A 600-year-old man named Noah built a boat out of wood of such immensity that he could obey God's command to "bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you;  they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kind, and of the animals according to their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you."  [italics mine]

Who wrote such a yarn?  Why would they lie?  Why bother to insist upon the utterly fantastic, to enter it into scripture, to demand that it be repeated endlessly, writ in secret, stored in caves, carried in caravans?

I believed as a child and believe still that these sacred authors do not lie, were not psychotic and were not trying to cynically support a royal lineage or a promote some party line in support of a hereditary priesthood. Instead, these women and men were doing their very best to record an event which actually had happened in their own lives, events they had witnessed yet, ironically, had not seen (the newly conceived have no eyes; indeed, no sensory organs of any kind.)  The story of Noah and his "ark" is reportage-- narrative of experience by the subject of that experience.  We all have this same experience, this genesis.  We are conceived.

Check out this ark and see that we are talking about a cell created in the fusion of sperm and egg floating in a "sea" which will condemn to acidic death every sperm which was "sinful", ie., less hardy, less quick.  Only Noah (and Noah's line) survive in a "boat" built to the exacting specifications of a Deity who ordains that Noah shall cover it outside and in with pitch--a neat adaptive word to describe the membrane of water-resistant fat which encases the cell.

Noah's mandate to preserve not only his own life, but the entire gene pool of the living universe is, get this, achievable.  DNA, combined as the result of male and female gene pairing, provides the material from which all life derives.  All life.  Giraffes.  Us.  Same material.  The "ark" does, indeed, contain the totality of earthly life forms in its four constituent parts, the four bases found in DNA--adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine -- G, T, C and A which, in various combinations, create everything from a sparrow to a Spaniard.  And the precious cargo floats above the hellish acids which are destroying the millions of male gametes which did not measure up.

And guess what?  The genes from mom line up in that single fertilized cell with the genes from Pop in pairs.  Homologous pairs of chromosomes from the male and female of the species are aboard this water-resistant cell containing the entire gene pool of planet earth as it floats as a morula of cells until it finally lands.    

The Ark landed on "Mount Ararat."  The morula, now known as a blastocyst, comes to rest forming a tiny blister on the uterus.  Ark, and cell, are uniquely equipped to obey God's command which shortly follows.

Multiply.  That's practically all a new zygote does.