More Than One Christian View

Many parents and pastors are wondering what to tell their children about creation and evolution. While Sunday school classes often cover Genesis 1 around kindergarten (with kids coloring pictures of what God created on each day), most curricula do not address science again before kids leave for college. Yet issues of creation and evolution can be addressed in age-appropriate ways throughout Sunday school. Elementary school children already learn about idol worship from other Old Testament stories, so teachers have an opportunity to contrast Genesis 1 with the idol-rich creation stories of other cultures. Middle school students can be given basic tools for considering creation and evolution such as the contrast between the “how” questions answered by their science lessons in school and the “who” and “why” questions answered in Scripture. Middle and high school students can find role models by reading the testimonies of scientist Christians.

Youth need to be encouraged to discuss their questions and doubts, while affirming core beliefs. When asked why they left the faith, scientists often mention that the church was not open to their questions and told them to “just believe.” Churches can demonstrate openness to questions by teaching youth about multiple Christian views on an issue. Students need to hear that some Christians accept the science of evolution and others do not, and have a conversation about the reasons why. Too many young people have struggled when they felt they had to choose between clear scientific evidence and the beliefs they grew up with. Even when parents and leaders are unsure about evolution, they can help students by saying, “While I have concerns about evolution, I’ve heard that some Christians accept the science of evolution while still believing in the God of the Bible.”

Difficult issues like origins cannot be addressed in a single event. People need time to ponder the issues, and spaces to talk it through. One church did a six-week sermon series, with parallel curricula for all ages in Sunday school, so that families could work through it together. Another church did a sermon series and discussion group for adults for four weeks, to prepare parents before a four-week series for the youth group. Other churches encourage small groups to read a book on science and faith and discuss a chapter a week. (Since all authors have their favorite view, I recommend discussing at least two books from different authors to learn about multiple Christian positions.)

More Than Evolution

In our science-saturated culture, evolution is not the only science topic the church should be considering, and not even the most important. With church members encountering the latest medical advances as patients and family members, a discussion on bioethics would be very relevant. Since young people are usually the first to use hot new gadgets, they should be considering the appropriate Christian use of technology . As the issue of climate change becomes more pressing every year, churches need to talk about it, and not avoid it because it is so political. The Evangelical Environmental Network offers many resources for churches, emphasizing ways that creation care benefits the poor and the unborn. One group of churches, with the help of Calvin College, joined together to clean up the local creek that drains the watershed in which the parishioners live, work, and worship. Many of the congregants were not even aware of the size of the watershed or the pollution level in their own creek. This was a hands-on opportunity for all ages, directly caring for their own corner of God’s green Earth.

More Than Controversy

With so many issues to discuss, Christians can easily get the feeling that science is always attacking the faith. It is essential to balance such conversations with positive responses to God’s creation. After all, the primary response to the natural world in the Bible is to praise the God who made it. The first time I led an adult Sunday school class on creation and evolution, I was amazed how much the participants appreciated simply ending each session with a Psalm reading or creation hymn. Thoughtful frowns turned into relaxed smiles as the group remembered our unity in Christ and the centrality of God as the Creator.

Creation themes can be incorporated throughout worship. One church asked the congregation to submit their favorite creation photos at the end of the summer (from backyard flowers to National Parks), then wove the images into a worship service with creation songs and readings from the Psalms. In addition to flowers and mountains, modern science has revealed incredible glories that can inspire our praise and reflection. Several contemporary Christian musicians have begun to artfully incorporate the wonders of the natural world into their music; Chris Rice sings of “cratered moon and Saturn’s rings,” and Third Day praises the “God of wonders beyond our galaxy.” In one church, an elder brought in modern science when leading the congregation in prayer with these words: “Creator God, out of nothing you created all that is. You hurled the galaxies through time and space. . . . The universe is your hourglass, the continental drift your minute hand, the Grand Canyon your second hand. You are infinite.”

Preachers can incorporate science in the same way they make references to movies, current events, or best-selling books in sermons. To notice these connections, take some time to encounter science: read the science section of the New York Times, visit a local science museum, or ask scientists in the congregation about their work. A visit to a planetarium might give a new appreciation for the vastness of the universe, which could illuminate a sermon on the vastness of God’s forgiveness in Psalm 103:11–12. Pastor John Van Sloten learned about the neural networks in the brain and incorporated it into a sermon on the vine and the branches of John 15.

Preachers are understandably concerned about avoiding scientific errors when preaching, but this should not prevent engagement with science. Some pastors do their own research to get the details right because they enjoy digging into a science topic. Other pastors bring in a scientist (live or by video) so that they do not have to explain the technical material themselves. Others play to their strengths by choosing topics with fewer technical details, such as the Christian motivation for doing science or exposition of Bible passages relevant for scientific questions. Many of the questions Christians have are really about biblical interpretation and Christian theology, areas where the pastor is an expert. Minor technical errors made in good faith are forgivable, but a sermon that argues that mainstream science is wrong on some point can be devastating for the faith life of teenagers who are learning the correct science in school.

Beyond Sunday morning worship and preaching, science can show up in many areas of church life. During a youth camping trip or church picnic, include a nature walk concluded with praise. After a winter evening worship service, invite a local amateur astronomer to set up a telescope in the parking lot to show people the moon and planets. Convert a vacant lot near church into a community garden, so kids can experience firsthand how God provides food from the Earth.

More Than Programs

In all these activities, remember that views on science are “caught” more than “taught.” Congregants will naturally pick up on the attitude of the pastor or ministry leader, whether skeptical of science or celebrating science as the study of God’s creation. Visitors will pick up on this too, so these attitudes are part of being a church that welcomes and ministers to scientist Christians . Recently I was invited to speak at a church on the expansion of the universe and the possibility of a multiverse. Several enthusiastic young people in attendance had clearly caught the love of science from the church leaders who planned the event. One girl came up afterward with her dad, both of them marveling at God’s creation. They were amazed not just with the particular things I had discussed, but with the way in which God has embedded wonders at every level of understanding. Everyone can marvel at the starry skies, school kids can learn about the planets and asteroids, and scientists with PhDs can study dark matter and string theory. No matter how deep we look, we keep discovering more and more ways that creation declares the glory of God.

For Further Reading

For more resources on a full range of science topics, visit the The Ministry Theorem collection at http://ministrytheorem.calvinseminary.edu/. You will find sample sermons, curricula for children and adults, worship resources, essays by a dozen scientist Christians, and much more.

So, I’ve decided to try a slightly different approach for the next while—one that has these sorts of folks in mind. From time to time, you can still expect those more in-depth, technical articles, or perhaps a discussion of some new research that makes the popular press, or even an analysis of some new argument from the IDM or RTB. These will be breaks from the new routine, however. For the most part, we’re going to stick to the basics, much like you would if you took an introductory evolution course at a university. Don’t worry, though: this course doesn’t have any prerequisites! All that’s needed is a willingness to learn.

What you can expect

The goal of this course is straightforward: to provide evangelical Christians with a step-by-step introduction to the science of evolutionary biology.  This will provide benefits beyond just the joy of learning more about God’s wonderful creation. An understanding of the basic science of evolution is of great benefit for reflecting on its theological implications, since this reflection can then be done from a scientifically-informed perspective. From time to time we might comment briefly on some issues of theological interest (and suggest resources for those looking to explore those issues further), but for the most part, we’re going to focus on the science. For folks interested in the interaction between science and Christianity, I heartily recommend Ted Davis’ recent series as a fabulous introduction to the topic.

You can also expect a slow, patient pace. Since this course is intended for folks with little or no background in biology, we’re going to take our time to make sure no one gets left behind. This might be frustrating to folks who already know a fair bit about evolution. Hopefully even more knowledgeable readers will learn some new and interesting details along the way—but the goal will primarily be to help folks who are less well versed in evolution increase their understanding.

You can also expect a survey of many different areas that have some bearing on evolution. We’ll examine geology, paleontology, biogeography, genetics, and a host of other topics in order to provide a “big picture” overview. This broad-brush approach means that any given individual post will not necessarily be “convincing” to folks who have doubts about evolution. Think about assembling a large jigsaw puzzle: placing any individual piece, on its own, doesn’t convincingly demonstrate what the overall picture will show. This course will be like that. Each topic we cover will put a few pieces in place here and there, slowly building towards the final overall picture.

Since evolution is an active science, this process will also highlight where there are “missing pieces” that are still being sought by scientists. All of this is well and good, since the purpose of this course is not so much to convince anyone of the validity of evolutionary theory, but rather to inform readers about the nature and scope of evolution as a scientific theory in the present day. My goal is to provide readers with a basic understanding of what evolution is and how it works. Given that as the primary goal, if one finds the scope of the evidence ultimately convincing (or not) is somewhat beside the point. The intent here is to provide readers with information they can use to make their own, informed decision.

How you can help

First and foremost, you can help by spreading the word about this series to folks you think would be interested in learning more about evolution in a non-threatening environment. Secondly, you can help me by asking questions in the comments. One of the challenges of being a specialist is having the ability to put oneself in the shoes of someone just starting out. What might seem obvious to me may not seem obvious to you, and I hope you’ll feel that no question is too basic or too simplistic. If you’re wondering about something, it’s almost guaranteed that other folks are, too! So, please don’t be shy. I’ll do my best to answer questions in the comments, though I hope that some of our more skilled commenters will (respectfully!) help out here, as well. Finally, you can help by letting me know what broader areas of evolution you find confusing. I have my own ideas about what areas of evolution are commonly misunderstood, but I’d love to hear from readers about what areas they find difficult to understand. I’ll use this input to shape the topics I will cover as we go forward.

Getting started

In the next post in this course, we’ll dive into the course content by introducing two key areas: how scientific theories work in general, and how evolution in particular works as the current organizing theory of modern biology. 

Antibody fine-tuning

At this moment, millions of B cells are patrolling my spleen and lymph nodes, each sporting a different antibody on its surface. If a foreign molecule from the cold virus happens to stick to an antibody on a particular B cell, the cell can get “activated.”

Pathogens are like cockroaches. If you see one roach, you can bet there are many more lurking under cupboards and between walls. Just as one shoe won’t kill them all, one B cell can’t make enough antibodies to deal with an infection. Activation causes the B cell to reproduce, creating more and more B cells that can produce the same kind of antibody.

As is typical during cell division, most of the DNA in dividing B cells is copied with extremely high accuracy. But in the gene segments coding for the variable region of the antibody, mutations accumulate about a million times more often than normal. Why would this be? Isn’t the point of B cell replication to make more identical antibodies?

Almost. It turns out that these frequent random mutations contribute to optimize the antibody. A shopping story helps to illustrate. I was recently at the mall and found a fabulous pair of shoes on sale. Sadly they were out of my size, but it was such a good sale that I decided to buy the half-size down, figuring the shoes might stretch out a little and grow more comfortable with time. Bad idea! That great bargain turned out to be pretty expensive when I got blisters and never wore the shoes again. Clearly this was not an optimized choice.

Just because you can get your foot into a shoe does not mean it fits. Likewise, just because an antibody binds to an antigen does not mean the two are perfectly complementary. Descendents of the activated B cell have a mechanism to induce mutations so each one can make a slightly different version of the antibody. If one of the resulting B cells makes a better-fitting antibody than its kin, it will have a selective advantage and proliferate. The other cells will not become activated as often and will end up dying by apoptosis, a kind of cellular suicide. This mechanism of mutation and selection, called affinity maturation, produces a highly specific, strong interaction between the antigen and the antibody.

Antibody production and evolution both involve mutation and selection

I believe God is sovereign over all of creation, but I don’t imagine he is presently curing my cold by directly controlling the specific gene rearrangements and optimizing mutations in each of the millions of B cells in my body. Could he do so? Of course! But if that were the case, why bother making billions of antibodies in the first place? The evidence suggests that God has chosen to work through a random process, one which involves the routine creation and destruction of millions of cells that never get used. This is the ordinary means by which God maintains our health. The miracles of healing recorded in the Bible are miraculous precisely because they don’t occur by this normal, natural process.

In my last post, I stated that the generation of antibody diversity is an example in which God uses a “blind” system to sustain and preserve life. I then suggested a link to evolution by asking, “If God uses natural mechanisms that work over short time scales (less than a week) to evolve life-giving solutions to disease, could he also use a similarly elegant approach to create life over long periods of time?”

Some may argue that a small-scale process like antibody production isn’t comparable to the processes of mutation and natural selection that are supposed to have caused macro-evolution. Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe, for example, accepts that all creatures (including humans) have a common ancestor, but he believes random mutations are not powerful enough to have brought about the diversity of life we see today. He argues that there is an “edge” of evolution: mutation can bring about drug resistance and other small-scale adaptations, but beyond a certain point it can’t really produce anything new.

Clearly, antibody production creates something new: the random recombining of whole gene segments generates highly specific, never-before-seen protein functionality within just a few days. The body can respond to any foreign entity, simply by sorting through billions of ready-made possibilities. Furthermore, a pretty-good solution can be made even better by generating many variations on a theme and sorting through these for the optimal antibody.

Evolution works by the same kinds of mechanisms, except the mutations occur in germ cells (which give rise to egg and sperm) rather than in B cells, and the sorting (selection) process occurs at the population level rather than the cellular level.

Though often neutral or destructive, mutations sometimes create new functionality

Most people are familiar with point mutations, in which a single DNA “letter,” or base, gets changed. However, mutations come in several other varieties. Short sequences of DNA can be inserted or deleted at random. Chunks of DNA can get cut out and inserted in the opposite direction. Individual genes or even whole chromosomes can get lost or duplicated. In rare cases, the entire genome can get duplicated!

The effect of a mutation principally depends on where it occurs, not on the size of the DNA segment affected. A large deletion occurring within a long stretch between two genes may do nothing at all. On the other hand, a single point mutation within a critical gene may cause a devastating disease. There is also a third possibility though: new functionality may emerge as a result of a mutation.

Let’s consider the protein hemoglobin, for example, which binds oxygen and transports it throughout the body in the blood. Hemoglobin is made from two pairs each of two amino acid chains, called α and β (blue and red in the figure at right). The corresponding genes that code for α and β have similar sequences to each other, and are believed to have arisen when an ancestral globin gene (still present in marine worms, insects, and some fish) duplicated and slowly changed over time. While the ancestral form can bind oxygen just fine, the four chains of hemoglobin cooperate to do so even better.

Both the α and β genes have undergone further duplications followed by smaller mutations. As expected, many of the resulting genes have become irreparably damaged by mutations, but they continue to exist in the genome as inert DNA “fossils.” Others, however, remain active and now perform specialized functions. For instance, one set of β genes binds more tightly to oxygen than the others; it becomes active only during development to ensure that the fetus gets enough oxygen from the mother’s bloodstream. A few months after birth, fetal hemoglobin turns off and the adult form turns on.

To summarize, mutations come in many forms (e.g. rearrangements, insertions, deletions, duplications) and can lead to good, bad, or neutral effects within an individual. B cells depend on random mutations to produce novel antibodies. A few are productive, but the vast majority of B cells die unused. Yet the entire process works for our good! In the same way, mutations in germ cells can lead to no effect, disease, or new and better solutions, as we saw in the hemoglobin example. These are the ordinary (but masterful!) means by which God creates and sustains life.

Editor's Note: For more on the evolution of the immune system, read Randy's Isaac's post "Complex Specified Information Without an Intelligent Source" at the ASA website.

By Luci Shaw

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops
that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from
the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage,
including the soggy gray mess on the deck
like an abandoned mattress that has
lost its inner spring. For the gurgle
of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when I
step off the porch. For slush. For the glisten
on the sidewalk that only wets the foot sole
and doesn’t send me slithering. Everything
is alert to this melting, the slow flow of it,
the declaration of intent, the liquidation.

Glory be to God for changes. For bulbs
breaking the darkness with their green beaks.
For moles and moths and velvet green moss
waiting to fill the driveway cracks. For the way
the sun pierces the window minutes earlier each day.
For earthquakes and tectonic plates—earth’s bump
and grind—and new mountains pushing up
like teeth in a one-year-old. For melodrama—
lightning on the sky stage, and the burst of applause
that follows. Praise him for day and night, and light
switches by the door. For seasons, for cycles
and bicycles, for whales and waterspouts,
for watersheds and waterfalls and waking
and the letter W, for the waxing and waning
of weather so that we never get complacent. For all
the world, and for the way it twirls on its axis
like an exotic dancer. For the north pole and the
south pole and the equator and everything between.

Editor's Note: If you'd like to see other great posts like this, go to the BioLogos Navigator topic Worship & Arts.

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer,
Unaware that you insult his tribe.

Cats play with a mouse or
with a half-dead mole.
You are wrong, though: it’s not out of cruelty.
They simply like a thing that moves.

For, after all, we know that only consciousness
Can for a moment move into the Other,
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.

And such as cats are, all of Nature is.
Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil.
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid.

Natural history has its museums,
But why should our children learn about monsters,
An earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?

Nature devouring, nature devoured,
Butchery day and night smoking with blood.

And who created it? Was it the good Lord?

Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent,
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons.

We are the only ones who say: cruelty.

Our consciousness and our conscience
Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies
Put their hope in a humane God.

Who cannot but feel and think,

Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,

For we are, as he told us, similar to Him.

Yet if it is so, then He takes pity
On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird.
Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion.

Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat:
A theological, Augustinian grimace,
Which makes difficult our walking on this earth.

–Czeslaw Milosz,¹
 translated by the author and Robert Hass

The Problem

The poem above communicates in a very poignant and profound way the essence of the theological problem of death, pain, and suffering in the natural world—what has been referred to as “natural evil.” As we will see, it may also point to at least one aspect of a Christian response.

I have become convinced that one of the fundamental issues underlying much of the resistance of many Christians to an ancient, evolving creation is that of the problem of “natural evil.” “Natural evil” is also very often a primary focus of those who reject a personal and compassionate God, as it was for Darwin himself. The issue of theodicy thus seems not only to drive many people of Christian faith away from an acceptance of the conclusions of modern science, but also to drive members of the scientific community away from a serious consideration of the claims of the Christian faith. The topic is important, then not because its solution is central to the validity of the Christian faith, but because it often serves as an unnecessary stumbling block to a productive engagement of both science and faith.

The tension generated by our understanding of God’s character, as revealed in the Bible, and by the reality of the natural world around us has been the focus of much theological and philosophical debate within the Christian church since the first century. This article sets out to examine critically several of the proposed solutions to this problem, viewing them from the perspective of a geologist, paleontologist, and orthodox evangelical Christian.

The theological problem of death and pain emerges from the following propositional statements:

1. Scripture consistently declares the absolute goodness of God and the very goodness of his creation. Furthermore, Scripture declares God’s love and care for creation, and the glory and praise it returns to him.
2. Scripture also confesses a transcendent God who is omnipotent in power, yet immanent in creation as well. God’s creative activity is not described as being confined to some past event at the beginning of time, but as a present and continuing reality. God upholds creation in its being from moment to moment, and is creatively active in its history. This understanding of God’s relationship to creation has been well articulated by Jürgen Moltmann.²
3. In seeming conflict with these confessions of God’s character, we observe death, pain, and suffering as ubiquitous, even integral, aspects of the creation around us.

The apparent conflict between God’s goodness and the presence of pain and suffering is made especially acute when we consider the nonhuman creation.³ How can we accommodate the death and suffering of animals within a theology that declares both God’s omnipotence and goodness? C. S. Lewis forcefully puts the issue before us in his book The Problem of Pain:

The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous ... but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it.⁴

Because the issue of animal pain so directly impacts our understanding of the goodness of creation, I will focus particularly on solutions to the problem as posed by Lewis.

How do we then reconcile the goodness of God who is immanent and active in his creation with the death, pain, and suffering we see embedded within it? There seem to be two basic alternative approaches to this dilemma.⁵

1. Natural evil can be attributed to something independent of God and acting against his will. This position threatens to limit God’s power and freedom.
2. Natural evil can be considered a part of God’s good purpose for creation, and either directly willed or permitted by him. Such a view would seem to bring into question God’s goodness and love for his creatures.

The tension between these alternatives—and efforts to avoid their negative theological consequences—surface in many of the proposed solutions to this problem.

In part 2, we start to look at some of the proposed solutions, beginning with the idea that a perfect creation was corrupted by a fall.

Notes

1. This poem was included in a collection of poems that was one of two works by Czeslaw Milosz mentioned in a review article by Michael Ignatieff, “The Art of Witness,” New York Review of Books (March 23, 1995). I thank Carol Regehr for bringing my attention to this work.
2. Moltmann refers to this aspect of God’s creative activity in history as “continuous creation.” Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 206–14.
3. I will not address here arguments concerning the degree to which animals experience pain. This issue is considered by Robert Wennberg in “Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (1991): 120–40. It is obvious to me that, for many animals at least, pain and suffering are a very real conscious experience.
4. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1962), 129.
5. As stated by John Hick, in Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977): “For every position that maintains the perfect goodness of God is bound either to let go the absolute divine power and freedom, or else to hold that evil exists ultimately within God’s good purpose” (pp. 149–50).

We tend to think of creativity in terms of flashes of insight and brilliance, of novelty, and especially of unexpected things bursting upon the scene. But creativity is no less creative and no less remarkable when it proceeds step by step, according to discipline, according to rule. We notice significant ruptures in the flow of things and upheavals of the regularity and predictability of life, faith, or science, precisely because such revolutions happen against a background of the ordinary. Even when the rules are interrupted and disturbed, they are usually not obliterated but modified. We and the rest of creation begin again by applying them anew and continuing on in light of what has changed.

Artist Linnéa Spransy makes this paradoxical ‘rules and rupture’ quality of life the method, not just the subject of her art, bringing a fascination with the mathematical underpinnings of the natural world together with her commitment to the kind of renewal-through-brokenness that comes with following Christ. As she says, “the boundaries between art, worship and natural sciences are fluid. I go [to that place of intersection] to be more amazed by the strangeness of existence, to experience awe and wonder.”

Confronted with the scriptural assertion that “eternity is written in [our] hearts,” Spransy wondered how we even begin to understand what that means. What might visual corollaries for such a statement be? How do we represent the tension between freedom and constraint, that dynamic dance of continuity and change, of predictability and surprise, that exists at every level of our experience and study of the world—from quantum physics to genetics to geology—and that seems fundamental to the ways of the Lord with us, as well? Her answer began to form around the study of fractals, mathematical rules whose reiteration in nature leads to endlessly new things. In her own work, a similar fractal sensibility leads to visual representations of something eternal.

Spransy says that every painting she completes “is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits, with a clear beginning and end. These scripted pieces of visual choreography are allowed to accrue to show me their beauties and surprises, allowing discovery in the midst of certainty.” In other words, images like Frenetic Sequence, 2011, above, are not pictures of natural systems or objects, but representations and results of the processes and relationships by which natural systems and objects come to be. They are built from the inside out, as it were.

To begin a piece, Spransy assembles a library of “research drawings” that play out the various rules and rule sets she intends to use—essentially a kind of preliminary modeling of the visual system she wants to explore. Sometimes these are based on fairly simple mathematical or geometric rules that tell her when a line or shape will turn or divide or end. Other times she uses several different sets of rules at the same time—whether mathematical or derived from biological relationships such as those between base pairs on the DNA strand, or the way bacteria will move towards available sources of food in a Petri dish. But though these rules are established at the outset of a new piece, when she begins a new large-scale work, the outcome is anything but mechanistically predetermined, for several reasons.

First, the physical context in which she’ll be exploring each basic “module” or set of rules is different from that of her research drawings, having moved from a sheet of paper onto large prepared canvases that are five or six feet on a side. She does not transfer the small drawing from the paper to canvas, but regards that earlier work as preparation and practice of the process out of which the final work will emerge. Second, because the works are hand-drawn, there is always the element of her own agency and engagement with both the materials and the rules. There is an inescapably subjective quality to the way she responds to both materials and means. There is also subjectivity to the way she engages with the lines and shapes she has already laid down. Put another way, the abstraction of the rules is always mediated by and expressed through specific, very concrete and physical circumstances.

Finally, Spransy’s process includes what she thinks of as cataclysmic events or moments of chaos: intentional ruptures of the emergent system by gestures that overwhelm and obliterate sections of what she’s already done. Often she will shield sections of the existing system from the coming trauma either by masking them off or by subtly manipulating the flood of color—tilting the canvas to preserve sections of what was there. Afterwards, she will continue scribing and painting lines from the original system on top of or adjacent to the new areas of color, but in ways that respond and adapt to the new visual ecosystem. In this way, layers of work are built up, obliterated, and built up again.

Again, there is an inescapable agency at work in what—from the imagined standpoint of the system itself—must seem a randomly destructive occurrence, but Spransy’s point in breaking into the system is to test the limits of its creative, integrative capacity. By creating “environmental pressure” in this way, then coaxing the fragments and remnant information to multiply and reassert their orderly identities again, she asks, “How flexible are the rules?” The finished paintings are not rote recitations of fractal or statistical formulae, then, but objects with both a physical and a relational history. They are records of a thoughtful, physically engaged, but also humble exploration of how the confluence of order and chaos creates meaning.

Though Spransy denies that there can be such a thing as a “perfect analogy,” her artistic practice has spiritual underpinnings and spiritual implications, as well as visual results. Like many working scientists, she is seeking a way of understanding how the creator engages with His creation, and a better grasp on how we creatures should make our way in response. On one hand, her attentiveness to the basic orderliness of the material creation has a corollary in the familiar disciplines of faith, including reading the scriptures, prayer, and responding with mercy to ruptures in human lives and communities. But on the other hand, her embrace of surprise and chaos is, as she says, an “invitation to the otherness of God,” and a recognition that radically “dissimilar things sometimes occupy the same space.” In combination, those divergent elements help Spransy’s works hover at the boundary between knowing and un-knowing, between control and accident, between freedom and determinism.

Spransy notes that “even in the aftermath of great destruction, life is given great opportunity. In science we’re actually happy and excited when there’s a break in the rules.” This insight, clarified and lived out in her life as well as her artistic practice, directs us to consider not only the necessity and goodness of diligent pursuit of the rules, but also to reconsider the goodness of what we are otherwise inclined to see as calamity and chaos. Indeed, Spransy’s work points us back to the central paradox of the Christian faith: that the most radical disruption of the natural systems of the world occurred two thousand years ago in Palestine with the coming of Christ—singular proof that rupture does not necessarily end in destruction, but may be our means to redemption.

Linnéa Gabriela Spransy grew up in rural Oregon in a community attentive to Christ’s call to live in community with one’s neighbors, but was herself equally aware of God’s presence in the natural world around her. She received her BFA in Drawing from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art. In the midst of exhibiting in solo and group shows in university and commercial galleries, she moved to Milwaukee to study the Bible and consider how it might re-frame her sense of self and her career as an artist. In 2005 she relocated to Kansas City to help found the Boiler Room, a prayer-focused intentional community where she lives and in which she is the artist in residence. She continues to show her work widely, has pieces in pubic and private collections, and was the subject of a recent film-making project: Linnéa: Freedom Through Limits. More of her art can be seen on her website.

Originally posted February 4, 2012

As we discussed yesterday, the most dramatic innovation yet observed in the E. coli Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) was the ability, acquired by one of the twelve cultures, to use citrate as a carbon source under aerobic conditions. When we last discussed the LTEE in 2011, we noted what was known then about the mutations that eventually combined to produce the Cit+ trait:

Tracking down the nature of this dramatic change led to some interesting findings. The ability to use citrate as a food source did not arise in a single step, but rather as a series of steps, some of which are separated by thousands of generations:

1. The first step is a mutation that arose at around generation 20,000. This mutation on its own does not allow the bacteria to use citrate, but without this mutation in place, later generations cannot evolve the ability to use citrate. Lenski and colleagues were careful to determine that this mutation is not simply a mutation that increases the background mutation rate. In other words, a portion of what later becomes “specified information for using citrate” arises thousands of generations before citrate is ever used.
2. The earliest mutants that can use citrate as a food source do so very, very poorly – once they use up the available glucose, they take a long time to switch over to using citrate. These “early adopters” are a tiny fraction of the overall population. The “specified information for using citrate” at this stage is pretty poor.
3. Once the (poor) ability to use citrate shows up, other mutations arise that greatly improve this new ability. Soon, bacteria that use citrate dominate the population. The “specified information for using citrate” has now been honed by further mutation and natural selection.
4. Despite the “takeover”, a fraction of the population unable to use citrate persists as a minority. These cells eke out a living by being “glucose specialists” – they are better at using up glucose rapidly and then going into stasis before the slightly slower citrate-eaters catch up. So, new “specified information to get the glucose quickly before those pesky citrate-eaters do” allows these bacteria to survive. As such, the two lineages in this population have partitioned the available resources and now occupy two different ecological niches in the same environment. As such, they are well on their way to becoming different bacterial species.

As such, we noted three distinct steps observed by the Lenski group: steps they call potentiation, actualization, and refinement. Potentiation mutations do not themselves result in the ability to use citrate under aerobic conditions, but they are necessary for it to appear later. Actualization is the mutation that first brings about the Cit+ trait, though, as we noted, this step produced only a very weak Cit+ effect. This nascent ability, however, then undergoes refinement through additional mutations and selection to give the final, robust Cit+ trait observed in the culture.

While some things were known about these steps when the Lenski group last published on this topic (in 2008), the precise details remained unclear. What was needed was a complete characterization of the Cit+ bacteria through whole-genome sequencing to help indentify the changes. These long-awaited results are now available in a new paper published last month by the Lenski group, and they shed light on all three stages of the process.

Lights, camera, actualization

The key step - and the one of greatest interest - is of course actualization: the mutation that converted a Cit- cell to a Cit+ one. This is also one of the easiest steps to study, since the mutation provides the cell with a new feature that can be detected experimentally. Though E. coli cannot use citrate as a carbon source in the presence of oxygen, they are capable of using citrate in anoxic conditions (i.e. when oxygen is absent). To do so, they employ a protein that imports citrate in to the cell while at the same time exporting a compound called succinate. Since this protein is already present in the E. coli genome, it was long suspected that a genetic regulatory change that turned on its production in the presence of oxygen could be the key innovation that produced the first Cit+ bacterium in the culture. As we discussed yesterday, Behe notes that this change could result from a loss-of-FCT or a gain-of-FCT mutation:

“If the phenotype of the Lenski Cit+ strain is caused by the loss of the activity of a normal genetic regulatory element, such as a repressor binding site or other FCT, it will, of course, be a loss-of-FCT mutation, despite its highly adaptive effects in the presence of citrate. If the phenotype is due to one or more mutations that result in, for example, the addition of a novel genetic regulatory element, gene duplication with sequence divergence, or the gain of a new binding site, then it will be a noteworthy gain-of-FCT mutation.”

Interestingly, the actualization mutation was indeed a change of regulation of the anoxic citrate / succinate transporter, and it arose through a gain-of-FCT mutation. The mutation turned out to be a side-by-side duplication of the citrate / succinate transporter gene, as well as portions of two genes on either side of it. This imprecise duplication placed a partial fusion of these flanking genes next door to one of the copies of the citrate / succinate transporter gene. This brought the copy under the control of promoter sequences derived from of one of its neighbors, a gene that is active when oxygen is present. The resulting product was a copy of the citrate / succinate transporter gene that was now very weakly expressed in aerobic conditions. Since this is an example of a mutation that duplicates a gene and simultaneously creates a new regulatory element for it (causing significant sequence divergence), this is a clear-cut example of a gain-of-FCT mutation.

Responding to the data

While Behe has not yet, to my knowledge commented on this particular development within the LTEE, one of his colleagues in the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM), microbiologist Ann Gauger, has offered her thoughts. Two themes emerge in her commentary: that the Cit+ trait is “not new”, and that the number of mutations it required were within the bounds set out by Behe and another member of the IDM, structural biologist Douglas Axe:

When is an innovation not an innovation? If by innovation you mean the evolution of something new, a feature not present before, then it would be stretching it to call the trait described by Blount et al. in "Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population" an innovation [...]

The total number of mutations postulated for this adaptation is two or three, within the limits proposed for complex adaptations by Axe (2010) and Behe in Edge of Evolution. Because the enabling pre-adaptive mutations could not be identified, though, we don't know whether this was one mutation, a simple step-wise series of adaptive mutations, or a complex adaptation requiring one or two pre-adaptations before the big event.

But does this adaptation constitute a genuine innovation? That depends on the definition of innovation you use. It certainly is an example of reusing existing information in a new context, thus producing a new niche for E. coli in lab cultures. But if the definition of innovation is something genuinely new, such as a new transport molecule or a new enzyme, then no, this adaptation falls short as an innovation. And no one should be surprised.

While Gauger does not speak to the tension between her description of the Cit+ mutation as “not genuinely new” and Behe’s criteria that this should be classified as a gain-of-FCT mutation, it is clear that she views this event as within Behe’s “edge” – i.e. within the bounds of “what Darwinism can do.” Additionally, she sees it as falling within the scope of what is evolutionarily possible as proposed by Axe’s work. In the next installment of this series, we’ll revisit how Behe defines his (claimed) limit of what evolutionary processes can accomplish, with this new evidence in hand. In doing so, a careful examination of the potentiation and refinement phases of the Cit+ transition will be informative.

For further reading:

Blount, Z.D., Barrick, J.E., Davidson, C.J. and Lenski, R.E. (2012). Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population. Nature 489; 513- 518.

Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2007).

Michael J. Behe (2010). Experimental evolution, loss-of-function mutations, and “The first rule of adaptive evolution”. The Quarterly Review of Biology 85(4); 419-445.

Photo credit: Jan Bacon

Singer/songwriter Andy Zipf’s “Stumble on the Line” is built around the image of a river flowing through a canyon it has sculpted—an image that can easily be played out as a picture of the way that the Lord has been at work preparing a path for us in the material world, complete with signposts to his former and present activity. Zipf’s imagery of flowing water as a powerful (even dangerous) but also refreshing force echoes the similarly-complicated place of springs and rivers and seas in the scriptures; his description of his own path through the canyon calls to mind the Psalmist’s affirmation that his help comes not from the idols erected on the heights, but from the maker who has crafted both heaven and earth. Here, the river has literally made the canyon, carving it through the “years and layers,” and leaving the evidence of that long work as a sign to all who journey through.

But though Zipf’s canyon provides shelter, a good measure of necessary constraint, and even encouragement to keep moving along the river-course, the thrust of the song is that seeking God is a complicated, sometimes difficult endeavor, whether we are looking for Him through what He has made or through what He has said. The lyrics suggest that walking with the Lord is a path of halting discovery and intrigue, of our learning to notice the way God’s actions in the past are written subtly into the world around us. But Zipf also implies that this is a path that requires obedience, since we are also confronted with the fact that He sometimes speaks to us directly and unequivocally, saying, “follow me.” The song does not take its name and refrain from the river itself, then, but from how we tend to navigate and respond to the terrain it has carved: we “stumble on the line.”

Though pursuing the text’s geologic conceit a bit further is possible, what is more poignant for all of us engaged in the science and faith dialogue is that “Stumble On the Line” is at its heart a love song addressed to the “you” that is the river—the one who has carved the path and along whose banks the singer and we pick our way. Our attentiveness to this terrain of faith does not come first from our desire to analyze and categorize the “evidence” of how it came to look as it does, or even to demystify the mechanism by which a message might be written “in a line of stones.” Rather, what leads us on is the desire to know how to relate to the water itself. The song describes not just a physical path, then, but one of the heart and will.

Indeed, the personal address of the song focuses our attention on the fact that the subtlety or obviousness of the signs along our way have much less to do with whether or not we heed them than does the basic dividedness of our hearts. As Zipf says, we alternate between “trying to reach” and “trying to leave” the One we love. Put another way, we do not reject how God has written his past activity into the layers and years of the earth, or spelled out his intentions for us in the future because they are not obvious, but for the same reason we reject any and all of His claims on us at one time or another: because we wish to be the ones who forge the path, write the story, and sing the song. Our pride—whether in our science or our righteousness—is what keeps us blind and deaf to His leading in our daily path. And yet, even—perhaps especially—in response to our pride, God makes a way for us to gain a better perspective, and leads us on towards Him through whatever means we need.

To return to the language of the song, there is a beautiful ambivalence to the word “stumble,” that contains reminders that following the Lord involves being ever surprised by His ways (we “stumble on” his truth as an unexpected discovery), and ever broken by our own ways (we “stumble on” our pride as an impediment to seeing and following). Yet in both cases, our stumbling leaves us in the same position: on our knees before the one who is both maker and guide. In the last few repeated lines of the piece Zipf affirms that we must and will continue to stumble on in this path of love, whether we come to each stumbling place through surprise and joy, or pride and brokenness. From that position of humility and worship we have the proper perspective to see and affirm that the God who creates is the God who speaks is the God who redeems—the Lord who meets us on our knees, lifts us up, and guides us into the steps of His righteousness.

“Stumble On the Line”

© 2009 by Andy Zipf

I walk a weathered canyon
you're the rapids, running through it
years and layers start to show
in the soil, there is a swelling, beating rhythm to it
earnest prayer I used to know

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you

came upon a message,
hidden in some shallow water,
written in a line of stones
telling me to go on down the canyon, follow after. . .
so I keep on. . .

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you

I walk a weathered canyon
you're the rapids, running through it
years and layers start to show
in the soil, there is a swelling, beating rhythm to it
earnest prayer I come to know

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you.

Though now based in Washington, DC, Andy Zipf began life in the Midwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa), but moved to Pennsylania and then New Jersey before his family settled in northern Virginia. He began his career as a professional singer and songwriter shortly after high school, and has performed over 400 times in the last four years—in living rooms, coffee houses, churches, concert halls, and bars. Though “Stumble on the Line” comes from Andy’s 2009 ep “Our Voice Is a Weapon,” his third full-length album and seventh studio release, “Jealous Hands,” became available in July, 2011. More details on Andy and downloads of his music may be found on his website.

In his essay for that series, Jeff Schloss addressed the question of whether animal death is a natural evil, but also noted that such theological considerations aside, death does not actually “drive evolution” in the way most people imagine—especially when they think of violence in the natural world. This more complicated sense of death’s role is partially the result of modern evolutionary science recognizing the importance of cooperation and inter-relation among species, rather than just direct competition. But just as important is the knowledge that evolution is significantly shaped not by the deaths of individual creatures, but by extinction, the loss of species over time. In this post, we explore some aspects of how extinction acts as both a destructive and creative force in evolutionary history, including the evolutionary history of mammals.

Sporadic extinction

Extinction is actually a common feature of life on earth when viewed over long (e.g. geological) timescales. By some estimates, over 99% of the species that have ever lived have gone extinct. One factor that promotes extinction is the fact that evolution does not produce species that are optimally adapted to their environment, but only better adapted than their local competitors. Invasive species testify to this fact: local (endemic) species are not always the best-adapted species for their own environment. Examples abound where species from other environments are actually better-suited to out-compete endemic species. Here in my own province, the invasive Himilayan blackberry (Rubis discolor) easily outcompetes many endemic species. If endemic species were optimally adapted to their environment, this would not be possible, as they would outcompete all exotic species. Instead, exotic species, by chance, might be better adapted to an ecosystem they did not evolve in. These exotics may be capable of eliminating endemic species altogether.

Such an extinction event (of a single species, or perhaps a handful of species) alters the environment of other remaining species in an ecosystem. This, in turn, may influence the ability of some of these remaining species to reproduce compared to other species. For example, the extinction of a competitor might allow a species to increase in population size. Conversely, the extinction of a species that provides a benefit (such as a pollinator) may reduce a species in number. As the ecosystem landscape shifts due to loss of species, new biological opportunities, or niches, might arise. These new niches are then available to support new species to fill them.

Extinction, en masse

One way to appreciate how extinction opens up new niches is to examine mass extinction events – geologically brief periods where large numbers of species go extinct at the same time. Over the history of life on our planet there have been several mass extinction events. The largest such event, at the end of the Permian (~250 million years ago) appears to have been caused, at least in part, by intense volcanic activity over several hundred thousand years. This activity likely shifted CO2 levels and eventually led to a “runaway” greenhouse effect that dramatically raised global temperatures and led to anoxic (i.e. oxygen-depleted) oceans, though the exact contributions of these varied factors remains an area of scientific debate. What appears certain is that during this period environmental changes were too rapid for most species to keep evolutionary pace with, and as a result over 90% of the world’s species alive at that time went extinct. Obviously this represents destruction of biodiversity on an unimaginable scale, and the destructive effects of this event are with us to this day.

Speciation, en masse

This destruction, however, is not the whole story. Following on from the Permian mass extinction, we observe a steady increase in new species. These are species previously unknown in the fossil record. In fact, this pattern (a “radiation” of new species following an extinction event) is the rule, not an exception – we see the same effect after every mass extinction in the fossil record. Extinction is a driving force for novelty.

Perhaps the most famous mass extinction event is the Cretaceous – Paleogene (KPg) extinction, and it too follows this standard pattern. This mass extinction took place 65 million years ago when an asteroid ~10 kilometers in diameter struck the Yucatan peninsula. (Note: this event was formerly known as the Cretaceous – Tertiary (K-T) extinction, but that terminology is in decline within the scientific community). This extinction event is famous since it is the one that eliminated the dinosaurs (with the exception of the ancestors of modern birds). As with the Permian extinction, the elimination of so many species shifted the evolutionary landscape for the remaining species, and the result was a burst of speciation that appears rapid when viewed in geological time. Significantly for our own species, following the KPg extinction event is a burst in mammalian speciation, as small mammals that survived the event diverge and fill niches left empty by the dinosaurs. Without this event, the trajectory of mammalian evolution would certainly look very different.

Clearing the deck, and re-filling the niches

One interesting fact to note is that biological features that make a species resistant to usual, sporadic extinction are not necessarily the same features that will be useful during a mass extinction event. While species are continually under selection at the local level, there is no mechanism for (pre) selection to survive a mass extinction. As such, only species that happen to have the right combination of traits will survive, and often spread widely after a mass extinction. These so-called “disaster species” are usually generalists, and will later be displaced by more specialized species as they arise. As such, where sporadic extinction allows for more gradual turnover in species, mass extinction events are major “resets” of evolution that can radically shift what constitutes “well adapted” in a geological eyeblink. For mammals at the KPg boundary, small body size and an omnivorous diet (including the ability to scavenge detritus) were the “winning” combination of traits that allowed them to survive where larger, more specialized animals (think Tyrannosaurus rex) could not. From this rather humble station, mammals would come to dominate the world’s ecosystems over the coming eons – including a lineage that would someday lead to our own species. Far from only a destructive force, extinction is a powerful mechanism to allow evolutionary innovation, and one that was of significant importance to us.

For further reading:

Meredith, R.W. et al (2011). Impacts of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution and KPg Extinction on Mammal Diversification. Science 334; 521-524.

Fastovsky, D.E. (2005). The Extinction of the Dinosaurs in North America. GSA Today (15); 1052-5173.

Benton, M.J. and Twitchett, R.J. (2003). How to kill (almost) all life: the end-Permian extinction event. TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution (18); 358-365.

The Evolutionary Role of Death & Natural Evil

In addition to providing a general theological critique of the endemic—as opposed to post-hoc or intrusive—origins of death in the natural world, John Laing’s imminently fair-minded essay also takes theological aim at the role death and natural evil play in the evolutionary diversification of life. It is one thing to say that death is primordial; it is another to view it not just as an ancient byproduct, but as the central means of creation. The understandable theological uneasiness expressed by John and many others about this issue ultimately rests not just on an understanding of God’s creative activity, but also on a particular representation of evolution. In this regard John makes two important claims:

• a) “…natural selection, with its emphasis on a natural state characterized by competition for limited resources and a general struggle for survival, is the primary means by which speciation takes place…”
• b) “death actually functions as a mechanism for life. Death plays a vital role in natural selection by rooting out weakness and driving evolutionary development.”

For reasons I discussed in the previous section, it is not entirely clear that death constitutes an evil that is incommensurate with divine activity. However, the fact is that the above depiction of evolution—which is not unique to John amongst public commentators and is largely commensurate with Darwin’s own views—does not adequately portray current discussions within evolutionary biology. There are three problems with this portrayal that I’d like to address in turn—three aspects of evolutionary theory that need to be better understood.

First, while there is no uncertainty about common descent or about natural selection as a cause of evolutionary change, there is considerable discussion over the extent to which natural selection is “the primary means” by which speciation takes place. For one thing, there are manifold other agents of evolutionary change: drift, gene flow, systems of mating, mutation itself unfiltered by selection. A tremendous amount of variation may be adaptively neutral, being invisible to natural selection. For another thing, some claim that evolution proceeds most rapidly and speciation occurs most precipitously in the relaxation of selection—when ecological times are good and the culling effects of the environment are minimized. We may see this in the contingency-driven formation or colonization of a new habitat or the exploitation of a new resource that does not displace previous variants. Or, speciation events or species-level innovations may be the results of chromosomal rearrangements or symbiogenesis that are not the cumulative results of selection. Finally, there exist manifold and admittedly controversial proposals that are critical of neo-Darwinism as a whole, claiming that natural selection may be a necessary, but is neither a sufficient nor a primary cause of large-scale evolutionary change.¹

Second, notwithstanding Darwin’s formulation of natural selection in terms of competitive struggle as (accurately) cited by John, the modern understanding of evolution and competition is considerably more differentiated and complicated. For one thing, competition is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for natural selection. Natural selection is formally defined as the differential reproduction of genotypes (or information.) Some sets of genes are replicated with greater efficiency than are others. Competition is formally defined as the negative impact of two organisms (or two species) on one another’s fitness. You can have all sorts of competition that does not result in natural selection. And importantly, you can have differential reproduction by natural selection without the negative fitness impacts of competition. Colonists to a new under-exploited habitat, or two species that are partitioned onto separate resources in a way that minimizes competition might well have some variants that leave more offspring than others without displacing them. This is natural selection.

Indeed, imagine an infinite habitat with non-limiting resources and no competition at all: as long as there were adaptively salient mutations, there would be natural selection—some of those new genotypes would reproduce more effectively than others. Competition, to whatever extent it exists in nature, is a consequence of finitude and not a necessary precondition of natural selection. And finally, the role of cooperation in evolution has itself been massively reconsidered in recent years. It would not be entirely unfair to say that on the basis of mathematical models and empirical data, the proposal that cooperation “is now seen as a primary creative force”² and a “fundamental principle of evolution”³ has moved from being a cult-alternative to a widely accepted paradigm. Indeed, cooperation and increasing scales of cooperative interdependence are seen not only as a formative process but also as a recurring product of evolutionary change, which may even be viewed as “progress.”⁴ A biologically significant and theologically salient thematic trend across major evolutionary transitions, is that cooperative interdependence itself – and the wondrous properties of life mentioned in the first installment of this essay – seem to be amplified through selection.⁴ Through evolution, God may be seen to confer life and confer it in greater abundance.

Third, the claim that “death drives evolutionary development” turns out to be problematic. Recent discussions of death and senescence (organismic decay) between various branches of the biosciences are spirited and fascinating. One of the vexing characteristics of living creatures is the internalization of death and senescence: even if an individual is not killed by external forces, it will die from the inside out—virtually no species is immortal.⁶ One account of this—the rate of living theory of senescence—understands it not in terms of selection for reduced mortality but in terms of biophysical or allometric constraints relating rate of metabolism to rate of wearing out. Though it views senescence differently, the prevailing evolutionary theory of senescence, with several variants, does not affirm death or decay—at least the kind of death and decay that is intrinsic to organismic development—as a prerequisite to evolution by natural selection either.⁷

Indeed, internalized death is viewed not as driving but as deriving from, not as a necessary requirement for but as a byproduct of, natural selection. Specifically, mutations or traits with detrimental impacts later in life may not be eliminated by or may even be favored by selection if their contribution to reproduction early in life is sufficient. Now, neither theory completely dismisses the shaping role of death. Under certain but not all conditions, differential mortality may have adaptive import (and it is not even the longer-lived organisms that always have adaptive advantage). Extrinsic sources of death may also shape the internalization of death.⁸ But the view that death drives evolution does not adequately represent emerging scientific understanding of the relationship between natural selection and senescence.

Scientifically death does not “drive” evolution. And theologically, although neither evolutionary change nor ecological interaction “solve” the ultimate puzzle of human death, they may nevertheless mitigate the proximal existence of creaturely death by amplifying the complexity and vibrant abundance of living forms.

Darwin famously closed The Origin by observing “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”⁹ Unlike John, I do not see anything in evolutionary theory to reduce, and I see much to augment the sense of grandeur and (for that matter) the appreciation of sheer goodness—both earthly and divine—evoked by the wonders of the living world.

Yet grandeur and goodness are not perfection. My Dad is still dying. I still wince at the suffering of clearly sentient animals. And, truth be told, I tremble at the biblical images of universal herbivory: even metaphors are metaphors of something, and in the case of biblical revelation, that something can be taken to be real and important. So like John, I confess to profound gratitude tempered with a lingering unease at the state of nature. Though I believe in a Fall, this unease is not rationally relieved by attributing to an Adam the present state of all nature. Nor is it resolved by the various alternative considerations I’ve described and which, taken together, seem to have considerable merit but not sufficiency. Notwithstanding, I thankfully affirm that “I have known the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” And I look to the day when we may say together, “My ears had heard of You, but now my eyes have seen You.” (Job 42:5)

Notes

1. E.g., Salthe, S. 2008. “An Anti-Neo-Darwinian View of Evolution.” Artificial Life. 14:231-233; David Depew and Bruce Weber (eds). Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. 2004. MIT Press
2. Michod, Richard and Denis Roze. 2001. “Cooperation and Conflict in the Evolution of Multicellularity.” Heredity. 86:1-7. Page 2
3. Nowak, Martin. Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation. Martin Nowak & Sarah Coakley, eds. Forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
4. Sigmund, Karl and Eörs Szathmáry. 1998. “Merging Lines and Emerging Levels.” Nature. 392: 439-441.
5. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry. 1998. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford University Press. Brett Calcott & Kim Sterelny (eds). 2011. The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited. MIT Press.
6. “Virtually” is an important qualifier: while senescence has been documented in nearly all organisms examined, there are some cell lines and species in which this may not be the case.
7. Williams, George. 1957. “Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence.” Evolution. 11:398-411.
8. This relationship is complex and not invariant. E.g., Williams, Paul and Day, Troy. 2003. “Antagonistic Pleiotropy, Mortality Source Interactions, and the Evolutionary Theory of Senescence.” Evolution. 57(7): 1478-1488.
9. Darwin, Charles. 1876. The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. 6th Edition. John Murray. p. 429.

Recently, an elegant and powerful experiment was done to further investigate a question of interest to many evangelicals: how is it that we are so different from our closest biological relative (the chimpanzee) when our DNA is so very similar? Even when using estimates that maximize the differences, our genomes are 95% identical. The conclusion, that I have discussed here in the past is that a dispersed set of numerous small changes can have large effects on the form and function of an organism. Of course, small changes are what evolution specializes in: tinkering here and there, one mutation at a time, as we have directly observed in laboratory experiments. Before we discuss how this pivotal new study was done, however, a brief review of how genes work is in order.

Review: gene structure and function

If you’ve been following the ongoing Understanding Evolution series here at BioLogos, you will recall that we discussed gene structure and function not long ago, in the context of discussing non-functional DNA sequences (so-called “junk DNA”):

Genes have a typical structure (obviously simplified here somewhat). First off, there is the actual DNA sequence that specifies the protein product sequence (the so-called “coding sequence”, shown in blue). This sequence is usually broken up into segments in mammalian genes, and these sequences are spliced together when the DNA sequence of the gene is transcribed into a “working copy” called mRNA – a short duplicate of the code that can be used by the cell’s machinery to actually build the specified protein.

In addition to the actual coding sequences, other sequences are needed to tell the cell when and where certain genes should be transcribed into mRNA. Every cell in an organism has the same genes in their chromosomes, but not all are transcribed. Using different genes in different combinations is what makes cells take on distinct roles – for example, cells in your small intestine need different genes (for absorption of nutrients) than do cells of the immune system (for fighting off pathogens). Regulatory sequences make sure any given cell type has the right genes transcribed and made into protein products. Some of these sequences are part of the mRNA transcript (shown in red), and others are not transcribed but only part of the chromosomal DNA sequence (such as the “promoter” region that directs the enzymes responsible for making the mRNA transcript (shown in blue).

With this background in mind, we can now extend our understanding slightly further. DNA in cells is “packaged up” when not in use by winding it around a class of proteins called histones. This packaging keeps the DNA in a compact form, and it is useful in helping cells prevent genes they don’t need from being transcribed. For any given chromosome - which is one long strand of DNA – some regions will be packed away (and the genes there not transcribed), while other regions are unpacked (less tightly associated with histones) with the genes there actively undergoing transcription. The open regions allow for transcription because enzymes and other proteins needed for the process can gain access to the DNA there.

Comparing gene transcription across species at the genomic level

Because of the overwhelming similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes (and the even greater similarity when examining only their protein-coding regions) it has long been hypothesized that changes in “where and when” genes are transcribed will be a major player in what makes our two species different (in contrast to the idea that we are different because of the relatively tiny changes in the coding regions of our genes). From an evolutionary point of view, there are a few ways to explore how differences in gene transcription arise once species go their separate ways, such as when our ancestors parted ways with our last common ancestor with chimps around 4-6 million years ago. The main idea is to compare the same cell type in both species: human skin cells versus chimp skin cells, for example. Determining what specific genes are transcribed (or not) in human cells and comparing the results to chimpanzee cells gives us an idea of how gene transcription differences arose in the two lineages since they last shared a common ancestor. The challenge, up until now, is that there was no easy way to indentify the changes in regulatory DNA that led to those differences in transcription. The problem arises because of the overwhelming similarities between our genomes: changes in transcription due to changes in DNA sequence are hard to find simply by looking for sequence differences, since in most cases the differences will be very small. There are also many small differences between our genomes that have no effect on gene transcription, so we cannot simply look for any difference at all. What we need is a way to identify which small changes led to differences in gene transcription.

Old hypotheses, new technology

Back in 2008, a method for addressing this issue was devised. As we have seen, DNA undergoing transcription is “unpacked” and accessible to enzymes. Researchers have long known about a certain enzyme, called DNAse I, that can cut exposed DNA but leave histone-packaged DNA alone. This means that DNA from any given cell type can be cut using this enzyme specifically at “DNAse I hypersensitive sites” (DHS’s) where regulatory DNA is unpackaged and a nearby gene is being transcribed. While this technique is decades old, what is new is a way to then go on to sequence the DNA next to each of these sites. This requires what is known as “next-generation” or “deep” DNA sequencing methods that can use a linker sequence to attach to the DNAse I cut sites and then amplify and sequence individual DNA fragments attached to the linker. Since we have the entire genome sequence of humans and chimps it is then trivial to take the sequencing results and map them to either genome. The results are a detailed map of what chromosome regions are unpacked and regulating transcription in each cell type. These maps can then be compared with related species across entire genomes.

It was only a matter of time before these powerful methods were applied to the human-chimp question, and the first results became available last month. The research group was of course interested in differences between the two species, and the results are fascinating. The researchers looked at several different cell types, and found similar results in all cases. The results for any given gene fall into one of several categories when compared to the human-chimp (H-C) last common ancestor:

• No differences in regulatory DNA relative to the H-C last common ancestor (1259 genes)
• Gain of regulatory DNA in humans relative to the H-C last common ancestor (836 genes)
• Loss of regulatory DNA in humans relative to the H-C last common ancestor (286 genes)
• Gain of regulatory DNA in chimpanzees relative to the H-C last common ancestor (676 genes)
• Loss of regulatory DNA in chimpanzees relative to the last common ancestor (211 genes)

While it was not surprising to find a significant percentage of unchanged genes, it was interesting to note the large percentage of differences in regulatory DNA, despite the overwhelming genomic similarity between the two species. Small changes had a large impact on gene regulation. The researchers went on to examine the new regulatory regions they had identified, and found that they showed evidence of being under natural selection. These mutations had not only brought change, but provided an advantage to their hosts.

These results underscore a few important points:

• Species become different because differences accumulate in both lineages once a common ancestral population splits into two. The differences we see in modern species are due to changes both species have accumulated over time.
• Tweaking the regulation of numerous genes appears to be a widespread mechanism for generating evolutionary novelty. Both gaining and losing regulatory sequences is common.
• These gains or losses in regulatory DNA require only very small changes at the DNA sequence level, but they can have profound impacts on how genes are transcribed.
• These changes appear to be widespread in genomes, and able to accrue in short evolutionary timescales.
• Small changes are exactly the sort of thing that evolution is known to be able to accomplish easily, one mutation at a time.
• These small changes bear the marks of natural selection, indicating that they were selected for as they arose.
• Anyone who wishes to call these differences “insignificant” will have to contend with the observation that the biological differences we observe between humans and chimpanzees are significant.
• Small, incremental changes at the genomic level fit nicely with the fossil evidence for human evolution, which, though fragmentary, indicates gradual changes in skeletal morphology over the same timescale.

Of course, this study is just the beginning, and future studies are sure to examine and compare additional cell types found in humans and our evolutionary cousins. These results have already added to the troubles of antievolutionary groups that wish to portray the differences between us as too great for evolutionary mechanisms to bridge. I suspect these troubles will only worsen in the coming years as these new techniques come into their own.

For further reading:

Shibata Y, Sheffield NC, Fedrigo O, Babbitt CC, Wortham M, et al. (2012). Extensive Evolutionary Changes in Regulatory Element Activity during Human Origins Are Associated with Altered Gene Expression and Positive Selection. PLoS Genetics 8(6): e1002789. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002789

http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1002789

One thing I ask from the LORD,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

Psalm 27: 4

I belong in the ranks of those who have cultivated the beauty that is the distinctive feature of scientific research.

Marie Curie¹

All of the biologists I know are undeniable lovers of their objects of study...

Konrad Lorenz²

Beauty in Science

As a biologist, I am fascinated by the fluorescent-on-black images of cells, 3D rotations of protein structures, and cross-sections of colourful tissue samples that grace the covers of scientific journals. I have spent whole weeks staring down a microscope at the beautifully transparent bodies of developing fish embryos, and whenever possible I illustrate my written work with photographs of the natural world. I’m not alone. In the institute where I did my PhD we had a basement full of microscopes and imaging technology, and it was considered important to have beautiful images in your presentations—movies were even better. The journal Nature: Cell Biology always features striking images on its covers, and in an editorial these photographs were described as works of art in their own right. In fact, ‘scientific art’ has become a recognised genre, and displays of science-related images are increasingly popular in research institutes, museums, science festivals and other public spaces.

Indeed, a number of practicing scientists have devoted their time outside the lab to communicating the beauty and wonder of science to the general public. (See sidebar.) One of these is Dr. Lynne Quarmby, a cell biologist who’s passionate about explaining her work to people outside of the scientific community. She writes a regular column, a ‘nexus of mystery, art, literature, beauty and science,’ for the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq.

If we can recognize and acknowledge that our direct biological senses, as wonderful as they are, give us only a tightly pinched and cloudy view of the world, then we open ourselves to unimagined beauty.

Lynne Quarmby, Numero Cinq, 2011³

Biologists often label themselves according to the ‘model organism’ that they work on. I was a zebrafish person, and Quarmby is a Chlamydomonas person. Chlamydomonas is not an STD (you’re thinking of Chlamydia), but a gentle single-celled algae that is in all likelihood swimming around the standing water in your garden as you read. This microscopic creature is easy to grow in the lab (a jam jar on a sunny windowsill will do), its genome has been sequenced, and it is a surprisingly powerful tool for studying human disease.

Chlamydomonas was not an obvious choice for medical research, but the secret is in the cilia. Cilia are hair-thin appendages that wave around in a coordinated fashion to move their owner from A to B. But these algae don’t spend their whole lives swimming around. When they reproduce, their cilia are absorbed back into the cell body (scroll to the 4th video here). When conditions are stressful, the cilia simply drop off. Quarmby and her students studied Chlamydomonas mutants that hold on to their cilia, and discovered a family of proteins involved in the regulation of both cilia and cell division.

At the same time as Quarmby was studying the behaviour of cilia in Chlamydomonas, medical researchers were identifying genes that are mutated in humans. The same proteins involved in cilia and cell cycle control in Chlamydomonas were affected in some patients with polycystic kidney disease. What’s the connection? Cell biologists knew that most of our cells have cilia on them, but assumed that they were not important. Our cells generally do not swim around, unless they’re sperm. It turns out that these tiny appendages are involved in a whole range of vital cell functions. The cilia on kidney cells are important for sensing the flow of urine, and without these the kidney cannot function properly.

Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to unicellular flagellates, but what I appreciate is the detail. To see the minutiae of cell structure is stunning, particularly when you know how difficult it is to achieve images like the ones in this article in the journal Cytoskeleton, or even the image of an adult rat head, below. And little Chlamydomonas, a microscopic pond dweller, has advanced our understanding of a devastating human disease. This combination of aesthetic experience and elegant scientific explanation is what I find beautiful. ⁴

Adult rat head MRI © Gavin Merrifield, University of Edinburgh.

It appears to be a universal experience for scientists to find beauty in their experimental systems. Perhaps this is because the daily discipline of examining anything in detail brings an appreciation of its finer points. Or maybe the process of choosing something to study and then spending the greater part of one’s waking hours staring at it provokes something akin to the loyalty of the mother who thinks her child is beautiful, despite the large pimple on its nose. But even bearing in mind the fascination and devotion of the true professional, there seems to be something more in the scientist’s experience of beauty.⁵ Most, I think, simply delight in the beauty of creation. For some, this gives a sense of the transcendent: a sort of natural spirituality. For a Christian, this encounter with beauty draws them nearer to God.

Christian Appreciation of Beauty in Science

One of the driving forces behind the work of many of the early scientists was their Christian faith. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) initially hoped to pursue theology, but was eventually satisfied that science was also a way to glorify God.⁶ Many others, including the famous naturalist John Ray (1627-1705), were ordained clergy in addition to their academic studies, so their science and theology were naturally interwoven. Others, like James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879), examined Christianity as rigorously as their scientific experiments.

These pioneering scientists (or ‘natural philosophers’, as they called themselves back then) were encouraged by a rich tradition of theology that wholeheartedly encouraged their exploration of creation. The Hebrew Scriptures tell how creation reveals the glory, generosity and faithfulness of God who created and sustains everything.⁷ The beauty of the land and everything in it is celebrated: mountains and trees, plants and animals, men and women.⁸ A number of the earliest Christian theologians, the Church Fathers, often expressed their delight in the details of animal and plant life, and what we now understand as ecosystems.

Diversity of beauty in sky and earth and sea…the dark shades of woods, the colour and fragrance of flowers; the countless different species of living creatures of all shapes and sizes…the mighty spectacle of the sea itself, putting on its changing colours like different garments, now green, with all the many varied shades, now purple, now blue.

Augustine, The City of God

Theologian Jame Schaefer has surveyed the writings of many of the Church Fathers and Medieval theologians, and found five broad themes in their contemplation of creation.⁹

• Affective appreciation: Simply delighting in what is seen.
• Affective-cognitive appreciation: A deeper, scientific study of creation leads to even greater joy for the beholder.
• Cognitive appreciation: Thinking in more abstract ways about the beauty of the interconnected universe. Each part plays its unique role for the greater good of the whole.
• Incomprehensibility: Being overwhelmed by the magnitude and complexity of the universe and everything in it.
• The sacramental quality of the physical world: The world God has created mediates something of God’s presence and character to us.

One of my favourites among the theologians covered in Schaefer’s work was an unnamed Cistercian who in the twelfth century wrote extensively about the grounds of the abbey in which he lived, and the surrounding countryside. He was obviously very happy with his vocation, and had a good understanding of the interconnectedness of the different factors: water, weather and crops - an early ecology. Basil of Caesarea (ca. 329-379) spent time observing animals and plants, noting similarities and differences, and encouraged others to do the same, giving glory to God for everything he saw. Hugh of Saint Victor (1096-1144) delighted in what his senses could tell him about creation, so enabling him to praise the Creator all the more, and lamented that others might pass such an opportunity by.

An important Medieval figure in the early development of science is Albert the Great (ca. 1200-1280), teacher of Aquinas, who wrote on “the importance of observation and experimentation in field and laboratory studies of animals, plants, metals, and inorganic elements”. He carried out field studies, and “legitimised the study of the natural world as a science within the Christian tradition.” For him, appreciation of creation had both cognitive and emotional aspects.

For all of these early scholars, to study creation and enjoy its beauty was an activity that everyone should engage in using their God-given intellect. Their detailed exploration of the wonders of the universe was fuelled by faith in a benevolent creator God, and this deep intellectual study led to heartfelt praise for the one who made it. Is this something we can share?

Protein structure model © Dr Neville Cobbe

The series continues tomorrow with Part 2: Understanding Beauty in Science.

Notes

1. Bersanelli, M. & Gargantini, M. Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of all Time. Templeton Press, Philadelphia, 2009. Page 9.
2.Ibid., Page 10.
3. I should highlight that as far as I know Lynn Quarmby is not religious and has not in any way endorsed this blog.
4. Further reading: http://quarmby.ca/, http://blog.quarmby.ca/, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Lynne%20Quarmby, http://www.ciliopathyalliance.org/
5. I try to avoid using the words ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’ as much as possible because of the ambiguity of the word nature, which is often wrongly used to create a divide between natural and supernatural worlds. This is ancient Greek philosophy and has nothing to do with the God of the Bible. When addressing Christians I usually use the word ‘creation’ in its traditional theological sense, meaning ‘everything that exists apart from God’, without connection to any one particular interpretation of Genesis 1-3.
6. Frankenberry, N.K. The Faith of Scientists, Princeton University Press, 2008.
7. For example, Psalm 29, 104, 148; Job 38-41; Joel 2: 18-32, Isaiah 41:17-20, Hosea 14:5-8.
8. Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible.
9. Schaefer, J. Appreciating the Beauty of the Earth, Theological Studies 62 (2001), p23-52 & Schaefer, J. Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic & Medieval Concepts, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2009.

“The heavens,” wrote the psalmist “declare the glory of God.” (Ps 19:1 NIV)

The universe that inspired the psalmist three thousand years ago grows grander as each new generation of astronomers adds yet another layer of understanding. Each new discovery pushes back the boundary that separates the known universe from the vast terra incognita that beckons and teases us to keep going, to sail ever further from familiar shores.

A few centuries ago the great philosopher Immanuel Kant repeated the psalmist’s declaration: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steady reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence."

The night sky still beckons us, as it once did the psalmist. I spend time each summer at a rustic family cottage in the wilderness of my native New Brunswick, Canada. There, miles from electricity, the night sky does not compete with artificial light. Smog does not obscure it. Planes do not draw white trails on it. It does not compete with cable television or even cell phones, silenced by the absence of signals. The night sky is simply there, quietly declaring the glory of God. Its many lights reflect off the ripples of the lake, and are accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the voices of the many creatures that call this wilderness home. Only a jaded soul could sit by that lake and not wonder if there wasn’t some larger meaning to the experience.

I can see what the psalmist saw and rejoice as he did. But I watch the night sky through the eyes of a twenty-first century scientist. I have the benefit of centuries of scientific advancement and can see, in my mind’s eye, so much more. Those visible stars are just the advance guard of an almost infinite army of stars going back almost forever. The stars are not attached to a dome that one might reach with an ambitiously tall tower or puncture with a long-range missile. They are so far away that their light has been traveling at unimaginable speed for years, centuries, milennia and longer. The light from the stars in the Hyades Cluster began its journey to the earth at about the time that my ancestors—Loyalists from Pennsylvania—began their journey to this part of North America in the eighteenth century. The light from the closest stars, the trio that make up Alpha Centauri, takes over four years to reach earth. The most distant star ever detected from the earth is a “gamma ray burster” that launched its signal almost 13 billion years ago, when the universe was young. The powerful gamma ray signal from this star began its journey before our planet was even formed, reaching the earth in April 2009.

The psalmist did not know that the stars were made of hydrogen and helium. He did not know they generated their energy through nuclear fusion or that many of them explode at the end of their lives. He knew nothing of galaxies and the layers of structure in the cosmos. He did not understand how fast light travels or that the light from our sun powers photosynthesis and many other processes here on the earth.

The universe brought into view by science is like a collection of Russian matryoshka dolls nestled one inside the other. With the psalmist we can see the outer layer—and it is grand. But inside are additional layers, each one with a new type of grandeur. And at the very end of the unpacking lie the remarkable laws of physics that keep the earth orbiting about the sun, the sun shining reliably, and the sunlight providing energy to sustain life on our planet.

The universe as we understand it today inspires awe. And for those open to its message—from the psalmists of yesteryear to the believers and even the thoughtful skeptics of today—it speaks of a Creator. Our universe does not look like a cosmic accident, where lots of stuff just happened. It looks like the expression of a grand plan—a cosmic architecture capable of both supporting life such as ours and of inspiring observers like us to seek out the Creator.

This is why Antony Flew—“world’s most notorious atheist”—changed his mind and started believing in God.

With the first part of my essay as background, I now respond directly to Dembski’s analysis of “Darwinism” and how BioLogos differs from the view he critiques. He begins by posing a question, “Is Darwinism theologically neutral?” He goes on to describe two contrasting views:

1. Those of the agnostic philosopher, Michael Ruse, who claims Christianity and Darwinian evolution are compatible and,
2. Those of individuals who hold a young earth view and claim Christianity and Darwinian evolution are incompatible.

Dembski suggests that Ruse, in order to claim compatibility (neutrality), redefines Christianity. I agree he does this. Without belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Christianity is dead and, as Paul says, Christians are of all people most to pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:19).

Dembski also states that a belief in common descent can be consistent with Christian faith (i.e. neutral), and here I agree with Dembski again. As he points out, Christianity is not defined by the mechanism that God chose to use in accomplishing his purposes in creation.

So far we are on exactly the same page. Ruse claims Darwinism is neutral, but only by departing from Christian theology. Some young earth creationists claim Darwinism is not neutral, but they focus on common descent and this, by itself, does not depart from Christian theology. However, as Dembski quickly notes at that point in his essay, he has not yet carefully defined Darwinism and Christianity. He goes on to describe what he considers to be some non-negotiables of each.

Dembski suggests that among the core non-negotiable principle beliefs of Christianity are: (a) divine creation, (b) reflected glory, (c) human exceptionalism, and (d) bodily resurrection of Jesus. I agree that these are non-negotiables; take away any of these beliefs and you no longer have Christianity. We’re still on the same page.

What about non-negotiables of “Darwinism?” They are, he says, (a) common descent, (b) natural selection, (c) human continuity, (d) methodological naturalism. With that, he proceeds to analyze each.

Common Descent

Common descent, which today is at the core of the biological sciences, was a fundamental tenet for Darwin. Dembski sees no significant theological problem with common descent. “By themselves [the Christian non-negotiables described above] allow that God might have specially created living forms or brought them about via an evolutionary process,” he writes. He sees no theological conflict with this Darwinian tenet, even though he does not subscribe to it.

Natural Selection

Dembski indicates that natural selection, as defined by Darwin, is in tension with two of the four Christian non-negotiables—divine creation and reflected glory. His primary concern is that Darwin’s view of natural selection is non-teleological. Insomuch as this is true (and Darwin’s views on teleology are complex and contested), I agree. If Darwin’s non-teleological views were correct, this would be incompatible with some of the non-negotiables in Christianity. As Dembski says, “to say that something is undetectable is not to say that it doesn’t exist....” I concur that Darwin had no scientific basis for concluding that the evolutionary process did not end up exactly the way that God intended in the beginning. If Darwin reached non-teleological conclusions on the basis of his data then he allowed his philosophical and theological commitments to influence his conclusions. Like Dembski, I believe God did call our existence into being; there is a teleological basis for our presence on earth. We are by no means an accident and to the extent that Darwin thought we are, he was wrong.

So far, I see no significant difference between BioLogos and the non-negotiables presented by Dembski. Intriguingly, however, Dembski goes on to state, “it seems odd, given C1—[divine creation], that God would create by Darwinian processes, which suggest that unguided forces can do all the work necessary for biological evolution.” Here we part company. As indicated in my introductory comments above, I believe that the natural activity of God is not less divine than the supernatural activity of God, something borne out by the Scriptures themselves. This does not mean that I think that no supernatural activity occurred in life’s history; I just don’t see why it would be “odd” if God chose to create life’s diversity through his natural activity. How would we know what is odd as it relates to the activity of God? The only reliable source of what is odd and what is not is God’s revelation through his Word. But I see no scripturally-based rationale for determining the expected ratio of natural vs. supernatural divine activity in creation. Scripture is silent on the issue and so far at least, science is as well—other than demonstrating that many biological features and mechanisms previously thought by some to be evidence of supernatural action can now be explained via God’s regular activity—that associated with his natural laws. For the present, I think it is best to withhold judgment about the extent to which God suspends his ongoing regular activity in favor of miraculous supernatural activity in the history of the creating life’s diversity.

I now come to the most fundamental point of disagreement between the Intelligent Design movement and BioLogos. Dembski states:

Given that science is widely regarded as our most reliable universal form of knowledge, the failure of science to provide evidence of God, and in particular Darwin’s exclusion of design from biological origins, undercuts C2 [reflected glory].

Furthermore, he also writes:

If God does occlude his purposeful activity in nature, that raises a tension with (C2), which states that the world clearly reflects God’s glory (Psalm 19) and that this fact should be evident to all humanity (Romans 1).

I don’t think that God occludes or masks his activity. Thanks in no small part to science, we now recognize that there are “signposts” (C.S. Lewis’s term) all over the place directing our attention to the existence of our Creator. The question is whether those “signposts” can be developed into scientific hypotheses that can be scientifically tested in a manner that parallels how one goes about testing the hypothesis that smoking causes cancer or that DNA is the genetic material. The heavens do declare the glory of God (Psalm 19), and, “ever since the creation of the world, his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20). God has not occluded his activity. It is all around us. From the birth of a baby to the birth of a star; from a universe which is mathematically coherent to one which is exquisitely fine-tuned; from our sense of shame to our ability to recognize the good and the right—from all of these and so much more, we see signposts all pointing to our Creator. Individually each hints at something beyond ourselves. Together they shout out with the message of God’s glory. Still, can they be tested scientifically—in a manner that parallels whether penicillin kills bacteria or the mitochondrion is the cell’s energy factory—to determine whether God is at work in them? Can intelligent people who choose not to believe come up with feasible alternative explanations that do not include God? Sure, they do it all the time and, as Romans 1 tells us, they have been doing it from the beginning of human existence.

Given the way that God has worked through his regular natural activity, why should we expect to be able to develop a test for the activity of God? God is always active, but scientific testing of God’s activity would require a “control” where God is not active. How can we conduct an experiment which studies the “presence vs. absence of God” when God is always present as sustainer as well as creator?

Human Continuity

Dembski quotes from Darwin’s Descent of Man:

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Even if all that Darwin says here were more or less true, it would still say nothing about that which makes humans truly exceptional, because—our linguistic and cognitive abilities aside—what makes us truly exceptional has less to do with biology than with the fact that God chose to enter into a unique relationship with humankind. Dembski paraphrases an ideologically strict Darwinian view of man as "not worthy of special divine attention, and with no prerogatives above the rest of the animal world." But Christians recognize that our material ordinariness is radically transformed by the presence and promises of God. Exactly as with the people of Israel among the nations, so humans among the animals: our special identity rests in the free choice of the Creator to give us his himself and his name. If we recognize that human specialness rests on God’s fellowship with and call upon us, and that we—alone of all creatures—are enabled by God to bear his image in the world, then anything Darwin said about the physical continuity between humans and animals is irrelevant. In the way that matters most, we are not continuous with animals. For philosophical and theological reasons, Darwin did not recognize this. Darwin, I believe, was wrong. I, like Dembski and like Southern Baptists in general, am not a Darwinist.

Methodological Naturalism

Dembski defines methodological naturalism in the following way:

The physical world, for purposes of scientific inquiry, may be assumed to operate by unbroken natural law.

He goes on from there to write that if one assumes that miracles were performed in salvation history, then it would seem to be arbitrary to assume that God would not also perform miracles in natural history as well. Although I do not rule out the occurrence of miracles in natural history, the purpose of miracles in the biblical narrative seems to stem from God’s desire to reveal himself to humankind, reminding us of and guiding us in our relationship with him and each other. Given that, I do not see why it is arbitrary to think that God may not have used miracles to accomplish his purposes in nature before humans were around to observe them.

However, I strongly disagree with Dembski that if one believes God has worked primarily through natural processes in creation as a whole, this makes belief in the resurrection less tenable. The two ought not to be tied together in this way, especially since I have already stated that I reject the notion that the ordinary and regular processes of creation are any less God’s—than what I have called supernatural processes. One’s conclusion about the mechanism of creation has no logical extension to one’s views about the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

In conclusion, I think Dembski takes some steps that are both theologically unnecessary and scientifically unjustified in rejecting what careful study tells us about God’s marvelously ordinary processes of creation: ordinary because they follow his natural laws so faithfully, marvelous because they have resulted in a world of complex and beautiful life. On the other hand, I agree with Dembksi that Darwin’s views were not theologically neutral. Darwin’s views on teleology, human exceptionalism, and miracles were not compatible with Christianity. Quite simply, this is why I do not consider my views to be Darwinian and why I am not a Darwinist.

For further reading:

The BioLogos website offers many resources to acquaint readers with the incredibly strong scientific evidence for common descent and other facets of evolutionary biology.

Despite a common desire among Christians to find evidence for the activity of the creator God in the natural world, the Scriptures themselves more often give us images and analogies of God’s providence rather than “proof” that would be admissible in peer reviewed journals, much less in court. In his final climactic week in Jerusalem, Jesus used image after image, parable after parable to convey the urgency of his message that the Kingdom of God was coming to pass through his own coming Passion.

Though His disciples did not understand them at first, it was by new pictures (the lost coin, lost sheep and lost sons) and reinterpreted old ones (like the vineyard), that they came to understand the “facts” of His healing miracles and, ultimately, His death and resurrection. By reframing concrete happenings and material relationships, stories and images opened up possibilities rather than limiting them—and they still invite us to enter into them, rather than leaving us dispassionate and disconnected.

As we remember the narrative that takes us from Good Friday through Easter morning, the image of a buried grain of wheat invites us into the story rather than just describing what happens in it. Certainly this is an image for Christ Himself, but as I’ve written elsewhere, the seed isn’t just a symbol of His death and rebirth from the grave, but a promise of future abundance, lavish reproduction, and a pointer to the coming harvest: Jesus Himself is the “first fruits” of the new creation. We are called not only to be workers for that harvest, but to be, like Him, the harvested grains. As Christ entered into His glory through self-sacrifice, so we, too, give ourselves in order to share in and contribute to the shalom—the comprehensive flourishing—promised as the marker of God’s Kingdom now and in the future.

This combined image of death and renewal, single seed to field, is the heart of John Crumb’s hymn “Now the Green Blade Rises,” first published in 1928 in the Oxford Book of Carols and originally set to an old French Christmas carol (“Noel Nouvelet”). By clicking the image above you can hear a new version as revised and re-arranged by contemporary hymnist Alex Mejias. We offer it as a meditation on the sacrifice and victory of Jesus, the glorious promise of resurrection, and the call upon us all to join in God’s story of redemption and renewal.

“Now the Green Blade Riseth”

John MacLeod Campbell Crum (1872-1958),
© Oxford University Press
adapted and arranged by Alex Mejias

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain.
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Alex Mejias is the founder and director of High Street Hymns, a non-profit music ministry that exists to spread the Gospel and worship the Triune God in spirit and truth through hymns, psalms and spiritual songs. Alex grew up in New Jersey and outside Washington, DC, receiving a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. For the past 15 years he has been leading worship for churches and ministries, writing and recording both new and old hymns, and touring the east coast as a singer-songwriter. Alex is also committed to the power of the creative arts to advance the Gospel and promote justice and healing in the name of Christ, serving, supporting, and collaborating with several other non-profit ministries. More details on these projects and music may be found at High Street Hymns.

My curiosity immediately led me to see what he had cut out. All of the miracles and the Resurrection passages were gone, and the Gospels were rearranged in a linear fashion, edited and pasted together as a single narrative. Then I looked particularly to see what Jefferson did with John 11.

Why John 11? For the past several seasons of Lent, I have been meditating upon this account of three siblings: Martha, Mary and Lazarus of Bethany. In particular, John 11:35 has become a central passage for me to consider in self-reflection, because an artist learns very early that creativity demands boundaries and limits to thrive. When I began on my recent journey to illuminate the Four Holy Gospels for Crossway publishing's celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, I needed to find a thematic boundary. I was so overwhelmed with the grand scale of the project that I chose this shortest passage in the Bible—“Jesus Wept”—and that decision has led to many discoveries along the way.

"Jesus Wept" is, to me, the most profound passage in the Bible. After I gave a recent lecture on this verse at Duke University, Richard Hays commented on my reflections: "The Incarnate Word of God stood wordless at Bethany." Indeed, Jesus' tears make no logical sense, as he came to Bethany with the specific mission to raise Lazarus from the grave. He told the disciples his mission (and why he intentionally delayed his arrival, knowing that Lazarus lay dying) and revealed to Martha that he was and is the "Resurrection and the Life." So why did he, upon seeing the tears of Mary, waste his time weeping, when he could have shown his power as the Son of God by wiping away every tear, telling people like her, "Ye of little faith, believe in me!"?

In my reflections, this "irrational," emotional response from Jesus became a central means to understand the role and even the necessity of art in the midst of suffering—what I have began to call our "Ground Zero" conditions. Art, like the tears of Christ, may seem useless, ephemeral and ultimately wasteful. But even though they evaporate into our atmosphere, the extravagant tears of God dropped on the hardened, dry soils of Bethany, or onto the ashes of our Ground Zero conditions, are still present with us. Because tears are ephemeral, they can be enduring and even permanent, as with “Jesus wept.” In the same way, perhaps our art can be so as well. What seems, at first, to be an irrational response to suffering may turn out, upon deep reflection, to be the most rational response of all.

Predictably, "Jesus Wept" did not make into the Jefferson Bible. John 11 was cut out entirely, falling onto the floor of his Monticello home and discarded, along with Martha's confession. Jefferson's rationalism allowed only a distant deity that made sense in reference to objective ‘scientific’ calibrations, not ephemeral marks of compassion. Yet, when this attitude is actually applied to the sciences, they also become, like Jefferson's Bible, a “cut and paste” product, based on a limited viewpoint.

Even with my rudimentary understanding of the early phonetic and acoustic research my father was part of at Bell Labs in the 1970s, I know that the optimism of many scientists there was based on reductionistic assumptions. I described my father’s wrestling with the basic theses of linguistic research in a previous essay:

In the 1980s, [while in his] early 50’s, my father began to send a series of notes to his colleagues questioning the basic tenets of acoustics research, as he found them flawed and inadequate for the goals pursued. . . .[W]hat the early research assumed was that by segmenting speech patterns, you could have enough data to rebuild speech. It would be a bit like dissecting a frog, and stitching it back together, only to expect it to jump again -- A typical reductionist/modernist assumption. (Refractions 24: "The Resonance of Being")

My father began to challenge these underlying but over-simplified assumptions and as a result, came under criticism for abandoning many of the positions held by his peers. I continue:

My father’s Converter/Distributor theory (C/ D theory) assumes that computer technology is now capable of anticipating contextual patterns of speech, and is able to simulate an architectural structure to account for the morphing of speech production. Rather than the segmental approach, he calls his new thinking prosodic, as it accounts for the complexity of speech and language. But it would take years of research to get to a point of presenting his new ideas to the linguistics/phonetics community.

My father, who had rarely had problems finding support for his research before, was in for a battle. . . . He could not find funding, and found himself fighting the establishment of the research world—the very establishment he had helped to build. After my father’s many futile attempts to secure funding for his new research, my brother, a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, stepped in to fund a post for a graduate student at Ohio State, to help my father compile enough data to be able to begin his research.

To my father, the integrity of the scientific process demanded such a course. He never considered that his challenge to reductionism would be seen as a threat by many of his colleagues. He simply was seeking after Truth.

Even in the objective rigor of the research process, then, human factors intervene—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Our presuppositions surface eventually, and it becomes clear where we place our "faith. " My father's C/D theory is an intuitive leap, arising from his love for synthesis and beauty, but pulled up by hard data and a stubborn commitment to the truth of matter. It is an example of the way intuitive, subjective insight can connect the ephemeral with the rational, objective and concrete. Should we seek, then, to make the sciences a Jeffersonian cut-and-paste re-narration of our reality? Are we so inflexible in how we will understand the great mystery of our being? If so, the gap between that reduced ‘reality’ and what is truly human is the very gap into which Jesus' tears still fall.

Jesus wept for Lazarus, but also, perhaps, for Jefferson as he snipped out John 11 with his own hands; for to dismiss Jesus’ tears as irrational and unnecessary is to miss Jesus entirely. Jefferson sought to cut out the Deity, but also lost the Man. Without Jesus' full humanity, coupled with his Divinity, we do not have a Savior. Without this fullness of humanity—concrete and ephemeral, intuitive and objective—we lose perspective on why we are doing our research to begin with. If we assent to the fragmenting, segmental assumptions of modernity, we will have stitched the frog back together only to bury him anyway. If the dead are to live, we will require a Miracle Worker to show us that the world that is cohesive, and rational, but only when seen through a veil of tears.

When astrophysicist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman first published the following posts as a paper in the BioLogos Scholarly Essay series, the essay’s subtitle asked the question, “Can Recent Scientific Discovery Inform and Inspire Our Worship and Service?” Over the next few weeks, we will look at Dr. Wiseman's answer to that query—an emphatic “Yes!”. But in this first installment we begin by describing some of the reasons such a posture of worship through science is not more common in the contemporary church than it already is.

Oh Lord My God, when I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; How great Thou art, how great Thou art

(Carl Boberg, 1885; Trans. Stuart Hine 1949)

The words of this great hymn convey the proper overwhelming sense in which the wondrous Creation of God should translate directly into a response of awe and praise from mind, body, and spirit. The writer sees and hears the wonders of nature with his body, considers with his mind what all this implies, and responds with songs from his soul.

But is this worshipful response happening in our Christian congregations today? I believe this kind of response to the Creation can and should happen within the hearts of God’s people and wherever congregations of believers are gathered. Such power can even unify believers who differ on lesser matters as we all look up outside of ourselves at the same wonders and respond with the same praise. As an astronomer, I have felt the sense of being “blown away” by seeing images of countless distant galaxies, or even by just looking up at the array of stars overhead on a dark moonless night and sensing something of the “big-ness” of God.

There are impediments to realizing the fullness of this kind of worship experience for many Christian congregations today. I believe four of the main culprits are ignorance, distraction, controversy, and uncertainty.

Let me start with the first, and clarify up front that by ignorance I am simply referring to being uninformed, rather than the sometimes more negative connotations of the word. How up-to-date is the scientific knowledge of average, educated, committed evangelical church members and pastors?Americans, both adults and schoolchildren, are not ranking favorably compared to the rest of the world’s developed nations in science knowledge these days. We enjoy our technological achievements and resulting gadgets, but true comprehension of scientific principles and recent discoveries is not a strong part of our culture and national conversation these days.

This is reflected directly in what kinds of things are (and are not) discussed in church. In my own generally very good church experience growing up in mainstream America, I can only remember science and nature being discussed in a general way (e.g., we should look at the beauty of flowers and mountains and animals and thank God), except for once in a specific way in a children’s sermon (where we were told we should not believe we came from monkeys!). That was a while ago, but how are science issues handled today? Do pastors speak about the evidence from cosmic background light for a spectacular beginning to the universe? Are the genetic codes being mapped out for animals and humans resulting in praise for God’s amazing “blueprint”? Are the advancements in nanotechnology and biotechnology and medicine subjects for discussion of good and poor uses of technology in church? The answer to these is, of course, “no”, for the most part, yet even issues seemingly more relevant to the daily lives of parishioners are often driven by current technology and scientific advancement, and an informed congregation can better understand how to praise, pray, discern, dialogue, and serve.

Related to being uninformed is the condition of distraction for many evangelical Christians today. The distractions of overloaded schedules, pressured jobs, divided families, and even church environments of entertainment-based worship and activities can impede a lifetime of quiet listening, learning, and contemplation. If there is no encouragement from church leaders to learn and incorporate nature and current scientific discovery into contemplation and praise and service, then there will be no space available in the lives and activities of congregants for what should be the resulting awe and praise.

But what does it mean to be informed about science in today’s evangelical congregations? Too often this has implied a direct relation to controversy, the third reason science is not often inspiring worship these days. There are many voices trying to “inform” Christians about science, and for the average evangelical congregant, discernment about which authority figure to believe can be difficult. Many times Christians are presented with a clear and strong implication that scientific conclusions, especially on issues related to origins of the universe and of life, are part of the secular “World” camp rather than the camp of “God’s Truth”. And Christians “know” that they must be on one side or the other of this stark line of worldliness. Often in more conservative churches a teaching will come from the pulpit that goes something like this: “Scientists tell us that *...+, but they cannot give a reason how *...+ happened; but WE know how: God is responsible!” Therefore any serious consideration of a scientific understanding of the development of the universe and life implies that one is “compromising” the teaching of the Word of God, rather than studying the details of how God works. In Scripture, however, never is the study and experience of nature seen as somehow antithetical to knowing and following the Lord; just the opposite in fact!

This often boils down to the correct interpretation of Scripture. Through sermons, radio spots, television shows, and literature, evangelical Christians are hearing adamant messages conflating the acceptance of modern scientific discovery with worldly compromise, or else providing alternative ideas that are not entirely satisfying. From Young-Earth Creationists, they hear that a literal reading of the Biblical creation account is the only correct one, so all scientific discovery must be reinterpreted to fit a recent Creation. But this robs them of the sense of awe we glean from the magnitude of space and time revealed by astronomy, geology, and fossils. From the Intelligent Design community, they hear the message that life (and perhaps the entire universe) is too complicated to develop through natural processes alone, and therefore that God’s work requires miraculous inputs of information into the natural world. This implies that somehow natural processes must not be fully God’s processes, or that God’s work through them is somehow inadequate. They also hear the message to “teach the controversy,” so that somehow by proclaiming that there is a controversy about natural processes as an adequate explanatory tool for natural history, the controversy will in fact become real. They are then surprised to find out from either advanced scientific study or from the Evolutionary Creation voices that in fact there is no great controversy in the scientific community about the basic structure and timeline of the natural history of the universe and life; that in fact there need be no theological debate about how God brought (and is bringing) the universe and life into being, rather, the issue is whether God is in fact real and responsible for all we know and are. And yet even this unifying message can sometimes seem to gloss over the central theological issues of suffering and death and fallen-ness in Creation. So every approach to origins and evolution evokes some difficulties and challenges with which the Christian congregant must grapple.

Next week, Part 2 concludes Dr. Wiseman's discussion of the stumbling blocks that can stand between the church and its appreciation of science as a means of worship, and turns to the ways that the pursuit of God through study of the created world can help overcome those difficulties by pointing us directly to the Lord.

Knowing your context, 12” x 16” Mixed media on panel, 2009. ©R. Sawan White.

The heavens declare the glory of God, 
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
 Day to day pours out speech,
 and night to night reveals knowledge.
 There is no speech, nor are there words,
 whose voice is not heard.
 Their voice goes out through all the earth,
 and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4)

The Psalmist affirms that the created world speaks of its Creator, and that everywhere we look or listen there are words, speech pouring forth in abundance. But are we prepared to hear that speech? Will we listen to it on its own terms, in the context in which it occurs? Or will we hear only what we already ‘know,’ see only what we want to see? Psalm 19 affirms that the speech of the world is heard, but it does not say that speech is necessarily listened to, much less understood. For the speech of the world is as a foreign dialect to us, and if we want to hear what it has to say about the Creator (and overhear the praise it offers to the Creator), we need to learn to listen differently.

As Bible translators know, learning a language is much more than a matter of vocabulary. We may master a list of names or definitions, but still miss the heart of what a language is about, what its speakers are making known about themselves and the world. Just as important as the individual terms is the structure of the language—its grammar and syntax—the way it tells its stories more than the objects and characters that populate them. This may or may not be the way the hearer’s own language casts its narrative thread, so we must be aware of our own practices and patterns in order to recognize the sameness and difference of the foreign tongue. In other words, understanding another language is doubly relational: we must explore the relationships within a given dialect, but also the relationships between it and our own linguistic home.

An awareness of this relational, provisional quality of language is at the heart of R. Sawan White’s practice as an artist, rooted in her own experiences of being linguistically out-of-sync, notably during her art training as a printmaker in England. There, she mistakenly assumed she would be speaking the same tongue as those around her, only to discover that profound differences can be communicated (or lost) through inflection and cadence of speech, let alone vocabulary. Beginning by including old maps and encyclopedia pages in her prints, then by encasing others’ anonymously-deposited secrets in plaster, and later moving into an abstracted but personal exploration of graphic elements that stand in for words, White has been using paint and wax and her etching stylus to engage with the richness and limitations of “local knowledge.” Aware that each cultural context has its own way of framing the world—its own dialect—that must be taken on its own terms, she highlights the necessity of conversation between ‘locals’ across boundaries, and holds out the promise that piece by piece and layer by layer, we will approach a more wholly encompassing sense of who we are and how the world is.

White’s oil and wax painting, Knowing your context (2009), is a visual enactment of that process of negotiation between words and syntax, between medium and meaning—using forms and figures that struggle to find and dwell in their proper physical, relational context. While we are tempted to read it as a landscape, that overall pattern is a byproduct of White’s primary visual interest, the way those small graphic elements and lines—emblematic of words (and sometimes people)—relate to each other and to larger shapes and fields of color, built up in the layers of wax and oil paint that define the overall structure of the work. Thus, both small, oscillation-like squiggles and large, organic shapes arrange themselves across the surface of the panel, but also emerge from and disappear into the irregular strata.

The red-orange circular shape at the upper right, for instance, is not defined by the application of color onto the white surface, but by a final application of thick, matte strokes of white paint over the ruddy, under-layers; meanwhile, the white is itself bounded by curving lines previously inscribed into the wax. Below those layers, we can see a more directly-formed oval of blue, whose top half is now obscured, but whose bottom half influences the curvature of the lines in the lower section of the painting. Finally, the detail image of the lower right edge of the panel shows incised ciphers buried deep in the wax and paint, as well as some holding their own at the surface.

These small re-curving figures are what function most like words in White’s work, but perhaps a better way of describing them is as indeterminate or extremely flexible ideographs—a symbolic shorthand for exploring relationship without referencing specific things outside the painting itself. Her squiggles usually enjoy a kind of freedom within a painting—hovering, floating, sometimes dangling in a way that is “haphazardly self-contained, unconnected”—and seldom tied down or to each other as they are here at both the left and right lower edges. As White said of the now-marginalized characters, “They’re stuck but also foundational, they don’t get to go, but they’re crucial to this part [of the painting].” Comparing these shapes with the ones floating but isolated in the white area at the upper left, White continued, “the ones down here, though tethered down, are in a more dynamic space, their crossing is causing many things to happen with boundaries, overlaps, etc.” This is a dialogue, then, between the artist and her medium about what happens when things get confusing and we begin to notice novel relationships emerging—how a new sense of connection and order arises there, too, even if it seems unfamiliar and uncomfortable to all involved.

Again, what’s being abstracted in Knowing your context is language, not material objects—and not even specific words, but their role as place-holders and connectors between people, local places, whole worlds. White’s reference to the drawn characters as “discovering” their situation, learning to “know their context,” reminds us that her work is also a narrative: it is the trace of her negotiation with the piece itself about how words and ideas and images are situated in particular places and moments, about how slippage, misunderstanding and newness occur when ‘figures of speech’ are removed from their usual homes or asked to do work which they are unaccustomed to doing. Indeed, even her titles are part of that process, for they often find their genesis in phrases only partially heard and mis-understood; they, too, are artifacts that emerge from the process of engagement with words rather than descriptors added at the end.

So circling back now to the familiar psalm with which we began, how might this visual exercise about the complexity of speech in all its forms help us reflect on the relationship between science and Christian faith, between God’s word and his world? We are now very well accustomed to reminders that the first chapters of Genesis were not written to tell us the kinds of things we sometimes want to hear. But it is also easy to ask the material world to say things it is not equipped to say, as when we expect it to speak unambiguously about of God’s activity within it. If we truly wish to hear the speech that pours out day after day in praise of the Lord, we need to let the heavens speak in their own way and strain to listen to them in the voice God made them to have—not in the voice we wish they had. In taking hold of the difference between those ways of listening, we not only understand the world more truly, we unearth our own biases, our own deafness, our own unwillingness to hear God the way he wants to be heard.

We can’t force Scripture or the natural world to speak to us in our ordinary tongue. But by listening to them both on their own terms, and by creating and dwelling in imagery that enables them to speak to each other through us, guided by the Spirit, we may be privy to interactions that reveal unexpected and elegant truths about their dialects, but more importantly, about the God whose Word brought both into being.

R. Sawan White was a Provost Scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University before transferring to Loughborough University in England to complete her First Degree in Fine Art Printmaking with highest honors. Since returning to the US in 2000, she has exhibited her work regularly in group and solo shows, and taught and lectured at museums, art centers, colleges and middle schools. To see more of her work, please click here.

Evolution: just a theory

One game that my (young) children like to play is a guessing game where both players select a character from among many choices, and by process of elimination, tries to guess the character the other has selected. Questions like “does your character have red hair? glasses?” etc., are used to narrow down the possibilities. Once you have guessed correctly which character your opponent has selected, you can perfectly predict the answer to every question thereafter (and a good many parents likely prolong the questioning to keep the hopes of victory alive for their children). When considered separately, the individual features of each character—glasses, brown hair, purple hat, and so on—mean almost nothing, since they could be features shared with other characters in the game. Only the convergence of multiple features is indicative of a good guess, and the accuracy of that guess is put to the test every time a new question is asked.

A good theory is something like this: an educated guess, based on and consistent with all past work on the topic to date. It allows you to predict how future tests should pan out. In the guessing game, there are limited options to choose from (so the analogy, like all analogies, eventually breaks down). In science, we don’t really know the true way things actually work. What we have are theories—broad explanatory frameworks supported by experimentation, that make sense of our current collection of facts—that we can use to make testable predictions about the natural world. All theories in science are provisional in that they are not complete descriptions of how the world actually works and are subject to future revision; but at the same time they are robust frameworks that can be used to predict how experiments should behave with almost boring regularity. So, far from the colloquial usage of “theory” as speculation, “just a theory” is high praise in science.

The current understanding of evolutionary theory in all its scope and diversity is far more complex than Darwin himself could have ever envisaged. (As a geneticist, I’ve often wished I could have a cup of tea with him to show him how far his theory has grown, especially given his confusion about how heredity worked.) Our understanding of how evolution works has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1850s. What is remarkable is just how much Darwin got “right” given his time and place. His main hypotheses—that species descend from ancestral forms through descent with modification, that and natural selection acting on heritable variation is a significant force in that process—remains the core of modern evolutionary theory. We’ve added a lot of detail since then (population genetics, kin selection, neutral evolution/genetic drift, symbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, molecular exaptation, and so on), but Darwin’s core ideas have produced a wealth of successful predictions. They were a very good “guess” that continues to pay rich scientific dividends.

Whale evolution: an example of converging lines of evidence

One of the things I personally find quite enjoyable about evolutionary theory is the counter-intuitiveness of some of the predictions it makes. One example that is a personal favorite, and one I often use to illustrate how evolution makes sense of converging lines of evidence, is cetacean (whale) evolution. Let’s set up the “problem” that evolutionary biology forces upon us:

• Modern cetaceans are mammals – they nourish their young in utero through a placenta, give birth to live young, and feed newborns with milk – all features of standard mammalian biology.
• Mammals are tetrapods – organisms with four limbs. Mammalian life shows up in the fossil record as an innovation within tetrapods, so mammals are “nested within the set” of tetrapod forms. Not all tetrapods are mammals (amphibians, for example) but all mammals are tetrapods.
• Tetrapods are by and large terrestrial creatures. Having four limbs for locomotion is a distinctly land-based adaptation.

The “problem”, of course, is that modern whales are emphatically not terrestrial, nor do they have four limbs – they have two front flippers and a tail, with no hind limbs in sight. Yet they are mammals, which forces evolution’s hand as it were. Evolution thus is dragged, under protest, to the prediction that modern whales, as mammals, are descended, with modification, from ancestral terrestrial, tetrapod ancestors. 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”.

Going out on a limb

Anyone who has seen a modern whale skeleton in a museum and noted it carefully may have noticed that though whales lack hind limbs, they do have a bit of bone back there where the hind limbs ought to be. While this is suggestive of a vestigial characteristic (a feature in a modern organism that has a reduced role relative to the role the structure played in an ancestral species), it’s hardly a smoking gun for evolution. Still, it’s consistent with the idea.

When we look at the cetacean fossil record, we also see forms suggestive of a progressive loss of hind limb function and structure over time, as David Kerk and Darrel Falk have elegantly explained before. Again, if one were resistant to evolutionary explanations, it would be possible (if a bit strained) to interpret these creatures as having been created directly as we find them in the fossil record. The facts that we do not see these forms in the present day, and that they seem to blur the distinctions between terrestrial tetrapods and whales might make one a bit uncomfortable, however.

Recent work on cetacean embryogenesis (how whales and their relatives develop from fertilized eggs into fully-formed baby whales) has shed even more light on the issue for modern species, however. Dolphin embryos actually have four limbs early in their development, as well as a few facial hairs, just as any good mammal should have. The hind limbs and hairs are lost later in development, and work on the molecular signaling events that halt hind limb growth and cause the limb bud to regress into the body wall have now been worked out in some detail. Moreover, early in dolphin development the nostrils are distinct and on the front of the face, and only fuse into a blowhole and migrate to the top of the head later in development. Early dolphin embryogenesis is distinctly mammalian and uncannily tetrapod-like.

… and passing the test

Taken in isolation, these facts about whales are interesting trivia. Taken together, however, they begin to form a picture entirely consistent with the prediction that modern whales are derived from terrestrial ancestors. The true strength of evolution as a scientific theory for the origin of whales is this: not that we can prove it, (for no theory is ever proven in science due to its permanently provisional nature), nor that we have full access to every bit of data we would like (consider how fragmentary the fossil record is, for example), but rather that we haven’t been able to disprove it yet, despite our best efforts. Descent with modification remains a productive educated guess that grows stronger with each investigation.

In the next post in this series, we’ll explore some additional lines of evidence for cetacean evolution that further illustrate the predictive power of evolutionary theory.

For further reading

Evidences for Evolution, Part 2a: The Whale's Tale

Evidences for Evolution, Part 2b: The Whale's Tale
J. G. M. Thewissen, M. J. Cohn, L. S. Stevens, S. Bajpai, J. Heyning, and W. E. Horton, Jr. (2006). Developmental basis for hind-limb loss in dolphins and origin of the cetacean bodyplan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (22), 8414–8418. available freely online.

Vox Balaenae, or “Voice of the Whale,” was composed by American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) and was first performed by the New York Camerata in 1971. It was only four years before that, in 1967, that biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that humpback whales “sing” and published recordings of the whales’ complex vocalizations, after which “whale song” quickly entered the popular consciousness and helped propel the “save the whales” environmental movement forward. (In 1970, Folk singer Judy Collins even put out a version of the traditional melody "Farewell To Tarwathie" over a background of recorded humpback whale songs.) For many, the fact that the massive creatures might share the human capacity and desire to engage in music as a social activity only made their wholesale destruction at our hands more egregious.

Though he was himself inspired by hearing those early whale song recordings, Crumb’s work does not utilize tapes of real whales or attempt merely to reproduce the effect in the context of an ordinary musical form. Instead, he asks three chamber musicians with modified and electrically amplified instruments (piano, flute and cello) to create sounds that evoke the entire natural history of the sea. The piano is played and strummed from inside the case and with a glass rod or plate on the strings, the cello part emphasizes a string’s abilities to produce high harmonic tones, and the flautist sings into her instrument as she plays. Many of these effects are intended to suggest natural sounds—as in the cello’s "seagull effect" (audible at 5:59 in the video linked blow), and the whale-like beginning cadenza by the flute—but not always in a direct way. In addition, all three players perform wearing half-masks, which, according to Crumb help “effac[e] the sense of human projection,” especially when they play under blue stage lighting as he envisioned. (Most of these features can be seen and heard in this April 2011 performance in Montreal by Philippe Prud'homme, piano; Stephane Tetreault, cello

; and Camille Lambert-Chan, flute, though it omits the blue stage lighting.)

In this multi-sensory impressionistic scene, the whales become representatives of a natural world that predates humanity, yet whose fate is inextricably bound up with the will of mankind. Indeed, the tension between the measured vastness of geologic time and the “Age of Man” is written into the score, as an opening prologue is followed by variations on the initial “Sea Theme” (beginning at 4:20), each named after geologic epochs: Archeozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and finally, the Cenozoic. It is in this last age—when mankind arrives on the scene—that the sometimes atonal and harsh combinations of sound reach a dissonant climax that the score indicates should be played as “dramatic, with a feeling of imminent destiny” (beginning at 11:26). Finally, the piece moves towards its conclusion with a haunting restatement and renewal of the Sea Theme (at just after 13:00), with the musicians gradually playing more and more quietly until ending with a pantomime, as if creating sounds beyond the limits of human hearing. Again, the sense of resolution in the music is named by Crumb in the score’s instructions to the players: “serene, pure, transfigured.”

So what do we make of this musical narrative and what Crumb seems to be saying about both whales (standing—or swimming—for the natural world) and humankind? Is it truly an anti-human statement, a “whales vs. people” image in response to environmental damage we were only really beginning to understand (via science) at the time the piece was written? There is certainly a skepticism here about human hubris, made explicit at the end of the prologue section by a “parody” of the opening phrase of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra (at 2:40). Contemporary listeners then and now will likely recognize that borrowed theme as the music from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but before that it was a musical homage to Nietzsche’s view of ascendant Man. In this ironic re-use of Strauss’ work, Crumb seems to say that against the span of geologic time and a vast (musical) world previously unknown to human ears, our claims of knowledge and technological mastery seem laughable.

Yet there are several clues that that sort of reading misses the mark, or that it is, at best, incomplete—beginning with the experience of playing and hearing it in person. I first heard Vox Balaenae in about 2002 with my then 6-year-old son. It was played in a small hall (under blue lights) at our local art museum by the Quadrivium Players, a group that included my friend Mary Boodell on the flute. While the masks were surprising at first, they did, indeed, de-emphasize the personality of the players as individuals, while emphasizing the atmospheric, world-creating power of art-forms, especially music.

Rather than a symbolic effacement of the human presence in the world (in keeping with the anti-Nietzschian not above), the effect was to move away from the ritualized performative aspect of modern chamber music and bridge the divide between players and observers, creating a more participatory community. Because of the piece’s distinctive, impressionistic kind of narrativity, one isn’t so much as “carried away by” the music as submerged and suspended in the world created by it, and Boodell describes the effect (especially at the end of the piece) of feeling like the audience is holding it’s breath to hear the silences Crumb has written into the score.

But Boodell also recounts the story of being drawn into the conceptual frame of the piece in a very physical, way when she found herself alone in a swimming pool in the weeks leading up to a performance. Though hesitantly at first, she couldn’t help but wonder how the sounds she made in Vox Balaenae would sound underwater, and so went under in the pool to find out. While the image makes one smile and probably reminds most of us of similar, less technically-proficient underwater experiments of our own, it also suggests how the piece helps hearers make a connection in addition to that between player and listener—that between humanity and the rest of the natural world. If the unexpected flow and soundscape created by Crumb helps audience and players achieve the kind of connection music scholar Jeff Warren has elsewhere on this site discussed as “entrainment,” it is also an invitation to a similarly compassionate state with the rest of creation, based on the new-found knowledge that other creatures have complex, even musical relationships with each other, and that we are privileged to discover and begin to understand them.

Clearly, then, Crumb’s Vox Balaenae touches on scientific knowledge of the world both in its genesis in recordings of whale songs and its structure keyed to geologic, evolutionary ages. But does it have more to say to us here than that we should avoid killing whales because they sing? While we can recognize that the biblical call to have dominion over the earth guides us towards cultivation and care for its creatures and remember that Jesus exemplified such a shepherding role, we should also remember his priestly one, and ours. For just as he remains the High Priest of heaven, holding our prayers in the presence of the Father, we have similar joy in being between heaven and earth, “a little lower than the angels.” Thus we can hold up the great whales (and their songs) as monuments to the depth of God’s creative activity in and through nature—and even revel in our musical, creaturely fellowship with them—without denying the special place of humanity. On the contrary, we affirm that special place when we humble ourselves to listen, seek to understand the native tongues of creation, and then, through Christ, present its songs before the throne of the Almighty Creator and King.