term for a theoretical female ancestor of all living people, also known as mitochondrial Eve. In 1987 biochemist Allan C. Wilson proposed that all living human beings had inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a single woman. Using statistical and computer analysis of mtDNA—which is almost always inherited by a child from the mother—from people of various ethnic groups and assuming a slow, constant rate of genetic mutation, Wilson concluded that the oldest mtDNA was African and that every person's mtDNA stemmed from one woman who lived about 200,000 years ago. (He did not suggest that this woman was the only female ancestor alive 200,000 years ago.)

Critics questioned the appropriateness of the mtDNA samples used in the study and argued that computer analysis of the data was flawed and that Wilson's conclusions were not supported by the fossil record. A further study using more diverse mtDNA samples and supporting Wilson's theory was published in 1991, but other computer analyses of mtDNA samples have indicated that several different "family trees" can be constructed from the same data and that the order in which samples are analyzed by the computer program affects the results.

A 1995 study supported the idea that modern humans originate from a single source by identifying identical stretches of DNA on the Y chromosomes of a sample of men taken from different racial and geographical groups worldwide. This study looked at the zinc finger y, or ZFY, gene, a gene that is passed only from father to son, and concluded that humans evolved from a common ancestor (i.e., a small group) around 270,000 years ago. More recently, Spencer Wells, in The Journey of Man (2002), has argued that all men are descended from a single African man who lived 60,000 years ago.

Those who argue against the Eve, or "out-of-Africa," hypothesis, are led by Dr. Milford Wolpoff and support an alternate hypothesis known as "regional continuity." It contends that human evolution was a much slower process (covering a million or more years) that occurred simultaneously in many areas of the Old World after the migration of Homo erectus, the species generally recognized as immediately preceding Homo sapiens, from Africa.

Adam and Eve, Life of, early Jewish work included in the collection known as the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. It was probably written in Hebrew between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100. Based on the Old Testament story, it supplements the original. It has been interpreted to teach that Eve was the source of Adam's sin and that she was responsible for the Fall.

In the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, the parents of the human race. Genesis gives two versions of their creation. In the first, God creates “male and female in his own image” on the sixth day. In the second, Adam is placed in the Garden of Eden, and Eve is later created from his rib to ease his loneliness. For succumbing to temptation and eating the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, God banished them from Eden, and they and their descendants were forced to live lives of hardship. Cain and Abel were their children. Christian theologians developed the doctrine of original sin based on the story of their transgression; in contrast, the Quran teaches that Adam's sin was his alone and did not make all people sinners.

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