Like any theory, Darwin’s idea that evolution proceeds through natural selection was once merely a hypothesis. In this post, we’ll look at some of the early observations Darwin made on biogeography: the study of where species are distributed across the globe. These lines of evidence would later prod him to consider the possibility that species arise through a natural process of gradual change over time, rather than being independently created in each location where they are found.

The curious case of the missing mammals

As a widely-travelled naturalist on the HMS Beagle, Darwin studied a large number of different environments and documented the species he found in each. The Beagle, engaged as it was in an effort to map the coastline of South America, naturally paid call to numerous island groups along the way, including islands at a great distance from a continent (i.e.oceanic islands). One observation that Darwin made about oceanic islands is that none that he studied had terrestrial mammals on them. Later work, after his voyage, would confirm that this was a general rule. Oceanic islands lack terrestrial mammal species, except for small species that were introduced by humans. In contrast, flying mammals (i.e. bats) were found on oceanic islands, and often these species were endemic (i.e. found nowhere else in the world but the island in question).

Darwin found these observations difficult to square with his (then) working assumption that species were independently created in (and specifically created for) the locations in which they are found across the globe. He discusses these observations, and the questions they raised in his mind, in two chapters entitled “Geographical Distribution” in his Origin of Species. After discussing the similar case that amphibians (such as frogs, newts, and so on) are also not to be found on oceanic islands, he turns his attention to the missing mammals:

Mammals offer another and similar case. I have carefully searched the oldest voyages, but have not finished my search; as yet I have not found a single instance, free from doubt, of a terrestrial mammal (excluding domesticated animals kept by the natives) inhabiting an island situated above 300 miles from a continent or great continental island.... It cannot be said, on the ordinary view of creation, that there has not been time for the creation of mammals; many volcanic islands are sufficiently ancient, as shown by the stupendous degradation which they have suffered and by their tertiary strata: there has also been time for the production of endemic species belonging to other classes; and on continents it is thought that mammals appear and disappear at a quicker rate than other and lower animals. Though terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, aërial mammals do occur on almost every island. New Zealand possesses two bats found nowhere else in the world: Norfolk Island, the Viti Archipelago, the Bonin Islands, the Caroline and Marianne Archipelagoes, and Mauritius, all possess their peculiar bats. Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? On my view this question can easily be answered; for no terrestrial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across. Bats have been seen wandering by day far over the Atlantic Ocean; and two North American species either regularly or occasionally visit Bermuda, at the distance of 600 miles from the mainland. I hear from Mr. Tomes, who has specially studied this family, that many of the same species have enormous ranges, and are found on continents and on far distant islands. Hence we have only to suppose that such wandering species have been modified through natural selection in their new homes in relation to their new position, and we can understand the presence of endemic bats on islands, with the absence of all terrestrial mammals.

(As an aside, it’s important to note that Darwin, when he discusses the “supposed creative force” is not here arguing against the existence of God as creator in general, but rather against the “ordinary view of creation” common at the time: that God had episodically created species at specific geographical locations (what were called “centers of creation”) and that biogeographical patterns could be explained with limited dispersal from those centers. Darwin himself held to this common view at the start of his voyage on the Beagle, and that is the model he is attempting to refute in Origin, since it was a prevailing view among scientists at the time. Darwin and many of his scientific contemporaries also had no difficulty viewing natural processes as part of God’s regular action in the world, as is evident in Darwin’s correspondence with American botanist Asa Gray, among others.)

So, for Darwin, his biogeographical observations sat at ease with his (later) ideas of colonization and subsequent species change through natural selection, but made no sense to him if one held to an independent creation model. Many oceanic islands were very old, yet no mammals had been created there. Many oceanic islands had habitat suitable for mammals (or, indeed, for amphibians, as he notes) yet no such species had been created for that suitable habitat.

Island endemics and their continental “allied species”

Darwin noticed more than the absence of certain species groups on oceanic islands. He also noticed an interesting feature of the species that were present: an endemic species on an oceanic island would often have strong similarities with a species on the mainland closest to the island in question. Additionally, the pairing of oceanic endemic species with continental species often seemed to override expectations that species found in similar environments would be more similar to each other. These observations prompted him to reflect further on the possible means by which these “closely allied species” arose. As Darwin would write in his Origin this repeated pattern made a significant impression on him, and further caused him to doubt that endemic species had been individually created for each oceanic island. His visit to the Galapagos would prove instrumental on this point:

The most striking and important fact for us in regard to the inhabitants of islands, is their affinity to those of the nearest mainland, without being actually the same species. Numerous instances could be given of this fact. I will give only one, that of the Galapagos Archipelago, situated under the equator, between 500 and 600 miles from the shores of South America. Here almost every product of the land and water bears the unmistakeable stamp of the American continent. There are twenty-six land birds, and twenty-five of these are ranked by Mr. Gould as distinct species, supposed to have been created here; yet the close affinity of most of these birds to American species in every character, in their habits, gestures, and tones of voice, was manifest. So it is with the other animals, and with nearly all the plants, as shown by Dr. Hooker in his admirable memoir on the Flora of this archipelago. The naturalist, looking at the inhabitants of these volcanic islands in the Pacific, distant several hundred miles from the continent, yet feels that he is standing on American land. Why should this be so? why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast: in fact there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects. On the other hand, there is a considerable degree of resemblance in the volcanic nature of the soil, in climate, height, and size of the islands, between the Galapagos and Cape de Verde Archipelagos: but what an entire and absolute difference in their inhabitants! The inhabitants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America. I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation; whereas on the view here maintained, it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists, whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land, from America; and the Cape de Verde Islands from Africa; and that such colonists would be liable to modification;—the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace.

Many analogous facts could be given: indeed it is an almost universal rule that the endemic productions of islands are related to those of the nearest continent, or of other near islands.

Rethinking independent creation

For Darwin, both of these observations (that oceanic islands lacked terrestrial mammals, and that endemic species on islands were most similar to a species on the closest mainland) had the same explanation: his hypothesis that endemic, oceanic species were the modified descendants of a colonizing species from the nearest continent. This also explained the lack of amphibians and terrestrial mammals (but allowed for bats) - simply based on the ability of these classes of life to disperse across large expanses of ocean. Those that could disperse and colonize oceanic islands would experience modification in the new environment, and species unable to colonize these islands would never appear. To Darwin’s thinking, this explanation was wholly more satisfactory than the assumption that God had independently created every endemic species in its place, and arbitrarily chosen that oceanic islands did not need terrestrial mammals and amphibians.

Despite Darwin’s musing on the biogeographical patterns he observed, and the strong suggestion these patterns made of species change over time, a mechanism for that change would take some time for him to imagine. In our next post, we’ll look at that mechanism: Darwin’s idea of natural selection, and the evidence he assembled in its support prior to publishing the Origin.

Grantees will benefit from in-person interaction through a series of summer workshops in 2013, 2014, and 2015. These meetings will not only foster a broader knowledge base, but will build a sustained network of scholars and church leaders, both young and seasoned, who are serious about addressing the concerns of the church about evolution. Also in 2015, in connection with the third summer workshop, BioLogos will host a large conference open to scientists, scholars, and church leaders from around the world.

ECF History

In January 2012, BioLogos was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund the work of scholars and church leaders on evolution and Christian faith. In spring 2012 we worked hard to get the word out. You may have seen announcements on the BioLogos website, in our newsletters, on the Books & Culture, Leadership Journal, or First Things websites, on your professional society’s listserv, or perhaps on your friend’s blog.

The response was overwhelming: we received 225 letters of intent for a total request of $21 million—about seven times the amount we had to offer. We needed to invite the most promising applicants to submit a full proposal, but recognizing the projects with highest potential would require broad expertise. From the beginning, we envisioned that a panel of scientists, pastors, and scholars would oversee the application and review process as well as play key advisory roles throughout the project. A team of eight highly qualified individuals came on board in the early months of the project. They reviewed each proposal and together recommended that BioLogos invite 86 applicants to submit full applications.

The deadline for submissions was October 1, 2012. As in the previous round, the ECF panel evaluated each proposal. In addition, we asked 55 other experts to participate, so that each proposal received 3-4 scores. Criteria for the decision included significance of topic, project design, creativity and innovation, long-term impact potential, feasibility, and budget.

The panel then met together November 29-30, 2012, to make the final funding decisions. In the end, they recommended that BioLogos give 37 awards, ranging from $23,000 to $300,000. BioLogos staff notified applicants of their awards on December 14, 2013.

The Grantees

As part of our objective to create a network of scholars and leaders, we awarded grants to organizations across the U.S. and the world. Thirty of the 37 grantees are domestic; seven are international, hailing from Canada, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, and Spain.

Two-thirds of the accepted projects will be led by teams—some with three or more Project Leaders. We expect that the teamwork and time spent together at our summer workshops will be the start of a long-lasting network of people dedicated to helping the church think carefully about origins.

Applicants chose to apply under one of three program tracks: interdisciplinary scholarship (Track 1), intra-disciplinary scholarship (Track 2), and translational projects (Track 3). Track 1 projects focus on both the collaboration between individuals in different disciplines and the development of projects at the interface of different content areas. Track 2 projects focus on work done within a specific discipline. Track 3 focuses on projects that encourage Christians, especially those within more conservative traditions, to engage in meaningful and productive dialogue to reduce tensions between mainstream science and the Christian faith. The numbers of grantees in Tracks 1, 2, and 3 are 6, 8, and 23, respectively.

Many of the scholarly projects tackle questions about Adam and Eve, the Fall, human identity, and Original Sin—some of the most critical interpretive issues for evangelical theology.  Some examples: 

• Theologian Oliver Crisp of Fuller Seminary will take an analytic theology approach to ask to what extent a theological account of the origin of human sin depends upon the evolution of modern humans from one and only one ancestral pair—especially if that pair does not appear to correspond to what we would think of as modern human beings. 

• Pastor Michael Gulker and philosopher James Smith, leading a large team from The Colossian Forum, ask a related question: if humanity emerged from non-human primates—as genetic, biological, and archaeological evidence seems to suggest—then what are the implications for Christian theology’s traditional account of origins, including both the origin of humanity and the origin of sin? 

• Biologist Dennis Venema of Trinity Western University and New Testament scholar Scot McKnight of Northern Seminary will write a book on the evidence for evolution and population genetics, with informed theological reflection on how these issues interact with orthodox Christianity.

• Biologist David Wilcox of Eastern University will develop an updated model of human identity which reflects the complex recent scientific advances in genetics and paleoanthropology and yet is sensitive to theological concerns.  

These are just a few of the scholarly awards; check out the Grantees page for full descriptions of all Track 1 and Track 2 projects.

All projects have translational potential, but Track 3 projects are designed to meet the needs of a particular constituency within the evangelical church. These projects run the gamut from ethics to education to media production to ministry resources.  Some examples include:

• Theologian Lee Camp of Lipscomb University will produce “The Questions in Monkey Town,” an episode of Tokens, a live variety show that features musical performances, comedic sketches, brief interpretive monologues, and dialog with authors and scholars. The episode will be performed and filmed on the site of the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.

• Chaplain Joshua Hayashi and Educator Diane Sweeney of the Punahou School in Hawaii will lead a team to produce multimedia curricula aimed at helping high school students connect with their biology curricula and, at the same time, deepen their Christian faith.

• Physics teacher and pastor Benoît Hébert of Science et Foi Chrétienne in France will lead an international, multi-denominational team of French speaking Evangelical scientists, pastors and church leaders to produce a large number of resources on evolutionary creation.

• Pastor Seung-Hwan Kim of Grace Truth Community Church, a Southern Baptist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will produce teaching and preaching materials about evolution for church leaders.

• President Gregory Wolfe and Director of Resource Development for IMAGE will gather artists and writers of faith whose work explores the dialogue between evolutionary science and faith practice, convening a conversation between them and scientists, theologians, and church leaders in private and public conferences.

Again, this is just a taste of the diversity of Track 3 projects. Read more about each project on the Grantees page. You can look forward to an incredible variety of resources coming out of the ECF program, many of which will be featured right here on the BioLogos Forum.

Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

A common argument leveled against the theory of evolution is that scientists have not been able to produce the expected transitional fossils that show the change of one species into another. If evolution were true, wouldn’t there be instances of clear intermediary species, like, for example, a species that was half whale and half hippo to show the transition between those two? In this BioLogos podcast, Kelsey Luoma addresses this misconception about what a transitional fossil actually is. Rather than a mix between two related species, transitional fossils point back to the common ancestors that modern species share. The fact is that the number of transitional species is massive and it grows with each passing year. Given the rarity with which organisms are actually fossilized, the amazing thing is actually the completeness of the fossil record, not its incompleteness. The transitional species story strongly supports, and certainly does not disprove, evolutionary theory. ¹

1. To hear the full audio clips which have been referenced go to:

• Rational Response Debate with Kirk Cameron (from Way of the Masters)
• Behind the Scenes with Dr. Neil Shubin (from Cincinnati Museum Center)
• Mark Norell Publishes New Archaeopteryx Findings (from American Museum of Natural Sciences)
• Texas A&M Professor Discusses Findings of Autralopithecus Sediba and its Relationship to Humans (from Texas A&M University)
• Intro/outro music composed by Martin Minor (Minor2Go).

An audio only version of the podcast can be downloaded here.

The story in Genesis is a story (full of the deepest suggestion) about a magic apple of knowledge; but in the developed doctrine [of the Fall] the inherent magic apple has quite dropped out of sight, and the story is simply one of disobedience. I have the deepest respect even for Pagan myths, still more for myths in Holy Scripture. I therefore do not doubt that the version which emphasises the magic apple, and brings together the trees of life and knowledge, contains a deeper and subtler truth than the version which makes the apple simply and solely a pledge of obedience. But I assume that the Holy Spirit would not have allowed the latter to grow up in the Church and win the assent of great doctors unless it also was true and useful so far as it went. It is this version which I am going to discuss, because, though I suspect the primitive version to be far more profound, I know that I, at any rate, cannot penetrate its profundities.¹

Whatever its theological profundities, though, Lewis is clear that Genesis 2-3 is probably not a straightforward narrative of historical events. “What exactly happened when Man fell, we do not know,” he later writes. “We have no idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish [to be our own masters] found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.”²

What, then, is of consequence for Lewis, we might ask? The real story of the Fall, says Lewis, is not the surface narrative about “the magic apple,” but rather what he refers to as “the developed doctrine” of the Fall, namely the doctrine of humankind’s depraved condition:

According to [the doctrine of the Fall], man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will. To my mind this is the sole function of the doctrine.³

The “sole function of the doctrine” for Lewis is to name the human condition for what it is, namely, shot through with corruption. Or, as Lewis put it in A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” “The Fall is simply and solely Disobedience—doing what you have been told not to do: and it results from Pride—from being too big for your boots, forgetting your place, thinking that you are God.” You might call this the “Mere Depravity” view of the Fall.

Throughout The Problem of Pain Lewis displays a remarkable degree of comfort with evolutionary theory, not least evolutionary accounts of human origins. A corollary of Lewis’s acceptance of evolutionary theory, of course, is that death pre-existed humanity. Lewis grasps this nettle in chapter IX of the book when he writes,

The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier generations, to the Fall of man—the whole world was infected by the uncreated rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good reason to believe that animals existed long before men. Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity.⁵

Here is not the place to go into Lewis’s postulation that Satan was responsible for animal predation. We need only note that he makes this suggestion precisely in order to show how a broadly Darwinian picture of natural history may be compatible with a broadly Christian view of the world. For some, severing the link between the Fall of man and death’s entry into the world, is anathema. But given Lewis’ mere depravity view of the Fall, this evolutionary understanding of natural history creates no real problem for Christian faith.

Moreover, for Lewis the evolutionary picture of the ascent of humankind presents no real objection to the Christian doctrine of the Fall, either:

Many people think that this proposition [that we are fallen creatures] has been proved false by modern science. “We now know,” it is said, “that so far from having fallen out of a primeval state of virtue and happiness, men have slowly risen from brutality and savagery.” There seems to me to be a complete confusion here…. If by saying that man rose from brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, I have no objection. But it does not follow that the further back you go the more brutal–in the sense of wicked or wretched–you will find man to be.⁶

Lewis goes on to note that the categories of virtue and vice simply do not apply to the animal kingdom–and therefore not to our pre-human ancestors either–because animals as such are not moral agents. Moreover, Prehistoric man is not to be presumed to be altogether reprobate simply on account of using only rudimentary tools, hunting and gathering, and the like. Primitivity ought not to be confused with sinfulness he argues. Thus, for Lewis, the discoveries of modern paleontology and archaeology can tell us nothing about when or whether our ancestors fell from a state of innocence, and so we are free to accept, as Lewis seems to have, man’s physical descent from animals without giving up the Christian doctrine of the Fall.

While Lewis may not have publically argued for the historicity of Adam and Eve, his private opinions might have been another matter. In his recent essay “Darwin in the Dock,” John G. West has argued that, regardless of what he said in print, Lewis privately “embraced the literal existence of Adam and Eve.”⁷ West chiefly bases his argument for Lewis’s private belief in a literal Adam and Eve on an anecdote involving one of Lewis’ Oxford colleagues, Helen Gardner, recounted in A.N. Wilson’s C.S. Lewis: A Biography.⁸ Upon being asked at a dinner party whom he would most like to meet after death, Lewis replied, “Oh, I have no difficulty in deciding…. I want to meet Adam.” Gardner, it is reported, replied by saying that “if there really were, historically, someone whom we could name as ‘the first man’, he would be a Neanderthal ape-like figure, whose conversation she could not conceive of finding interesting.”⁹ Lewis, we are told, gruffly responded, “I see we have a Darwinian in our midst” and never invited Gardner to dinner again.¹⁰

West takes this tense little interaction between Lewis and Gardner to indicate that Lewis’ belief in a literal historical Adam and Eve. However, it should be noted that such a conclusion seems somewhat overhasty in light of what Lewis says in The Problem of Pain, where he articulates a view rather similar to what Gardner said that evening:

I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronised. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.¹¹

Given that Lewis actually believed what he wrote here, the difference between Lewis and Gardner seems not to have been either the question of “whether man is physically descended from animals” (which, as we have seen, Lewis was willing to grant) or the question of whether Paradisal man would be a “naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature,” a “Neanderthal ape-like figure.” Rather they differed over whether “Paradisal man,” as Lewis puts it, would have been someone, however primitive, to be revered, or whether, as Gardner seemed to believe, a mere brute. Taking Lewis’ written statements at face-value, it would appear that his irritation with Gardner owed less to her acceptance of evolution than it did to her dismissive presumption that our forebears were but dull savages.

Finally, it should be noted that Lewis was not even committed to the most basic element of a belief in a literal Adam and Eve, namely, that it was precisely two humans who fell and from whence our species came. He writes, “We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell.”¹² Lewis’s mere depravity view of the Fall and his belief in the mythical character of the Eden story gave him some latitude on the question of whether the Fall consisted of a historic first human pair going wrong at an easily identifiable moment. For Lewis, it was apparently quite possible that whole tribes of “Paradisal” Prehistoric humans could have gone about their business for generations—hunting, gathering, singing around the campfire, rearing children, painting in caves—before the spiritual and scientifically undetectable catastrophe of “the Fall” occurred. In other words, if Lewis were presented with the recent genomic evidence which suggests that our species arose from an initial population of several thousand rather than only two, it is doubtful that it would have flustered him. It simply makes no difference to Lewis’s argument how or how many humans initially “fell.” All that matters for Lewis is that God made humans (perhaps via evolution, perhaps not) and that we humans have gone quite wrong–so wrong, in fact, that it is beyond our powers to repair ourselves. Mere Christianity, for Lewis, does not logically depend on the historicity of the Adam and Eve story, but on the doctrine of our mere depravity.

In tomorrow's concluding post, we turn to C.S. Lewis' views on the compatibility of evolution and Christian faith.

Notes

1. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 63-64, my italics
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, my italics
4. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 70-71
5. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 119
6. Ibid, 64
7. West, “Darwin in the Dock,” in The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2012), 121. West’s volume takes a markedly different view of Lewis and Lewis’s legacy regarding debates about Christianity and evolution. I intend to write a thorough critical review of West’s book in the near future.
8. Ibid
9. A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 210
10. Ibid
11. Ibid
12. Ibid.

This week we feature the third clip from the upcoming documentary “From the Dust”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion, and we feel that this week’s topic, the Fall, is of particular importance for Christians as we think through the ramifications of creation by evolutionary mechanisms.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.

The provided questions are just a few of the discussion questions that go with this transcript, and we'd be happy to send them to you to foster further conversation within your church or small group setting. If you’d like to see the questions, or if you have stories from your own small group discussions about the clip, we would love to hear from you at info@biologos.org.

Editor's Note: The full documentary is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can order the film here, and learn more about the project here.

“The Fall” Transcript

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “My friends and colleagues, who have concerns about evolutionary theory for theological reasons, are onto something, and one of them involves the Fall, the nature of the Fall, what it is. Even if it is a metaphor, it is a metaphor for something, and what is that something? And how would we make sense of that something in light of evolutionary theory? The other issue on this has been probably the most serious issue that not only Christians, but all theists who believe in a good and providential God have wrestled with, it is the problem of natural evil.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “The problem of evil is a real problem to religious faith. It was certainly the thing for Darwin himself. That is what made him question his faith, and I think rightly so. It does not look like the sort of system that a good and loving and benevolent God would have set up. Now, obviously that raises huge questions because we don’t see any evidence of a world that was harmonious. We only see evidence of a world that was at war with itself, and that obviously is the problem that Christian theologians face. For a long time I used to believe that the Genesis narratives paint a picture of a world completely at peace, completely harmonious until the human fall, and then something goes wrong. When I began to look at it more closely, I began to think that there is more to it than that. There is evidence from the text that things are already dislocated, already out of joint. For one thing, there is the serpent, and however you interpret the serpent, here is a bit of the created order that is actively talking against God, working against God—so there is already something that has gone wrong. Secondly, there is the command to fill the earth and subdue it. There is the suggestion that something needs to be subdued, something is not quite right that needs to be put right and humans beings are called to do that—to put it right. And thirdly, it is a garden. It is almost as if God has said, ‘Here is a little bit I have done for you, here is a little bit of order and harmony that I have done for you. Now you go and spread that order and that harmony throughout the rest of creation.’ The tragedy is, of course, that human beings don’t do that. Rather than put that right, they make it worse.”

Dr. Alister McGrath: “Clearly Scripture distinguishes humanity from the rest of creation by this idea of the image of God. And that is understood in a number of ways—one of which is relational. Human beings have this God-given capacity to be able to relate to God, which is simply not there for the rest of creation. How do we understand that phrase: the image of God? If we accept the narrative of biological evolution, we have to say that at some point humanity became sufficiently distinguished from the rest of the natural world to be able to have this relationship with God.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “If you have a very finely graded gas tap and you begin to turn it on, initially, there is not enough gas in the air for the gas to ignite. So, you turn it up some more, still nothing, a bit more, still nothing, and a bit more, still nothing. At a particular point, there will be enough gas to air ratio for the thing to ignite. So, you can have a completely smooth, upward development, and yet, you can have something decisive happening at a particular moment. You get an increase in that moral capacity and moral awareness; you get an increase in their relational ability, in their social ability. You get an increase in their tool-making ability. You get an increase in their language. At a particular point there is enough of all that. There is enough relational capacity; there is enough social capacity and moral awareness and spiritual awareness for God to deal with us in a new way: ‘They have enough creativity to reflect the fact that I am the creator. They have enough relational capacity to reflect the fact that I am love. This in some way reflects who I am, and I will stamp my image upon them.’”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “As hominids evolved and became more complex, then self-consciousness, in the sense of projecting our minds into the remote future or past began to dawn in them. And that didn’t bring biological death into the world, because obviously it had been there for millions of years beforehand, but it brought into the world what you might call mortality. Because our ancestors were self-conscious, they knew they were going to die. Because they had turned away from God, they had alienated themselves to the only one who was the ground for the hope of a destiny beyond death. And so, mortality, meaning the sadness, the human sadness at transiency and decay dawned in human life. Another very subtle feature of the Genesis 3 story is that it is a fall upwards as people would sometimes say. It is the gaining of some knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, the story says. And so, the dawning of self-consciousness is also the gaining of something that wasn’t there before. What the serpent whispers in Eve’s ear is, ‘eat this fruit, and you will be like God. You won’t need God anymore. You can do it yourself.’ That is the fundamental sin, the fundamental mistake in human life is believing that we can do it on our own, doing it my way, and spiritual death is to deliberately and persistently cut yourself off from that. It doesn’t occur as an angry God giving you a punishment for not falling into line. It is simply that you have punished yourself. You know, preachers sometimes say that the gates of hell are locked from the inside not to keep the creatures in, but to keep God out. And that, I think in the end, is what spiritual death is if you persist in it. But God is always, I am sure, at work, seeking to draw people back into the divine love. I think that is the work that is necessary to understand what Paul is getting at in Romans 5 when he says that death came into the world through one man. The cost of development is a degree of precariousness. The people need the grace of God if we truly are to live fulfilling lives.”

Dr. Thompson responded that while the essence of Sin is ultimately mysterious, he suggests that there are some ways to think about Sin in the language of interpersonal neurobiology.

On the other hand, Dr. Smith found the wisdom of St. Augustine in The Confessions quite helpful—The essence of Sin is loving the wrong things in the wrong ways. It’s a disordered love.

We need to have an account of Sin in terms of habit. A lot of Christians today think of “sins” and discreet choices, but historically Christians have thought of Sin as a habitual tendency and disordering. It is formed over time—that’s what a vice is. Virtue and sanctification require ongoing re-habituation, a counter-formation of our inclinations.

Dr. Thompson followed up with a reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and noted that people who are really good at what they do generally acquire it through lots of practice. Thompson then asked the audience, “How are we, in an embodied way, going to practice Christianity for 10,000 hours?”

We hope you have enjoyed this video series. If you'd like to learn more, we encourage you to read Curt Thompson's The Anatomy of the Soul and James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Dr. Smith also has a new book coming out this winter entitled Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. ]]> Fri, 05 Oct 12 04:00:00 -0700 Curt Thompson, Smith, James K.A. http://biologos.org/blog/series/decoding-encode-series?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/decoding-encode-series?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The BioLogos Foundation explains to the findings of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project and responds to the claims that its discoveries challenge the theory of evolution, especially regarding so-called "junk DNA". In 2003, under the leadership of BioLogos founder Francis Collins, the Human Genome Project sequenced the full human genome, showing us for the first time the order of the 3.2 billion chemical “bases” that make up the rungs of DNA’s double helix structure. The project identified and mapped 23,000 genes that code for proteins, but those genes make up less than 2% of the total sequence—far fewer than originally predicted, given the complexity of humans. While many non-coding sequences were identified as having function as well, there were still vast swaths of the genome that had no obvious function. In fact, what was known about certain classes of sequences suggested that they had no functional role for humans—such as the sequences identified as either transposons or transposon fragments that make up nearly half of our genome. These sorts of sequences seemed to fit into what was popularly known as the “junk DNA” category.

With the complete genome sequence in hand, we knew the sequence and location of our genes, but what we didn’t know was how all those genes are regulated: how do the trillions of cells in our bodies know when to turn on or off all those genes? How do the hundreds of distinct cell types develop and function together, when they are all running on the same DNA “operating system?”

That’s where the ENCODE (short for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project comes in. Launched in September 2003, shortly after the announced completion of the Human Genome Project, the goal of the ENCODE project is “to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome, including elements that act at the protein and RNA levels, and regulatory elements that control cells and circumstances in which a gene is active.” In other words, the project seeks to understand how the genome “works.”

Early this month, researchers from ENCODE released more than thirty papers presenting their findings. During a Science magazine online chat, the project’s data coordinator, Ewan Birney, explained the outcome:

The ENCODE project aimed to start our understanding of how the human genome works. We know that (nearly) all the information that determines a human is in the genome, as we all start off as single cell with this DNA. However, we had a patchy understanding of how it works, in particular away from protein coding genes.

To work out how the genome works, we used the fact there are many tiny machines (proteins and RNA - RNA is very like DNA) in each of our cells which know how to "read" parts of the genome. By monitoring where these little molecular machines are on the genome, or how parts of the DNA are copied into RNA (there are quite a few different types of RNA as well), we start to gain some insight into the genome.

We did many such experiments, across different cell types (eg, one cell type was very similar to a liver cell type; another was very similar to a white blood cell). This way not only can we see what is similar, we can also see differences between these cell types.

There is a lot more to get to know and understand here - this is definitely closer to the start than the end. But it is a substantial amount of data, and analysis, to start on this journey.

According to the abstract of one of the lead papers from Nature, this extraordinary glut of data “enabled us to assign biochemical functions for 80% of the genome, in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions.” Only 2% of the genome codes for proteins, but 80% or more has some biochemical function. As a Science news article put it, these 30 papers “sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases.”

The pro-Intelligent Design organization The Discovery Institute has heralded the discovery as the “demise of junk DNA.” Casey Luskin writes for their blog Evolution News:

Let's simply observe that it provides a stunning vindication of the prediction of intelligent design that the genome will turn out to have mass functionality for so-called "junk" DNA. ENCODE researchers use words like "surprising" or "unprecedented." They talk about of how "human DNA is a lot more active than we expected." But under an intelligent design paradigm, none of this is surprising. In fact, it is exactly what ID predicted.

The extent to which the ENCODE project been able to identify function has been surprising—even exhilarating—though scientists have for some time been getting glimpses of the many ways in which segments of DNA can be “active.” Even in 1970 biologists knew that some non-coding DNA had function, and by 2003 there was a large body of work demonstrating that many non-coding elements acted as promoters, enhancers, insulators, and so on. Indeed, in recent years many have come to appreciate the fact that “junk” was never really an appropriate metaphor in the first place. Still, because sequencing of multiple genomes has shed such extraordinary light on key evolutionary mechanisms, many geneticists have focused on function primarily in terms of which regions do or do not contribute to the evolutionary fitness of their host, rather than whether they were merely "doing something" biochemically. What the impressive ENCODE project has done is open a treasure trove of new information that can only accelerate the pace at which researchers are able to explore the incredible subtlety and complexity of DNA, and refine the very concept of “functionality.”

So with all this in mind, is ENCODE a stunning victory for ID, as Luskin believes? Bryan College biologist Todd Wood thinks not. He writes, “I don't think that function equates to design, nor do I think that design requires or predicts function. They're not the same thing… my understanding of function does not require me to hypothesize God (or an anonymous designer, if you must) as the proximal cause.”

We agree. Indeed we would go on to say that evolution and design are not mutually exclusive. So while finding function is not sufficient to prove design, recognizing that function has arisen by way of evolution does not indicate that God was not at work. We at BioLogos believe God providentially works out his purposes—his designs—through the elegant processes of evolution, not in opposition to them.

Amazing as the new data are, it only strengthens and enhances our evidence for evolution. While much of the genome is “doing something” biochemically, it is still likely that the majority of the sequence is evolutionarily neutral (Senior Fellow Dennis Venema discusses the evidence for this “neutrality” in a post on our site, including a striking comparison between 29 different mammal genomes and the human genome). In fact, another ENCODE researcher participating in the Science magazine chat, John A. Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington School of Medicine, thinks the findings align beautifully with evolutionary theory:

ENCODE's data provide a unique and powerful window through which to view evolutionary change. We can see those changes directly by lining up the genome sequences of many different organisms -- these line-ups have revealed millions of regions where all the genomes agree, indicating sequences that have been specially preserved by evolution while others have decayed away (ie freely changed their letter codes). We now see that a large proportion of these 'conserved' regions are lighted up by ENCODE annotations, indicating that they are marking spots in the genome that contain important instructions for cell function.

We’ve discussed “junk” DNA previously, including a multi-part series by Dennis Venema, and we’ve received many emails over the past few days asking for our comments on the ENCODE findings. On Monday and Tuesday, Dr. Venema will begin to offer his own thoughts on ENCODE.

A special thanks goes to Darrel Falk, Mark Sprinkle, Kathryn Applegate, Dennis Venema, and Tom Burnett for their contributions to this post.

Last time I introduced the idea that a Christocentric theology of creation is one of the hallmarks of Theistic Evolution, and I focused on the idea of the “Crucified God.” But the scientist-theologians who write about TE also think about creation and theodicy in terms of divine “kenosis” and eschatology. So today we’ll conclude our “implications” section by returning to creational theology, and then turn to the ways TEs re-think Adam and Eve in light of human evolution.

Kenosis, theodicy and eschatology

John Polkinghorne and others, citing Philippians 2:7, like to speak about divine “kenosis”, God’s choice to “empty himself” in taking on human form; they apply this also to the act of creating the world in a great work of self-sacrificial love. Although Wikipedia gives much information about the roots of this doctrine in Orthodox and Catholic circles, my knowledge is minimal and I cannot confirm what I find there (though it might all be correct). According to a theologian I once consulted, kenosis in soteriology was discussed by Lutherans in the 17th century (if not perhaps even earlier, by others), but was only extended to theology of creation in recent decades. The most I can say with confidence is this: one of the most striking features of Protestant thought about nature, during and since the Scientific Revolution, is the degree to which it is not Christocentric in the sense we are now discussing. In much Protestant and Evangelical literature devoted to the topic of creation, one often looks in vain even for references to Jesus, let alone to Jesus as the suffering servant through whom the world was made,. Only in the latter part of the 20th century do I find a clear emphasis on the idea that nature is the creation of the God who put aside power and was crucified. If this understanding is correct, then I would say that it’s high time, and let’s get on with it!

TEs (especially Polkinghorne) are also in the forefront of those Christian writers who are linking theodicy inextricably with eschatology. Yet another scientist-theologian, Robert Russell, offers this powerful eschatological vision in Cosmology From Alpha to Omega, drawing on all of the main ideas I’ve presented in this section:

[I]n order to move us beyond mere kenosis to genuine eschatology, I believe that both kenotic theology and eschatology must be structured on a trinitarian doctrine of God. The reason here is simple: it is the trinitarian God who will act to bring about the redemption of all of nature since it is this God who is revealed as God in and through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. A kenotic theodicy (that God suffers voluntarily with the world) in and of itself is not redemptive. Eschatology is required, in which the Father who suffers the death of the Son acts anew at Easter to raise Jesus from the dead. In turn, the involuntary suffering of all of nature--each species and each individual creature--must be taken up into the voluntary suffering of Christ on the cross (theopassionism) and through it the voluntary suffering of the Father (patripassionism).(p. 266)

George MacDonald (source)

Because this series is primarily focused on the history of approaches to understanding Science and the Bible, I will not delve more deeply into these important theological issues, but only direct readers to resources such as these. Still, I close this section with a quotation from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, the same passage that C. S. Lewis used in abbreviated form as an epigram for The Problem of Pain:

“the Son of God, who, instead of accepting the sacrifice of one of his creatures to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly unto them, and therein to the Father by doing his lovely will; who suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his, and lead them up to his perfection...”

Adam, the fall, and sin

(5) TEs have to confront questions about human origins that are much easier for OECs or YECs to answer: Did Adam and Eve really exist as historical persons? Was the “fall” an actual historical event? If not, what is the origin of sin?

Michelangelo Buonarroti, “The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” Cappella Sistina, Vatican (1509-10)

My comments here are much briefer, but I don’t mean to imply that the questions are any less important than the one I’ve just dealt with. Polkinghorne does not hold a traditional view of the fall, but he likes Reinhold Niebuhr’s view “that original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine!” (Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 88) This reminds me of G. K. Chesterton, who famously remarked, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved” (Orthodoxy, chap. 2). In other words, anyone who doubts the idea that we are “fallen” creatures simply needs to look around—that is all the evidence of our strong bent to wickedness that you’ll ever need.

There are ways to finesse the fall and evolution in a quasi-concordistic manner, such as the “headship” model advocated by Denis Alexander. Others reject any appeal to Concordism, stressing the principle of divine accommodation. For example, Denis Lamoureux argues that in the revelatory process the Holy Spirit came down to the level of understanding of the ancient Hebrews and used their ancient conception of de novo creation, in which humans were created quickly and completely. Thus, in Genesis chapters 2 and 3, Adam and Eve are ancient vessels that deliver the inerrant spiritual truths that God created us and that we are sinners.

The views that have received the most attention among evangelicals, however, are probably those of biblical scholar Peter Enns, particularly his new book, The Evolution of Adam. Instead of trying to summarize them myself, I’ll link his discussion of “Mistakes in the Adam/Evolution Discussion”, since it parallels some of the content in the book. Also see his replies to some evangelical scholars who have been critical of the book.

One of the most original and thoughtful proposals I have seen comes from philosopher Robin Collins (for bibliographical information on this and the other works cited in the rest of this column, see below). Collins calls his model the “Historical/Ideal” view, because “the original state described in the Garden story represents an ideal state that was never realized,” showing “what an ideal relation with God would be like.” Adam and Eve represent every person who has ever lived, but they also represent “the first hominids, or group of hominids, who had the capacity for free choice and self-consciousness.” Just as the first hominids made sinful choices, so do we now, and original sin involves “the resulting bondage to sin and spiritual darkness that is inherited from our ancestors and generated by our own choices.” I can’t convey the subtlety and thoroughness of this account in a short space, so those who want to know more will have to read for themselves. Conveniently, Collins provides a link to a “near final version” of his paper on his web site. If someone wants to summarize his arguments in a few paragraphs below, it would be a real service to our “course.”

Problems with historicity

(6) Questions about the historicity of Adam & Eve are underscored by evolution, but they would still come up even if Darwin had never existed and no one had ever proposed that humans and other animals have common ancestors. The Bible places Adam & Eve in a Neolithic world, with cities and agriculture, whereas non-biological scientific evidence shows that humans existed for a very long time before cities or agriculture came into existence.

Read that again. It’s a crucial point. Far too many people believe—erroneously—that evolution is responsible for undermining the historicity of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden. In fact, the relevant science here is almost entirely from anthropology, not biology, and it involves human antiquity, not common ancestry. Since the mid-nineteenth century, evidence has been building that creatures anatomically and behaviorally identical to us have been on this planet for a very long time, far longer than the biblical 6,000 years. We could leave Darwin and evolution entirely out of the picture, and we would still be having a conversation about the historicity of Genesis 2 and 3. The same issues pertain to any OEC scenario. Most proponents of ID can’t duck this, either, even though they get to say “officially” that ID isn’t about the Bible. Because most ID proponents are not YECs, they accept the general validity of the methods used to date rocks and fossils, and so (by implication) this is their problem, too, whether or not it’s acknowledged.

To illustrate my point historically, let me introduce readers to George Frederick Wright (read more here and here). Ronald Numbers, the leading historian of American religion and science, wrote a clear, detailed article about this (see the reference below) that I strongly recommend to anyone who’s interest has been piqued. An influential Congregationalist clergyman and theologian, Wright was mentored by Harvard botanist Asa Gray, served briefly under Thomas C. Chamberlin on the U. S. Geological Survey, and even contributed articles on early humans and the ice age—his specialty—to scientific journals. During the 1870s, he worked closely with Gray to promote what is usually seen as a type of Theistic Evolution. By the early twentieth century, however, he appeared in some of his writings to have almost completely reversed his views on evolution. He even contributed an essay on “The Passing of Evolution” to the famous pamphlets, The Fundamentals, that later gave its name to that movement.

In other writings, however, Wright seemed to remain convinced of evolution, at one point saying that, “it is difficult to resist the conclusion that, so far as his physical organism is concerned, man is genetically connected with the highest order of the Mammalia.” Whatever he really thought about common ancestry—whether he was really a TE, an OEC, or an ID (one could make a good case for each)—the question of human antiquity dogged Wright for decades, as he sought ways to reconcile the genealogies in Genesis with accumulating evidence that humans have existed much longer than 6,000 years. Fortunately for Wright’s Christian faith, which probably hung in the balance, the famous Princeton theologian Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, together with the conservative biblical scholar William Henry Green, managed to persuade Wright that the Genesis genealogies had plenty of wiggle room. Anyone wanting to see the crucial details should read Green’s paper on “Primeval Chronology” at this point. Note Warfield’s own conclusion (same URL): “There is no reason inherent in the nature of the Scriptural genealogies why a genealogy of ten recorded links, as each of those in Genesis v. and xi. is, may not represent an actual descent of a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand links.”

Can this really be true, without straining the whole idea of historicity? Davis Young’s skepticism seems appropriate here. How far back can we place Adam and Eve and still have contact with the biblical period? In my opinion, a clear and convincing picture of an historical Adam and Eve, reconciling the biblical picture with human antiquity, has not yet been produced, and I am doubtful that we will ever have one. Those who want more information about the possibilities and the difficulties are invited to consult the articles (cited below) by anthropologist James Hurd, evolutionary biologist David Wilcox, and anthropologist Dean Arnold. To the best of my knowledge, Hurd and Wilcox are TEs, while Arnold is an OEC. It’s up to you, my “students,” to consult these sources and place summaries and comments below. I’ve done enough already.

Looking Ahead

In about two weeks, I’ll conclude with a short history of Theistic Evolution. There’s plenty to think about in the interval. Please follow some of these links, borrow some of these books, and add your views to mine.

Citations

Dean Arnold, “How Do Scientific Views on Human Origins Relate to the Bible?” in Not Just Science, edited by Dorothy F. Chappell & E. David Cook (Zondervan, 2005), 129-40.

Robin Collins, “Evolution and Original Sin,” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, edited by Keith B. Miller (Eerdmans, 2003), 469-501.

James P. Hurd, “Hominids in the Garden?” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, 208-33.

Ronald L. Numbers, “George Frederick Wright: From Christian Darwinist to Fundamentalist,” Isis 79 (1988): 624–45.

David Wilcox, “Finding Adam: The Genetics of Human Origins,” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, 234-53.

The Denisovans, an extinct hominid group that interbred with modern humans, made the news again lately with the publication of a more detailed study of their genome. One of the many interesting findings was that the Denisovans share the same chromosome 2 fusion that modern humans have. In this post, I review what we know about the origins of human chromosome 2, and then discuss the new Denisovan findings and their implications.

The origins of human chromosome 2: a brief review

Though I have discussed the evidence for a fusion event leading to human chromosome 2 before, perhaps a brief review of the evidence is in order. The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes (for a total of 46 chromosomes). This makes us something of an oddity among living great apes, all the rest of whom have 24 pairs of chromosomes (for a total of 48). Given that there are many independent lines of evidence that support the conclusion that we share a common ancestor with other great apes, this poses something of a conundrum: how is it that our species arrived at this specific chromosome number? If we were to represent this “problem” on a phylogeny, or tree of relatedness, it would look something like this (not to scale):

Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, both have 48 chromosomes, as do all other great apes such as gorillas and orangutans. This pattern has one of two explanations, one of which is much more likely than the other. Either the common ancestor to these species had 48 chromosomes, and there was an event that reduced that number to 46 specifically on the lineage leading to humans (option A), or the common ancestor species had 46 chromosomes, and there were independent, repeated events that increased chromosome number in all other great ape species (option B). We can compare these options by placing the required event(s) on the phylogeny (again, not to scale):

It should be obvious that the option that requires the fewest events is the more likely one – in this case option A with an event that reduces chromosome number in the lineage leading to humans. The other option, that of repeated, independent events to increase chromosome number, remains a formal, but unlikely, possibility. Events that reduce chromosome number are not frequent occurrences, so Option A is more likely than Option B.

We can also find further support for Option A, because it predicts a specific type of event, namely one that reduces chromosome number. Since loss of a large amount of chromosomal material is almost always detrimental, we need an event that reduces chromosome number without losing information. One way for this to happen is for two chromosomes to fuse together and become one. Initially, this event would produce an individual with 47 chromosomes, where two different chromosomes get stuck together. Contrary to what is often assumed, this individual would be fertile and able to interbreed with the others in his or her population (who continue to have 48 chromosomes). In a small population, over time, two relatives who both have one copy of the fusion chromosome may mate and produce some progeny with two copies of the fused chromosome, or the first individuals with 46 chromosomes. Since either a 48-pair set or a 46-pair set is preferable for ease of cell division, this population will either eventually get rid of the fusion variant (the most likely outcome), or by chance will switch over completely to the “new” form, with everyone bearing 46 chromosome pairs. While not overly likely, this type of event is not especially rare in mammals, and we have observed this sort of thing happening within recorded human history in other species. Some mammalian species even maintain distinct populations in the wild with differing chromosome numbers due to fusions, and these populations retain the ability to interbreed.

Further evidence for a fusion event in the lineage leading to modern humans comes from comparing synteny, or gene locations and orders on chromosomes within modern great apes – an issue we have discussed here before. In brief, what we see in human chromosome 2 is exactly what we would predict for a fusion event. When compared to other great apes, we see the genes on human chromosome 2 match up, in order, with two smaller ape chromosomes. We also see that sequences used at the tips of chromosomes are present at the proposed fusion site, and that human chromosome 2 has not one but two sites for the cell cytoskeleton to attach to for cell division – but that one of the sites is mutated and not functional, though it lines up precisely with the location of this site on the appropriate ape chromosome. Together, this evidence consistently supports both common ancestry for humans and great apes, and specifically that the difference we see in our chromosome numbers arose due to a single fusion event. I briefly discussed this evidence in my last post where I describe how I teach some of this material and the compelling impact it has on students exploring the evolution question for the first time.

Enter the Denisovans

With that as background, we are now prepared to appreciate a new finding that comes from genomics work done on the Denisovan hominids, an archaic species that is more closely related to Neanderthals than to us, but that nonetheless interbred with some anatomically modern humans as they migrated out of Africa and populated the globe. (For those not familiar with the Denisovans, or the evidence for our interbreeding with them, both Darrel Falk and I have written on this previously, here and here). Recently, a more detailed understanding of the Denisovan genome was published, and nested in the new information is the discovery that the Denisovans share the 46 chromosome set with the same fusion that we have. This strongly supports the hypothesis that the fusion event predates the separation of our species. If we were to represent this on a phylogeny, we can now place this event with more accuracy than before (as before, the phylogeny is not to scale):

Despite this new information, one obvious question remains. Did the Neanderthals also have the 46-pair set? From looking at the phylogeny above, we can see that the most likely answer is that they did, since the fact that the Denisovans had it strongly implies that the last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals / Denisovans had it as well, and the Neanderthal-Denisovan split comes later. While the Denisovan DNA samples are of high enough quality to make this assessment, we do not yet have Neanderthal DNA of high enough quality to do the same analysis with current methods (though one additional feature of the new work on the Denisovan genome is developing more sensitive DNA sequencing techniques that may resolve this question in the future).

In other words, this fusion seems to be an ancient one, predating our species by several hundred thousand years. Present estimates of the last common ancestor between humans and Neanderthals / Denisovans range at about 800,000 years ago.

Implications for understanding our “becoming human”

The main implication from this work is that it places the fusion event well before the advent of our species. I’ve often chatted informally with Christians about evolution, and at times some have thought that this fusion event was what “started” our species, or made our species unable to interbreed with other groups. Some have even suggested that perhaps the fusion event was what produced the first human (i.e. Adam).

Note that thinking this way suggests a misunderstanding of how chromosome fusions occur and what effect they have on their hosts. A fusion does not precipitate a speciation event, but rather the individual with the fusion remains a part of his or her population, and able to interbreed, even if with reduced fertility. Also, there is no necessary biological effect or change that the fusion produces on the appearance of the organism. These misunderstandings aside, however,what this new evidence shows is that this fusion event took place long before modern humans arose at around 200,000 years ago. Indeed, the 800,000 years ago date for the last human - Denisovan common ancestor means that this is the most recent date possible for the fusion. While it is an interesting piece of our evolutionary history, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we came to acquire the traits that set us apart from, and ultimately outcompete, other similar species.

Darwin’s finches are some of the most visible and recognizable symbols of evolution in the world today. Biology textbooks feature them prominently, and the National Academy of Sciences has enshrined them in the entrance of their headquarters in Washington, DC. Surely the finches that Darwin collected on the Galápagos islands were a central feature of his evolutionary theory, right?

Lobby of The National Academies Building. Courtesy of CPNAS. Photo by Robert Lautman

Actually, the Galápagos finches are never even mentioned in Darwin’s famous work On the Origin of Species. Nor do they appear in Darwin’s famous notebooks on “Transmutation of Species”, in which he formulated the idea of evolution by natural selection.¹ Even Darwin’s private diary of his voyage on the HMS Beagle only mentions the Galápagos finches briefly in passing.²

It was only in 1845, in the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle, that Darwin included a tantalizing sentence about the Galápagos finches:

Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.³

However insightful this statement may have been, Darwin never published anything else about the Galápagos finches for the rest of his life. Nor did he publically present these birds as direct evidence for this theory of evolution.⁴

If these finches were so important to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, why did he remain silent about them? One of his comments in The Voyage of the Beagle provides us with a clue:

Unfortunately most of the specimens of the finch tribe were mingled together; but I have strong reasons to suspect that some of the species of the subgroup Geospiza are confined to separate islands.⁵

When Darwin was exploring the Galápagos himself in 1835, he had not formulated his theory of evolution yet, and thus he did know what data would be necessary to make definitive conclusions about finch evolution. In particular, he did not keep careful track of which of his specimens came from which islands. Moreover, as was customary among naturalists at that time, Darwin only collected a small number specimens—he brought home only 31 finches and 64 total birds from the Galápagos.⁶

Though Darwin sensed that these birds were truly special, he lacked sufficient evidence to reach any specific conclusions about their evolutionary origins. It would be up to the rest of the scientific community to carry out the necessary empirical research. Subsequent expeditions in 1868, 1891, 1897, and 1905 brought back thousands of Galápagos finch specimens, but instead of unlocking the mysteries of evolutionary theory, the Galápagos finches became a great enigma.⁷

A century after Darwin's voyage, scientists still struggled to explain the staggering variety of finches on this tiny, remote archipelago. By the mid-1930’s, British Museum ornithologist Percy Lowe argued that the finches presented a "biological problem of first class importance", and he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the finches displayed a "bewildering diversity, intergradation, and distribution".⁸ Who would be up to the challenge of making sense of such tremendous biological complexity? It was David Lack.

David Lack

Ornithologist David Lack

David Lack had an exceptionally keen eye for bird-watching, and he possessed a passion to match it. By age 15, he had already observed 100 distinct species of birds, and before entering college, authored his first scientific paper. At Cambridge University in the early 1930’s, Lack was disappointed to find that his zoology professors taught “nothing about evolution, ecology, behavior or genetics, and of course nothing about birds.”⁹ In fact, at that time, there were only two professional ornithologists in all of Britain!

Thus David Lack took it upon himself to create his own learning opportunities. As an undergraduate, he became the president of the Cambridge Ornithological Club, traveled to Greenland for a bird-watching expedition, and cultivated a relationship with the prominent biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley). Huxley was an inspiring mentor and encouraged Lack to expand his research further by studying tropical birds.¹⁰ Following this advice, Lack embarked on a research trip to Tanzania in the summer of 1934, but his greatest adventure was yet to come.

In 1937, Lack became fascinated by the scientific mysteries surrounding the Galápagos finches. But in order to study their behavior, Lack would need to travel to remote islands halfway around the world. How could he possibly get there? Once again, Julian Huxley was tremendously supportive and raised funds from two prominent scientific societies to pay for his expedition. After a long delay, David Lack and five companions finally set off on their journey.

Instead of residing in comfortable quarters aboard a royal naval ship, Lack’s group subsisted on a shoestring budget, traveled on commercial steamers, and stayed with local settlers. Their experience was definitely not a romantic tale of imperial expedition:

The Galápagos are interesting, but scarcely a residential paradise. The biological peculiarities are offset by an enervating climate, monotonous scenery, dense thorn scrub, cactus spines, loose sharp lava, food deficiencies, water shortage, black rats, fleas, jiggers, ants, mosquitoes, scorpions, Ecuadorian Indians of doubtful honesty, and dejected, disillusioned European settlers.¹¹

Whereas Charles Darwin spent only nineteen days on the shores of the Galápagos, Lack and his crew conducted more than five months of meticulous and exhausting study in the harsh climate. At that time, even the finches themselves provided little solace. Lack wrote,

Darwin’s finches are dull to look at, not only in their orderly ranks in museum trays, but also when they hop about the ground or perch in the trees of the Galápagos, making dull unmusical noises. Only the variety of their beaks and the number of their species excite attention.¹²

Large Cactus Finch on Española Island in the Galápagos Islands

The repetitive tedium requisite for important scientific discoveries is rarely discussed in public, and even today many bright-eyed science students become disillusioned by the painstaking work demanded by their Ph.D. programs. But one of the things that distinguishes great scientists is their unwavering commitment and tenacity in completing major projects. David Lack's efforts were not in vain:

"Despite his personal discomforts (or perhaps because of them), Lack did see something on the Galápagos that no one had ever seen before—natural selection at work among its finches through interspecies competition." ¹³

When the birds’ breeding season ended in 1939, Lack was ready to return to his home in England. But the captive finches that he had brought with him fared so badly on the voyage home that he detoured to San Francisco and put them in the care of the California Academy of Sciences. Turning this mishap into an opportunity, Lack stayed there for five additional months to study the Academy’s enormous collection of Galápagos finch specimens.¹⁴

To complete his systematic research, Lack then travelled across the United States to study the Galápagos finch collection housed at the American Museum in New York.¹⁵ Altogether, Lack examined more than 8000 specimens and specifically measured the length, width, and depth of all their beaks.¹⁶

Lack’s final obstacle was in getting his research published. Though he completed his academic manuscript “The Galápagos Finches—A Study in Variation” in 1940, paper shortages during World War II delayed its publication by the California Academy of Sciences until 1945. Were he only interested in making an original contribution to science, Lack could have stopped here and congratulated himself on a job well-done. However, his motivation sprung from a deeper source:

David Lack's drawing of 14 species of Galápagos finches, p. 19 of Darwin’s Finches

"I did not watch birds primarily for scientific reasons but for sheer enjoyment, and from the age of 15 onward returned day after day in a glow of excitement after seeing a new bird or a new habit." ¹⁷

Lack’s joyful fascination with the Galápagos finches inspired him to continue developing his conclusions long after returning from his expedition. While waiting for his academic paper to be published, he began writing a book that would enable students and the general public to share his excitement about these remarkable birds and the evolutionary processes that shaped them.

First published in 1947, Lack’s book became tremendously influential. Before this time, biology textbooks had never even mentioned the Galápagos finches. But after David Lack’s study, the finches became a primary example of evolution by natural selection, specifically adaptive radiation. Not only did textbooks fully rely on Lack’s findings, they also followed his lead in calling them “Darwin’s finches”, the title of Lack’s famous book.¹⁸

Iconic Finches

What was it about these birds that made them such a prominent symbol of evolution? As Darwin himself pointed out, the numerous Galápagos finch populations each have distinctive beaks, and he speculated that they could have evolved from an ancestral species that came to the islands. But a complete picture of finch evolution would have to wait another hundred years, when David Lack arrived.

During his five months on the Galápagos, including both the rainy and dry seasons, Lack observed that these beak differences enable the finches to subsist on different kinds of food:

The beak differences between most of the genera and subgenera of Darwin's finches are clearly correlated with differences in feeding methods. This is well borne out by the heavy, finch-like beak of the seed-eating Geospiza, the long beak of the flower-probing Cactornis, the somewhat parrot-like beak of the leaf, bud, and fruit-eating Platyspiza, the woodpecker-like beak of the woodboring Catcospiza, and the warbler-like beaks of the insect-eating certhidea and Pinaroloxias.¹⁹

Lack's image of beak adaptations from Darwin’s Finches

Specializing in such different sources of food enables these finches to live in close proximity without directly competing with each other or driving populations to extinction. The fact that so many of these closely related finches are able to co-exist is a remarkable fact in itself. As Lack himself put it, “It is not only the origin, but also the persistence, of new species which require explanation.”²⁰

But it is also fascinating to consider how these birds got to be so different in the first place. How did a finch come to have a beak like a “parrot”, “woodpecker”, or “warbler”? The answer lies in the distinct characteristics of the Galápagos. Because the islands are so remote, no actual parrots, woodpeckers, or warblers ever settled on it. In the absence of these species, the Galápagos finches were able to adopt feeding habits and forms that they would never have taken on a large continent full of other birds competing for food. The isolation of these islands offered just the right conditions for us to see living examples of adaptive radiation.²¹

Conclusion

Considering the immense popularity of the Galápagos finches, it is quite surprising to learn that Charles Darwin himself had so little to say about them. In fact, it was actually David Lack, one century later, who conducted the critical research that immortalized the finches in biology textbooks and popular lore. By naming his landmark book Darwin’s Finches,²² Lack paid homage to the man whose voyage on the HMS Beagle helped transform the study of natural history. But at the same time, Lack also obscured the fact that evolutionary biology is an enterprise conducted by a large community of brilliant scholars, not just the product of one man’s efforts.

This tendency to immortalize “great men of science” has also led many people to refer to modern evolutionary theory as Darwinism, despite the fact that it has substantially changed and developed over the past 150 years. It is important to give credit where credit is due, and if that’s the case, we should seriously reconsider how we refer to the Galapagos finches. Evolutionary biologist Dolph Schluter, who studied the finches several decades after David Lack, had this to say:

I find Lack's intuition really stunning given how little information he had. He's my hero actually… They should be called Lack's finches.²³

In the second part of this series, we’ll explore the fact that David Lack, in addition to being a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, was also a devout Christian. His study of evolutionary theory did not cause him to lose his faith; in fact, he actually converted to Christianity after completing his Galápagos finch research.

For Discussion

Further Reading

• Grant, Peter R.; Grant, B. Rosemary. How and Why Species Multiply: The Radiation of Darwin's Finches, Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Sulloway, Frank J. (Spring 1982), "Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend" (PDF), Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1): 1–53.
• Weiner, Jonathon. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Vintage Books, 1995.

Notes

1. Sulloway, F. (1983). "Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend." Journal of the history of biology 15(1): 32. Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation mentioned Galapagos tortoises and mockingbirds, not finches.
2. Lack, David. Darwin’s Finches. Cambridge University Press, 1947: 9. Confirmed by Sulloway (1983), p5.
3. Darwin, Charles. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world. London: John Murray. 2d ed. 1845: 379-80. This edition of the book also contained the drawings of four different finches that have become enshrined in biology textbooks and on the walls of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.
4. Sulloway, p35. Sulloway points out that the first published evolutionary account of the Galapagos finches was not until 1876, by Osbert Salvin: "On the Avifauna of the Galapagos Archipelago." Trans. Zool. Soc. London, 9:447-51.
5. Darwin (1845), p395.
6. Sulloway, p40.
7. Sulloway, p40.
8. Larson, E. J. Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York, Basic Books, 2001: 166-67.
9. Lack, David. (1973) “My life as an amateur ornithologist.” Ibis: 424.
10. Lack (1973), 425-27.
11. Lack (1947), p1.
12. Lack (1947), p11.
13. Larson, 167-68.
14. The California Academy of Sciences sponsored an expedition to the Galapagos in 1905-06 and collected nearly 9000 Galapagos finch specimens (Sulloway, p40).
15. In New York, Lack roomed with the curator of the finch collection—German émigré zoologist Ernst Mayr. By developing this relationship, Lack had close ties with two of the biggest figures in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Julian Huxley and Ernst Mayr (Larson, 168).
16. Larson, p168.
17. Lack (1973), p424.
18. Larson, p198.
19. Lack (1947), p60.
20. Lack (1947), p158.
21. See Lack’s concluding chapter on “Adaptive Radiation”, pp146-159 of Darwin’s Finches (1947).
22. British ornithologist Percy Lowe originally proposed the name “Darwin’s finches” in 1935, but the name did not catch on until Lack used it in his book. See P.R. Lowe, (1936) "The Finches of the Galapagos in Relation to Darwin's Conception of Species." Ibis, 13th ser., 6:310-321. (Cited in Larson, p287)
23. Schluter, in an interview with Edward Larson, 16 March 2000.

Eugene Dubois

13 years before, in 1877, Dubois had arrived in Amsterdam to study medicine, but always harboring a desire to study the ancestry of modern humans. So, after four years at the University there, he accepted an invitation to go to the University of Utrecht to study comparative anatomy and devote himself to the latest thinking about the origins of the human species. It was during his time at Utrecht (from 1881 to 1887) that Dubois became enamored of Haeckel’s views on human origins, which differed from those of Darwin. While Darwin argued that humans had evolved in Africa, the region in which our closest living relatives—the chimpanzees and gorillas—still live, Haeckel believed that the origins of humanity lay in East Asia. This was so, he believed, because of his own observations of gibbons that walk bipedally when on the ground.

Haeckel also believed that there had once been a large landmass called Lemuria between the continents of Africa and Asia. In his view, Lemuria had since become submerged, leaving the modern islands of Madagascar and the East Indies as its only remains. The idea of submerged continents was not unusual for the late 19th-century, as people struggled to understand the character of biological diversity present in the world and why there were such striking similarities between animals that were geographically dispersed. The geographical distribution of marsupial fossils in South America and Australia is an example of this sort of problem, and one that was not solved until the second half of the 20th century when continental drift reconstructions suggested that ancient marsupials had used Antarctica as a conduit between the other two continents. Not only did such theories make sense of modern distributions, they were confirmed with later discoveries of marsupial fossils in Antarctica.

In any case, in 1888 Dubois joined the army and set out for the Dutch East Indies to pursue his ideas. For the next two years, he would comb Sumatra attempting to locate the hominin remains that Haeckel promised would be there. In hindsight, what Dubois was attempting was something that had never been done before: discovery of hominin material through the tools of archaeological excavation. Up to this point, all of the human fossils had been found on the surface, eroding out of the side of a bank, or as a result of farming. It had not occurred to anyone to go looking for human ancestors.

Now, with his supply of prison workers dwindling due to desertion and fever, he had almost run out of options and was on the verge of failure. Using almost all of his remaining resources, he decided to abandon his excavations on Sumatra and turn to the nearby island of Java. Emboldened by the fact that early modern human fossils had been discovered there (at Wadjak), he arrived and settled in at Trinil, on the banks of the Solo River, in 1890.

Figure 1: Dubois' Pithecanthropus erectus

The very next year, Dubois’ long-standing efforts were finally rewarded, first with the discovery of a skullcap (calvaria) of a hominin cranium, and then with an intact femur (Figure 1). Judging by what he knew of cranial anatomy, Dubois estimated that the skull would have been approximately 900 cubic centimeters (cc) in volume, placing it below even the lowest threshold of modern humans. Further, he noticed that it was not like modern humans in shape, being too long and low. He concluded that it showed “evidence of a form intermediate between man and the anthropoid apes” (Dubois, 1896). Dubois envisioned a sequence of forms in which the gibbon gave rise to a form of chimpanzee called Anthropopithecus sivalensis, which then gave rise to the form represented by the Trinil remains, after which Homo sapiens arose (Turner, 1895).

Dubois spent the next twenty years on the road with his find, trying to drum up support for its place in human prehistory. As with Raymond Dart’s discovery of the first australopithecine thirty-three years later, Dubois did not receive a warm reception. Most critics simply said that he had gotten it wrong and that the femur did not belong to the same individual as the obviously-primitive skull cap. Some of the criticism Dubois suffered could have been mitigated had he been more open to sharing the Trinil materials; but, instead, he allowed very little access to the bones, so that very few people knew exactly what they looked like. Adding to Dubois’s credibility problems was the 1911 “discovery” of Piltdown. This intentional hoax turned the paleoanthropology world on its head for forty years, sending researchers down innumerable rabbit holes. As I noted in a previous post, the Piltdown remains made all of the other hominin finds appear too “ape-like” to be on the road to humanity and informed many opinions about finds such as those from Trinil.

On the other hand, some critics of Dubois’ new hominin claim were vicious, and questioned both his academic abilities and his judgment (Shipman & Storm, 2002)—in addition to the interpretation of the find itself. It was in reference to Dubois’ work that the term “Missing Link” was first used with reference to a particular human fossil, originating with Charles Lyell (1863) and describing palaeontological gaps. And ironically, it was in one of the most stinging criticisms of Dubois’ work that the name that would eventually stick was first used: “Homo erectus.” Eventually, many other finds in the same general area and across Southeast Asia demonstrated that what Dubois had found was a real, previously-unknown hominin form, and the first to colonize the Asian continent and the islands leading off towards Oceania.

Homo erectus across South East Asia:

Figure 2: Sangiran 17

Sangiran

The earliest point at which Homo erectus appears to have begun to colonize the greater East Asian region is around 1.8 million years ago, represented first by the partial child’s skull found at the site of Modjokerto, and then, at around 1.66 million years ago, at the site of Sangiran, in Trinil, where Dubois had made his landmark discovery. This site was rich, yielding the remains of many crania, perhaps best represented by Sangiran 17 (Figure 2), an almost complete skull.

The material from the Sangiran site is very diverse morphologically, with some crania having capacities of as little as 700 to 800 cc, and other, larger heads with volumes in the range of 1000 cc. As with the late Homo ergaster finds from Africa, the remains from Sangiran yielded crania that were still widest at their bases, possessing large brow ridges. Some have thick cranial bones and are very robust (Sangiran 4), while others are very gracile (Sangiran 31). What this variation means is not clear, but most workers believe it represents a very diverse diachronic population (that is, one group living and moving around over a long period) rather than separate species inhabiting the area. The Sangiran site yielded fossil material in an almost continuous succession from approximately 1.66 million years ago to less than 800,000 years ago.

Because the area of the excavations—the Sangiran Dome—is a volcanic deposit, the layers have been securely dated by the ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar method, although questions remain about the historical sequence and distribution of other animals that lived there through the ages (its faunal succession). The problem is that many of the fossils were not found in context, and relating them directly to the stratigraphy is tenuous. Despite this, most workers are comfortable with the earliest hominins in the region being at least 1.5 million years old.

One of the things hampering workers in this region is the comparative paucity of recovered stone tools. Those that have been found suggest a technological stage similar to the late Oldowan design, equivalent to that being created by the Homo ergaster populations inhabiting the area of Dmanisi and East Africa. Unfortunately, none of the tools have been associated with the hominins directly so it is not exactly clear who made them.

Figure 3: Sambungmacan 3

Sambungmacan

Another major find from the area where Dubois brought Homo erectus to light is the cranium from the site of Sambungmachan. This skull was reportedly found in 1977 but was then illegally sold to the antiquities market, where is spent considerable time in different collections before being “rediscovered” in 1998—in a New York nature curio shop called Maxilla and Mandible, Inc. (Delson et al., 2001). This was an almost-complete calvaria (Figure 3), with only part of the base missing. It is equivalent in size to the fossils from Sangiran, with a cranial capacity of around 1000 cc. It has a large brow ridge extending all of the way across the top of the eyes, a long, low cranium with a sloping forehead and a maximum width near the cranial base—all features that are also characteristic of the late African H. ergaster and Sangiran crania. Although we will never know exactly how old this cranium is, its morphology is consistent with that of the material from Sangiran.

Figure 4: Ngandong 6

Ngandong

Later in time, but also located on the Solo River, is the site of Ngandong, excavated by Oppenoorth in the early 1930s. At this site, fourteen calvaria have been discovered, all of which show advanced Homo erectus characteristics: long and low in shape, with thick-bones and a distinctive brow-ridge. (Figure 4). As with the other Indonesian finds, dating the Ngandong material has been problematic. The deposits at the site were originally thought to be around 100,000 years old, but this interpretation was turned on its head in 1996, when Swisher and colleagues claimed that the deposits were no older than between 27,000 and 53,000 years old (Swisher et al., 1996). These age estimations were made on the associated fauna, however, and as Rainer Grün and the late Alan Thorne pointed out, the faunal material does not match the skulls either in color or in texture and is likely not from the same time. Recently, Swisher and colleagues revisited the dating of the site and derived internally-consistent dates of at least 143,000 years before the present (Indriati et al., 2011). As with the Trinil remains, however, there are no associated stone tools.

Homo erectus in China

The Chinese Homo erectus material is very widely scattered and working in the region has presented many difficulties for researchers in terms of transport, language barriers and funding. Consequently, we know less about this region and its previous inhabitants than we do about most other areas of the Old World. Although there are between ten and fifteen sites that have yielded Homo erectus material, I will only touch on the most important ones.

Lantian:

Figure 5: Lantian

In the early 1960s, a cranium and mandible were found in the cave of Lantian, Shaanxi province, whose characteristics matched other remains from China designated as Homo erectus. Paleomagnetic dating has yielded a date no earlier than 1.15 million years ago for the skull, with the consensus being that it is around 800,000 years old. A date of approximately 650,000 years before the present was derived for the mandible. The cranium is heavily encrusted and suffered from postmortem deformation (Figure 5). When reconstituted, it was found to have a capacity of around 780 cc (low for Homo erectus) and the bones on the sides of the head are the thickest yet recorded. At this site some flake tools, mammal remains, and an ash deposit were all recovered, suggesting hunting and control of fire.

Figure 5: Hexian

Hexian

Another almost-complete calvaria was found at Longtandong cave in the province of Hé Xiàn, dated to between 400,000 and 500,000 years ago. This find exemplifies typical Homo erectus in many ways in that it is long and low, with heavy muscle markings toward the base and the rear of the skull (Figure 6). The cranial capacity is around 1000 cc, a third-again greater than that of the Lantian calvaria. Its cranial shape is very similar to those found in Southeast Asia, suggesting that it straddles the Southeast Asian and Chinese boundary.

While both Lantian and Hexian were significant finds, another site in China boasted the single largest collection of Homo erectus fossils ever found at one site, as well as presenting one of the greatest mysteries in paleoanthropology. Tomorrow, in the conclusion of our look at Homo erectus in Asia, we’ll peer into the Zhoukoudian caves and consider how this species fits into the lineage of man.

There are two opposite errors which need to be countered about the fossil record: 1) that it is so incomplete as to be of no value in interpreting patterns and trends in the history of life, and 2) that it is so good that we should expect a relatively complete record of the details of evolutionary transitions within all or most lineages.

What then is the quality of the fossil record? It can be confidently stated that only a very small fraction of the species that once lived on Earth have been preserved in the rock record and subsequently discovered and described by science.

There is an entire field of scientific research referred to as "taphonomy" -- literally, "the study of death." Taphonomic research includes investigating those processes active from the time of death of an organism until its final burial by sediment. These processes include decomposition, scavenging, mechanical destruction, transportation, and chemical dissolution and alteration. The ways in which the remains of organisms are subsequently mechanically and chemically altered after burial are also examined -- including the various processes of fossilization. Burial and "fossilization" of an organism's remains in no way guarantees its ultimate preservation as a fossil. Processes such as dissolution and recrystallization can remove all record of fossils from the rock. What we collect as fossils are thus the "lucky" organisms that have avoided the wide spectrum of destructive pre- and post-depositional processes arrayed against them.

Soft-bodied organisms, and organisms with non-mineralized skeletons have very little chance of preservation under most environmental conditions. Until the Cambrian nearly all organisms were soft-bodied, and even today the majority of species in marine communities are soft-bodied. The discovery of new soft-bodied fossil localities is always met with great enthusiasm. These localities typically turn up new species with unusual morphologies, and new higher taxa can be erected on the basis of a few specimens! Such localities are also erratically and widely spaced geographically and in geologic time.

Even those organisms with preservable hard parts are unlikely to be preserved under "normal" conditions. Studies of the fate of clam shells in shallow coastal waters reveal that shells are rapidly destroyed by scavenging, boring, chemical dissolution and breakage. Occasional burial during major storm events is one process that favors the incorporation of shells into the sedimentary record, and their ultimate preservation as fossils. Getting terrestrial vertebrate material into the fossil record is even more difficult. The terrestrial environment is a very destructive one: with decomposition and scavenging together with physical and chemical destruction by weathering.

The potential for fossil preservation varies dramatically from environment to environment. Preservation is enhanced under conditions that limit destructive physical and biological processes. Thus marine and fresh water environments with low oxygen levels, high salinities, or relatively high rates of sediment deposition favor preservation. Similarly, in some environments biochemical conditions can favor the early mineralization of skeletons and even soft tissues by a variety of compounds (eg. carbonate, silica, pyrite, and phosphate). The likelihood of preservation is thus highly variable. As a result, the fossil record is biased toward sampling the biota of certain types of environments, and against sampling the biota of others.

In addition to these preservational biases, the erosion, deformation and metamorphism of originally fossiliferous sedimentary rock have eliminated significant portions of the fossil record over geologic time. Furthermore, much of the fossil-bearing sedimentary record is hidden in the subsurface, or located in poorly accessible or little studied geographic areas. For these reasons, of those once-living species actually preserved in the fossil record, only a small portion have been discovered and described by science. However, there is also the promise of continued new and important discovery.

The forces arrayed against fossil preservation also guarantee that the earliest fossils known for a given animal group will always date to some time after that group first evolved. The fossil record always provides only minimum ages for the first appearance of organisms.

Because of the biases of the fossil record, the most abundant and geographically widespread species of hardpart-bearing organisms would tend to be best represented. Also, short-lived species that belonged to rapidly evolving lines of descent are less likely to be preserved than long-lived stable species. Because evolutionary change is probably most rapid within small isolated populations, a detailed species-by-species record of such evolutionary transitions is unlikely to be preserved. Furthermore, capturing such evolutionary events in the fossil record requires the fortuitous sampling of the particular geographic locality where the changes occurred.

Using the model of a branching tree of life, the expectation is for the preservation of isolated branches on an originally very bushy evolutionary tree. A few of these branches (lines of descent) would be fairly complete, while most are reconstructed with only very fragmentary evidence. As a result, the large-scale patterns of evolutionary history can generally be better discerned than the population-by-population or species-by-species transitions. Evolutionary trends over longer periods of time and across greater anatomical transitions can be followed by reconstructing the sequences in which anatomical features were acquired within an evolving branch of the tree of life.

In the previous post in this series, we explored how evolution can force science into making predictions that seem counter-intuitive. For cetacean (whale) evolution, we saw that the preliminary lines of evidence (the fact that whales are vertebrates, and mammals, for instance) pointed to the prediction that modern whales are descended from four-limbed, land-dwelling ancestors. As we then noted:

Instantly this prediction raises a host of uncomfortable questions: where did their hind limbs go? How did they acquire a blowhole on the top of their heads when other mammals have two nostrils on the front of their faces? How did they transition to giving birth in the water? What happened to the teeth of the baleen whales? What happened to the hair characteristic of mammals? and so on. In some ways, evolutionary thinking about whales creates more difficulties than it appears to solve.

And yet, these difficulties are the stuff of science. If indeed our “educated guess” of terrestrial, tetrapod ancestry for whales is correct, the evidence will show that these transitions, challenging though they may seem, did indeed occur on the road to becoming “truly cetacean”.

We have already discussed hind limb and hair loss in whales, citing evidence from embryonic development in modern whales that shows how hair and hind limbs develop early in their embryogenesis, but then are lost at later stages. We now turn to one of the remaining questions: tooth loss in the lineage leading to modern toothless whales (order Mysticeti). To obtain their food these whales pass seawater through a baleen, a large sieve-like structure that filters out plankton, small fish and other food items. Some recent genetics sleuthing has investigated a portion of this riddle, and adds further details to the story of how the baleen whales came to be.

Evolution: A Theory with Bite

If indeed modern whales are descended from ancestral, four-limbed, terrestrial ancestors, then those ancestors, like mammals in general, had teeth. Modern toothed whales (order Odontoceti) have retained those teeth to the present day, but baleen whales have adopted a new way of life as filter-feeders. Researchers were curious to see if traces of a “toothed past” could be found in the genomes of modern baleen whales, so they went hunting for remnants of genes devoted to making teeth. Such defective gene remnants would be examples of pseudogenes, and we have discussed pseudogenes previously in this series. While pseudogenes in and of themselves are powerful evidence for evolution, pseudogenes that are “out of place” are especially so. One such example we have seen before is the human vitellogenin pseudogene, the remains of a gene used for yolk production in egg-laying organisms found in the exact location in the genome that evolution would predict for it. As mammals that receive embryonic nourishment through a placenta, we have no need of egg-yolk genes. Similarly, baleen whales have no need for genes responsible for making teeth, and finding the remnants of such genes would make a strong case for an evolutionary origin of baleen whales as the modified descendents of toothed whale ancestors.

Independent Lines of Evidence, but Contradictory Stories?

Some of the genes known to be used in all mammals for tooth formation were the obvious candidate genes to start with: the products of the ameloblastin, amelogenin, and enamelin genes are all used in the formation of tooth enamel, the hardest structure in the vertebrate skeleton. Researchers went looking for these genes in several Mysticete (i.e. toothless whale) species. The results showed that all the species studied did indeed have these three genes present as pseudogenes (and more specifically, as unitary pseudogenes, a special class of pseudogene we have discussed in detail previously). Finding these genes as pseudogenes in toothless whales was exactly what evolution predicted, but there was a catch: none of the mutations that removed the functions of these three genes were shared between different species, suggesting that these genes lost their function independently in the species studied. This finding was at odds with data from the fossil record, which suggested that teeth were lost only once, and early in the lineage leading to all modern toothless whales. So, the researchers seemed to have two lines of evidence that at face value contradicted each other. The fossil record suggested that tooth loss occurred once in the common ancestor of all toothless whales, but these three genes seemed to have been inactivated independently, several times over, suggesting that loss of teeth should be happening later in Mysticete evolution, and more than once.

One proposed explanation for the apparent discrepancy (among several put forward) was to predict that a fourth gene required for enamel formation was lost early in Mysticete evolution. The loss of any one gene necessary for forming enamel would be enough to prevent the process altogether. In this case, the loss of this fourth gene would prevent tooth enamel from forming, even though the genetic sequences of the other three enamel genes would still be intact. Once enamel function was lost, random mutations in the remaining enamel genes could then accumulate later in Mysticete evolution after speciation in this group was already underway. To test this hypothesis, the research group went hunting for other enamel genes in toothless whales.

Signature in the SINE

The smoking gun for tooth loss in Mysticetes turned out to be exactly what was predicted: a fourth gene, necessary for enamel production, and mutated with the same inactivating mutation in all modern toothless whales. The gene in question, named enamelysin, was destroyed when a mobile genetic element called a SINE transposon inserted into it, breaking it into two halves and removing its function:

The fact that the same SINE insertion mutation at an identical location is found in all modern Mysticete species indicates that this mutation happened once in a common ancestor and then was inherited by the entire group. Since this must have occurred early in the evolution of toothless whales in order to happen in the common ancestor of the entire group, the picture from the genetics and the fossil record match. Once again, findings in one discipline (in this case, paleontology) can be used to make very detailed predictions about what another, unrelated discipline (comparative genomics) should reveal. These results are also entirely consistent with the observation, made in the 1920s, that toothless whales form tooth buds during embryogenesis that are later reabsorbed prior to the point when the deposition of enamel would begin. As with the hind limb story in whale evolution, lines of evidence from genetics, paleontology and embryology converge to support the hypothesis that modern toothless whales descend, through modification, from toothed ancestors.

In the next post in this series, we’ll examine a few more lines of evidence for whale evolution, and extend our discussion to converging lines of evidence for the evolution of our own species.

For further reading:

Meredith, R.W., Gatesy, J., Cjeng, J., and Springer, M.S. (2011). Pseudogenization of the tooth gene enamelysin (MMP20) in the common ancestor of extant baleen whales. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: 278 (1708); 993 – 1002. Available online: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/09/16/rspb.2010.1280.full.pdf

Ridewood, W.G. (1923). Observations on the skull in foetal specimens of whales of the genera Megaptera and Balaenoptera. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: 211; 209 - 272. Available online: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/211/382-390/209.full.pdf

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In our previous post, we examined processed pseudogenes – transcribed gene copies that randomly insert into genomes. Unitary pseudogenes, however, are different: unlike processed pseudogenes, they are unique sequences in genomes, and not copies. They have the features one expects of “real” genes: regulatory sequences, introns, and protein coding sections – but with mutations that prevent them from being transcribed or translated. Like buildings in various states of repair, there is a similar range for unitary pseudogenes. If they have only been recently inactivated, they will be largely intact – like a recently abandoned building with a few broken windows. Others are further along in their degradation, like a stone building without a roof and grass growing up through the floor. Some are so far gone that one needs to peel back the turf to search for what remains of the foundation. Despite their various states of disrepair, they remain recognizable – in some cases, they can persist for millions of years before they slowly mutate beyond recognition.

The reason for these defective genes is straightforward: the organism that had the original mutation that removed the function of the gene was not significantly impacted by the loss. One example I have previously discussed is the human GLO pseudogene. The functional GLO gene is part of the biochemical pathway for making vitamin C, something that humans and other primates are not able to do: if we don’t get enough in our diet, we get scurvy. In an environment with adequate dietary vitamin C, however, the loss of the GLO gene is no big deal – and mutations that remove its function would not have been a disadvantage. The mutations that remove GLO function in humans are the same mutations we see in other species – they are an example of mutations in a nested hierarchy, the type of pattern that relatedness produces. This indicates that the mutations happened once, in a common ancestral species, and have been inherited by several species that descend from that ancestor, ours included.

So, what’s a defective gene like you doing in a species like this?

While it makes sense that mammals ought to be able to make vitamin C (even if humans and other primates cannot), in some cases pseudogenes seem much more “out of place.” One example from the human genome that we have discussed in the past, is the vitellogenin gene, a gene required for egg yolk formation in egg-laying organisms. This gene is present in the human genome as a pseudogene, even though humans are placental mammals – human embryos are nourished through a placenta, not egg yolk. This pseudogene was located in the human genome by predicting that its genomic location relative to its neighboring genes would be retained for a long time, even after its inactivation. Accordingly, researchers found a functional vitellogenin gene in the chicken genome, and noted the genes on either side of it (let’s just call them “Gene A and Gene B” for convenience). Gene A and Gene B are also side by side in the human genome, so the researchers looked between them for the signs of vitellogenin gene remains – and found them in that precise spot, still visible despite approximately 300 million years since we last shared a common ancestor with chickens:

Other examples like this abound: whales, for example, have unitary pseudogene remnants of genes devoted to an air-based sense of smell, even in cases where the whale species in question does not have an olfactory organ. A second example from whales are pseudogene remnants of visual pigments adapted for wavelengths of light found in terrestrial settings, not aquatic environments. These examples make perfect sense in light of the terrestrial ancestry of whales, but are challenging to account for from an antievolutionary perspective.

Pseudogenes: evolution’s silver bullet?

Unitary pseudogenes with shared mutations in nested hierarchies among related species are far from the only evidence for evolution, and are not even necessarily the line of evidence most convincing to specialists. Specialists can see the broad pattern of multiple lines of converging evidence that support common ancestry to an extent non-specialists cannot easily appreciate. Unitary pseudogenes, however, are valuable tools for demonstrating a sampling of those lines of evidence, and providing a window into the world of comparative genomics that, to paraphrase Dobzhansky’s famous quote, would make absolutely no sense except in the light of evolution.

Yes, the implications of unitary pseudogenes such as these are easy for even non-specialists to grasp: whales have the defective remnants of genes adapted to terrestrial vision and air-based smelling because they descend from terrestrial ancestors. Placental mammals, including humans, have a defective remnant of a gene used to make egg yolk because they descend from egg-laying ancestors. Unitary pseudogenes share identical mutations across related species because they were inactivated in a common ancestor, and were inherited by every species that descended from that ancestral species.

No special training in genetics is required to appreciate the strength of the evidence that these examples provide. Nor does it require special insight to see that attempts made by antievolutionary groups to refute this evidence face an uphill battle. Its daunting nature notwithstanding, some have undertaken just that task, since the evidence is too compelling to ignore, and too risky to leave unanswered.

Bringing it together: antievolutionary approaches to pseudogenes, unitary and otherwise, miss the mark

Now that we have covered significant ground with respect to what various classes of pseudogenes are and how they arise, we are now able to properly evaluate antievolutionary arguments put forward in an attempt to discredit these lines of evidence for evolution. Attempts to discredit unitary pseudogene evidence generally have one or both of the following two approaches, which we will evaluate in turn:

Approach 1: Discuss rare examples of processed pseudogenes that have acquired function, and imply that all pseudogenes, including unitary pseudogenes, will similarly be shown to have function.

This approach is a fairly common one in the antievolutionary literature, and examples abound. We have examined previously how processed pseudogenes may, in rare cases, acquire a function and come under selection. Note well: the vast, vast majority of processed pseudogenes are not functional and are slowly mutating beyond recognition as DNA not under selection. While rare examples that have acquired function are very interesting from a scientific perspective, they do not “confer functionality” on the remainder of processed pseudogenes, let alone on unitary pseudogenes.

The other issue with this argument is that in many cases we know what the function of the unitary pseudogene once was. We know what the function of vitellogenin is, for example – and we can find this gene in modern-day egg-laying animals. When we see the remnants of this sequence in the human genome it is a stretch to argue that it has another, as of yet unknown function. When we see the human pseudogene sitting between two other genes in the human genome the same order as we observe in the chicken genome, it stretches credibility well past the breaking point.

Approach 2: Claim that unitary pseudogenes with mutations shared across species are the result of non-random mutations that occurred independently in the two species, and are not inherited from a common ancestor.

This argument, though having an appearance of validity, is similarly doomed to frustration. While mutations are not entirely random (certain regions of the genome mutate more readily than others) there is no known mechanism that could create the precise, repeated pattern of shared mutations we observe between related species. The most significant attempt to mount this type of argument against unitary pseudogenes in general was directed at the GLO pseudogene, and I have already discussed the specific details of why that attempt was inadequate. No refinement of that argument, to my knowledge, has been put forward since.

In summary, pseudogenes in general, and unitary pseudogenes in particular, remain a significant thorn in the side of antievolutionary groups. In the next post in this series, we’ll cast our net wider and explore an example of how multiple, convergent lines of evidence support evolution, often in unexpected ways.

For further reading:

http://biologos.org/blog/signature-in-the-pseudogenes-part-1
http://biologos.org/blog/signature-in-the-pseudogenes-part-2
http://biologos.org/blog/a-tale-of-three-creationists-part-3

I’d like to suggest that this argument is in significant ways misplaced. The participants in this debate all seem to agree that what makes us “human” can be defined by genes and population studies. There is a pressing need for them to conform theology to population genetics, or to conform population genetics to theology, because the story of our genes is implicitly equated with the story of what it means to be “human.” The hypothesis that there was a “first human” – a capital-A “Adam” – can be tested in our genes.

But “genes” do not make us “human.” What makes us “human” is the irreducible phenomena of all of our material and immaterial being as persons.

Nothing we observe in the universe is flat. By “flat” I mean having only one aspect or “layer.” Consider, for example, an apple. What is it? Is it the fruit of an apple tree? The seed-carrier – the potentiality – of new apple trees? Beautiful and delicious? Skin, flesh, and core? Water and organic molecules? Caloric energy and roughage? Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon? Physical laws? All of these things comprise some of what we mean by “apple,” but none of them are what an “apple” is. The reality that is “apple” cannot be reduced to any one of its aspects or layers.

It is possible to think of these aspects or layers hierarchically, with “higher” layers that emerge from “lower” ones. Physical laws emerge from quantum probabilities; molecules emerge from physical laws; seeds, skin, flesh and core emerge from complex arrangements of molecules; beauty and delight emerge from the connection of skin, flesh and core to human sense perception;¹ “apple” emerges from all of this (and more) combined with the human cultural experience of this thing we call “apple.”

Notice that some “layers” can impinge or “supervene” on lower ones – for example, human sense perception and cultural experience do something to this thing confronting the subject in order for it to become “apple.” But notice also that “apple” is not merely a cultural construction. The word or signifier “apple,” of course, could be arbitrary, but there is an objective reality to the thing signified. The layer of human sense perception and cultural experience supervenes upon, but does not create, the lower-order reality from which it emerges.

Sociologist Christian Smith draws these strands together in a critical realist framework in his excellent book What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. In a critically realist approach to culture and human personhood, Smith suggests, “[h]uman beings do have an identifiable nature that is rooted in the natural world, although the character of human nature is such that it gives rise to capacities to construct variable meanings and identities….” Culture is a social construction, but it is not merely a social construction. Human beings are social, but they are not subsumed by the social. The reality we inhabit is “stratified”: it includes both the reality of individual conscious human agents and the reality of the social structures that emerge from the cultures created by those agents. These “personal” and “cultural” layers of the world interact with each other dynamically, each continually informing and changing the other.

Smith’s approach is helpful, but perhaps it does not go far enough. For Smith, as for critical realists in general, the phenomena of human culture remain subject to some degree of granular disaggregation, at least analytically. A phenomenological approach suggests that no “thing” can be broken into components and still comprise that “thing” – the genes that encode for apple trees are not apple seeds, apple seeds are not apple trees, and apple trees are not apples. The critical realist framework of stratification, emergence, and supervenience functions as a very useful heuristic device, but to describe what an apple is, we must approach the phenomenon of “apple” in its fullness. To know whether something falls into the kind “apple,” we must hold an ideal of everything an apple is, and compare the subject to the ideal.

And because of the transcendence of the ideal concept of “apple,” we can begin to speak of the relative excellence of particular instantiations of apples. What is an “excellent” apple? What distinguishes the excellent apple from a poor one? We can only ask such questions if “apple” means something more than the particular physical specimen in hand, whether firm, sweet and tart, or bruised and sour.

The same is true of human “persons.” We can say almost nothing about a “person” merely by observing genes, because genes are not “persons.” Populations genetics studies can provide models of the dispersion of genes through groups of biological entities, but they can tell us nothing whatsoever about when the first “human person” emerged. Indeed, for population genetics qua population genetics, there simply are no “persons” – for this is a science of the movement of genes, not a philosophical, sociological, or theological description of “persons.”

So what of “Adam?” It is often suggested that in Romans 5:12 Adam is a type of Christ. But, in fact, in Paul’s thought, as well as for the early Church Fathers, Christ is the type, the typos, a notion derived from the “stamp” or “seal” on an official document. There is a hint in Romans 5 of a truth that would only become clarified later in Christian theology – that the pre-incarnate Christ, the second person of the Trinity, always was. Whereas Arius declared that “there was a time when he [Christ] was not,” Nicea established the orthodox Christology of Christ’s eternal sonship. Thus Christ is and was the Redeemer, the one for whom creation was made and in whose death and resurrection creation always finds its fulfillment. Adam’s failure was that he went against type – he did not conform to Christ but rather tried to become something else, and thereby the true nature of humanity was broken.

Is the typos of Christ reducible to a set of genes? Surely not. It resides not in genes or in any other created thing but rather in the Triune life of God Himself. We might speak, in a roughly analogical way, of ideas we hold in our minds – say, the idea of a perfect Bordeaux, ruby-red, silky, smoky, plummy, luxurious. We could labor to instantiate that idea, combining genes and terroir and water and light and care, and perhaps we might achieve it, to the point where upon taking a sip we exclaim, “this – this – is Bordeaux. Nothing else is worthy of that name.”

This is what God said of Adam, when he gave him breath and a name. It is not something that God said of any other creature, even apparently some creatures that a modern population geneticist or paleoanthropologist might designate as ancestrally human based on genes or bones. Yet that Adam, and each of us in that Adam, fail to participate fully and unreservedly in the true nature of the true human, the nature of Christ. And so Pontius Pilot, an unwitting prophet, said of Christ: “behold, the man” (John 19:5, KJV). And so also Paul invites us to see: the sinful man, the broken seal, the first created Adam; and the true type, the seal of humanity’s future, the perfect Adam, the Christ. None of this is about the definitions and categories of modern science, as helpful and important as they may be for the progress of scientific thought. It is, rather, about the fullness of what it means to be human.

Notes

1. Human sense perception, of course, is an emergent property of an even more complex set of relations that give rise to the human “person.”

The song entitled “The Fall” by Gungor is from the artists’ latest album Ghosts Upon the Earth. The lyrics begin by painting a picture of the Fall as something in which each person has participated as indicated by the assertion that “the fruit (of the Fall of man) is seen in every eye and every hand.” After reflecting on the words, consider the discussion questions below.

“The Fall” by Gungor

The Fall, the Fall, Oh God, the Fall of man,
The fruit is found in every eye and every hand,
Nothing, there is nothing yet in truest form,
We walk like ghosts upon the Earth,
The ground it groans.

How long? How long will you wait?
How long? How long till you save us all, save us all?

Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.
Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.

The light, the light, the morning light is gone,
And all that is left is fragile breath and failing lungs.
The night, the night, the guiding night has come,
Uniting lover with his bride more precious than the dawn.

How long? How long must we wait?

Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.
Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.

Questions

1. By focusing only on the Fall as a historical event, have we consciously or unconsciously simplified it—almost removing ourselves from the story?

2. Besides Genesis 3, what other Scripture has inspired the opening lines of this song? Does the feeling evoked by these opening lines personalize that passage for you?

3. Have you ever felt: “the light, the light, the morning light is gone?” Have you experienced night as “guiding?” Who is the lover? What Scripture informs these lines?

4. Have you ever asked, “How long? How long?” Have you heard the answer, “Turn your face to me. Turn your face to me?”

5. Do you agree that the story of Adam and Eve is your story, except for one important difference? What is that difference for you?

Michael Gungor has also served as a pastor at the Bloom Church in Denver, Colorado. Below we post an excerpt from a sermon he has given on his own personal journey and his views about science and Scripture.

(To hear the entire sermon go to this link and scroll to sermon of March 8, 2009—“What Can We Learn About Jesus from Science?”)