Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Biologos - Adam, Eve and Human Population Genetics, Part 3: Language, populations and speciation


Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics
Part 3 -
Language, populations and speciation
http://biologos.org/blog/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics-part-3-good-butter-and-good-cheese

In this series, we explore the genetic evidence that indicates humans became a separate
species as a substantial population, rather than descending uniquely from an ancestral pair.

by Dennis Venema
December 12, 2014

In yesterday’s post, we drew an extended analogy between genetic change within a population over time, and change within a language over time. While no analogy is perfect, this one is remarkably good – and it will continue to be useful as we now turn to discussing how new species form.



Flags of Friesland and England

With a last name like Venema, it will come as no surprise to many that I have Frisian ancestors. Friesland is a province of the Netherlands with a distinct language, West Frisian, that is one of the most closely-related modern languages to English. My paternal grandparents, immigrants to Canada in the post-World War II era, spoke a delightful hodge-podge of English, Dutch and Frisian to each other, often using mostly Frisian and only reverting to Dutch or English if it happened to have a better word for the concept at hand. As a child, I remember hearing Frisian and noting how similar many of its words were to their English equivalents – far too many similarities, I thought, to be merely coincidence. A well-known sentence will serve as an illustration: it is pronouncedessentially the same in both Frisian and English:
Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Frise.

Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

Later, I would come to understand the reason for these striking similarities – English and West Frisian are modern descendants of an ancient language – they share a common ancestral population of speakers. As we have seen, languages change over time. In the case of English and West Frisian, the original population, which spoke a language ancestral to both modern-day English and modern-day West Frisian, was divided: some remained on the European continent, and others travelled to what is present-day England. Once separated, each sub-group – which at the point of separation spoke the same language – went on to acquire differences over time that were independent of each other. In due time, the changes that accumulated in both groups rendered them mutually unintelligible to each other: they had become separate languages. The precise point at which they became “different languages” of course is impossible to pin down, since there was no such precise point when it occurred. Both groups changed their language over time incrementally, as a process on a gradient.

Species form through a process much like language development. Should two populations of the same species become separated, they too can accumulate genetic changes that shift their average characteristics over time – changes that are not shared and averaged across the two groups due to their genetic isolation. In many cases, geographic isolation acts as the first genetic barrier – much like the ancestors of the English parting ways with their continental cousins. Once separated, should enough genetic changes accrue between the two populations, eventually they will not recognize each other as members of the same species – which would be analogous to my experience as a modern English speaker in present-day Friesland.

Species, like languages “begin” as populations – and “begin” isn’t the right word

Our language analogy also helps to counter some common misconceptions about how species form. Often when I am speaking about human origins, folks who have heard about modern humans descending from around 10,000 ancestors wonder how on earth those 10,000 people suddenly appeared on the scene without ancestors. Of course, they didn’t suddenly appear – they too have a population that gave rise to them, and so on – stretching back to our shared ancestral populations with other apes and beyond. There is in fact no point in our evolutionary history over the last 18 million years or more where our lineage was reduced below 10,000 individuals – and 18 million years ago our lineage was not even close to “human” in any sense, since this timepredates any hominin (i.e. species more closely related to us than to chimpanzees) in the fossil record. The 10,000 number is simply the smallest population size we have in our history over the last several million years. The lineage leading to modern humans experienced what is known as a population bottleneck, a time when our ancestral population size was reduced to around 10,000 breeding individuals, only to expand again afterwards.

Despite these explanations, it is a common misperception to think that species, should one go back far enough, started off with one ancestral breeding pair “becoming different”. Hopefully our language analogy is useful here. It is of course not reasonable to expect that English or West Frisian got its start when two individuals began speaking a new language. The lineage that led to either modern language did so as a population of speakers – and each generation within both lineages was perfectly intelligible to their parents and their offspring. In the same way, species form as populations shift their average characteristics over time – but always remaining the “same species” as their parents and their offspring. So, to speak of a language or a species “beginning” is to hit up against the limits of language. Neither “begins” in some sort of discontinuous sense – they become, over time, in continuity with what came before.

So, one of the reasons for the common expectation that humans had a discontinuous beginning with a single ancestral couple has nothing to do with Genesis or Judeo-Christian theology: I have met many non-theists who also have this same expectation. We are used to thinking in discontinuous terms – species should have a defined beginning – and we are used to thinking that species therefore begin with a radical change to a single ancestral pair. For evangelical Christians, these incorrect assumptions about how species get their start fit hand in glove with the common view that since species require a discontinuous start, only God can miraculously provide it through an event of special creation. Once one understands how species form as populations over time, however, one is then prepared to investigate the question of how large our population was as we became human – a question we will begin to address in the next post.

For further reading:



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Dennis Venema is professor of biology at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He holds a B.Sc. (with Honors) from the University of British Columbia (1996), and received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2003. His research is focused on the genetics of pattern formation and signaling using the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. Dennis is a gifted thinker and writer on matters of science and faith, but also an award-winning biology teacher—he won the 2008 College Biology Teaching Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers. He and his family enjoy numerous outdoor activities that the Canadian Pacific coast region has to offer. Dennis writes regularly for the BioLogos Forum about the biological evidence for evolution.









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