Dr. Charles Jackson
A comparison of the current standing of genetic research to the narratives from both the biblical historical model and the Darwinian evolutionist model of human history.
Is the Bible’s narrative for the history of humankind accurate? If it is, then we should expect to see a very specific result of these events imprinted on the DNA in our cells. This is just as certain as it is that if someone has walked across a beach of sand or a field of snow, they should leave the telltale footprints of the path they took.
The path our genes have taken since Adam and Eve walked in the Garden of Eden, Noah and his family walked off the ark, and the nations of people walked away from the Tower of Babel should have left the telltale footprints of those journeys, also. They did.
Not until our discovery of DNA sequencing have we been able to see it, but now we do. Current knowledge of human, animal, and plant genetics has confirmed every significant point of history recorded in the Holy Bible. Here we will restrict ourselves to only human history as it relates the human genome to Bible history. As early as the 1980s, science began to slowly catch up with the Bible in its search for the identity of the very first humans.
DNA found that the tiny chambers of the cell, known as the mitochondria, would be the easiest to isolate and analyze. It was also assumed that this mDNA could only be handed down through the mother to both her sons and daughters. It was the perfect first step in retracing the genetic roots of humankind to the first root of womankind.
A trail of DNA led to a single woman from whom we are all descended. Newsweek, 1/11/1988, p46
In honor of Genesis, the researchers named this single ancient woman “mitochondrial Eve,” and she has been known as this ever since.
Further research not only continued to affirm that the entire human race has only but one mother but also that she did not walk the earth millions of years ago. Instead, the diversity of mDNA found in all human cells was so slight that it could have developed over a mere 120,000 years.
“We are finding that humans have very, very shallow genetic roots which go back very recently to one ancestor,” said Michael Hammer of University of Arizona. “That indicates that there was an origin in a specific location on the globe and then it spread out from there.” US News & World Report, 12/4/1995
Before these discoveries, evolutionists had been arguing among themselves whether there was indeed only one point of origin for the human race. The two competing theories were called the “Out of Africa” theory and the “Multi-regional” theory. Many evolutionists felt that the supposed missing link fossils found in Asia, such as Homo erectus, were evidence that humans first arose in several different places at similar times. Many “multi” theorists still reject the data to this day, though the “Africa” theory has had the majority vote throughout this controversy. Perhaps the “multi’s” just don’t like the idea of one “mother of all living” since it sounds too much like the Bible.
Then something most disturbing and shocking happened in 1998. A glitch was discovered in the central assumption of the “mitochondrial clock” mechanism. Another of the world’s most respected evolutionist-run journals reported the finding that male mDNA could indeed be donated to offspring of both sexes at the moment of conception.
This meant that not all of the differences that we see in human mDNA are due to the maternal line, but that much was due to the invasion of the fertilized egg with sperm-cell mitochondria. It was calculated that the frequency of such an event in the breeding history of humankind would step up the diversification process by a factor of 20 times faster than had been originally thought. Instead of being only 120,000 in our past, Eve was now finally pegged as only 6000 years removed from us today.
Regardless of the cause, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate. For example, researchers have calculated that ‘mitochondrial Eve’–the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people–lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa. Using the new clock, she would be a mere 6000 years old. No one think that’s the case. ~Ann Gibbons, “Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock,” the Journal Science, 1/2/1998, p28
The Science article quotes the original paper, saying, “evolutionary studies led them to expect about one mutation in 600 generations … they were ‘stunned’ to find 10 base-pair changes [in the mDNA sequences], which gave them a rate of one mutation every 40 generations” (Nature Genetics, vol 15, 1997, p363-8).
One must account for the biblical history explaining to us that the first eight generations of humans took place over a long 1700 years, only then tapering to the rapid generations more typical of the life and times of later human history. Once this is done, the evidence confirms that Eve lived only 6000 years ago; not 120,000 years; not 200,000 years; certainly not six or seven million years (where evolutionists currently date our first split off from the ape lineages).
Researchers who accept this knowledge are routinely ignored by those in the scientific community who are of the Darwinian faith.
The most recent common ancestor would have lived in the very recent past … the MRCA of humans lived just a few thousand years ago. ~Nature, “Modeling the Recent Common Ancestry of all Living Humans,” vol 431, 9/30/2004, p562.
Some might object to the notion that one human couple might give rise to all of the genetic diversity now found in the human race. But the origin of this one couple must be taken into account. Creation anatomist David Menton urges us to remember that Eve was a direct creation of God.
All baby girls after her are born with all the egg cells in their ovaries that they will ever have for their entire lifetime. They get those eggs by meiotic division of their parents’ DNA during their own prenatal development.
But where did Eve get her DNA? Where did Eve get the egg cells in her ovaries? Menton suggests that each of Eve’s c. 400,000 eggs could have had a set of alleles in the genes that were totally distinct and diverse from one another. The Bible does not say how many offspring Adam and Eve had. Only three are named, and the rest are referenced only as “many sons and daughters.” How many? How many could the most healthy couple in history produce in a fertile lifespan of perhaps more than half a millennium (500 years — Adam is recorded as living to the age of 930)?
Together, our first parents could have easily provided far more genetic diversity than even now the human race displays. Much of that diversity would have been lost when the human race was reduced once again to only three breeding couples, who, of course, obtained their genetic inheritance in the same way as humans do today.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing it. I heard you speak in Charleston, WV many years ago.