Long story. A lot of links to portions of this can be found here.
Well science shows that most of the lines that we have traditionally drawn between animals and humans simply are not there or are at most a quantitative difference. Animals use tools. Animals do art or the definition of art is too subjective. I do not see solid difference in this. There really is only one valid candidate for a difference and that is language – not communication but a language with all the Turing complete representational and abstraction capabilities that equal and surpass that of DNA itself making it another possible medium for the life process (these are lines which are well defined).
Now I would be thrilled to find that some animals do have kind of language, but if some do, it is likely much more limited than this. It is also true that considerable evolutionary adaptation is a part of our development of language over a 100,000 years, but that really only prepares the setting for bringing the human mind to life by this communication we had from God – for ideas have a greater power to transform human existence faster than mere genetics. So the difference I am talking about is not just a capability for language but also what we have done with, making ourselves a mental life (including an inheritance passed to the next generation) that rivals our physical life.
Depends on what makes the transition from animals to human beings. If it is like I have suggest a matter of thought and inspiration rather than genetics then our very ideas of relationships and marriage are a part of that transition.
One should have trouble viewing Genesis the same way as any of the other diverse types of literature in the Bible also. It isn’t a parable, but it isn’t just history or a science text either. Any telling of events from so long ago before the specialization of human activities into history, law, science, religion, and entertainment has a recognizable mythical character from the mixing of all these together in an oral tradition. The Bible itself shows that some of the elements of the story are symbolic rather than literal.
The things God did or told the Israelites to do in the rest of the Bible doesn’t sound “very good” either… not to mention many of the realities of life which has been the greatest criticism of theism since Epicurus in the third century BC (known as the problem of evil and suffering). The result is that I couldn’t believe in Christianity without evolution, because it shows quite conclusively that life simply could not exist without death and suffering because that is how it develops. Thus the flaws you are seeing really come from Deist notion of God as a watchmaker designer rather then the Biblical role for God as a shepherd – a role accepting that self-organization, learning, adapting, and struggling against death and suffering is all part of the very nature of what life is. So the truth is that the Bible with all its moral horrors and the stark realities of evolution fit together like a hand in a glove, and it is trying to make Genesis into a Candyland dream of children which is ultimately incoherent.
P.S. It has been claimed that natural language is not Turing complete, whatever natural language may be. But the proof that human language is Turning complete and surpasses DNA is quite simple. These things are both themselves described and explained in human language. That would be impossible unless language has all the same functionality as these things. Indeed you could say that human language has something more fundamental which includes the ability to learn, develop, and explain things like Turing completeness and DNA.