Re: Do men have fewer ribs than women as per Adam and Eve?

I know the answer is no, they have the same.  And I know about cervical and 
lumbar ribs.  But this question came up in our church recently, and I was the 
only person present who thought that they have the same number.  How can I 
prove this to people, some of whom believe that science is a conspiracy to 
prove the Bible (and therefore God) wrong?

The simple way to test whether men and women have different numbers of ribs 
would be to ask all the people who want to know, to dig up their own chest 
X-rays. Let anyone who wants, count the ribs without knowing whose is whose 
(though female X-rays do show breasts, much of the time). See whether there's 
any correlation between the number of ribs counted, and the sex of the person 
X-rayed. The exact number is less important than the fact that most chest X-rays 
will show the same number of ribs on each side of the body.

As a Christian myself, though, the bigger answer is that there is little hope of 
reaching those who have firmly decided that science is a vast atheistic 
conspiracy. Examples from the history of science might work; a web search might 
help; and Leadership University's website has a number of articles and essays on 
science and/or faith from an evangelical Christian perspective. I've written a 
few myself, though I'm not an evangelical; see http://www.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/essays/.


Dan 
Berger
Bluffton 
College