R.E. Slater - Finding a New Normal

Finding A New Normal

by R.E. Slater

I thought today we might take a break from the heavy, practicuum stuff of process ecological civilizations to shift our gaze occasionally to the perennial Christian struggle with evolution. Here, at Relevancy22, it was one of the first topics I had focused on to help set the tone and tenor of how to read the bible in the context of science. It was during this time I found myself struggling moving forward with finding a new hermeneutic which might help my reading of the bible in a contemporary sense. Which I did, though it took awhile, and found it all too simple  in solution when applied in the context of an open and relational (process) faith. I wish to always credit Peter Enns with helping me in this journey, and later, Thomas Oord and Tripp Fuller, Roger Olson, and many others.

It took eight years of daily research, study, prayer, and methodically writing through issue after issue, doctrine after doctrine - all of which are recorded here in timeless form in the topics column listed along the right side of this blog. The some 2200+ posts show my path forward through the labyrinth of contemporary evangelical thought and how I was able to move beyond the sanctified beliefs of my generation to where I am now only by the help of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God.

And yes, it was the burden of the Spirit which propelled me for as long as I've attended to these tasks beginning with quite a dramatic first start into my own personal wilderness wherein I was quickly swallowed up and quite unable - and later, unwilling - to leave a very dark time in my life until the Spirit was done filling the cavity of God's absence in my life over the space of a very long year of unlearning and relearning. In this, I am not unlike the beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died this week at 101:

“Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical,” Ferlinghetti told Interview magazine in 2013. “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.” - LF

And though this period of life was a very dark time of deconstructing my past, it had to be done. If not, I could not be released to reconstruct where my once conservative evangelical education, training, and beliefs might go when directed aright by God during an arising time of observed religious atheism and agnosticism amongst my Christian brothers and sisters.

Yes, you read this aright. The church as I knew it had shifted, and in its shift I happened to break away onto another path. I think belatedly but am glad I had by the Spirit's power. And glad that I did in the hindsight of what has happened over these past recent years since 2012 when I began (though it had been building for many decades previously). I suspect the biggest problem I've observed over this time has been my faith's reconciliation of polypluralism with the Jesus-Christian ethic from a dominant white culture I had been raised. However, there are many more issues at work here as I've attempted to write about over the years.

So it wasn't until late last August, 2020, when I realized I had completed my journey when reading through past articles I had written on quantum cosmology here on this site. By now I had discover a helpful biblical hermeneutic to compliment my Reformed faith and decided that evening in the glowing autumnal dusk I could begin a different kind of script for the years ahead.

Essentially, the past eight years I now use as a kind of postdoctoral journey out of one kind of worldview and towards another kind of perspective. Let's call it a process-based expression of my faith. For myself, all learned biblical approaches within an evangelical Reformed context ended last fall. They would not be dropped, only expanded. And placed onto different platforms and foundations. For my hermeneutical search also was looking for a radically different context.

That said, I could continue writing in the same religious venues I had been writing or try to take my journey's life lessons to then lift up the Author and God of my burgeoning faith to write in a post-Whiteheadian, post-process, post-constructivist, post-modernist, sense of a post-Reformed Christianity. I am choosing to do this latter while occasionally looking back as we are today with Peter Enns' podcast on the evolution of Adam. (For more similar articles look under the Science section of the topics list to the right as well as any appropriate indexes which I keep up as I can.)

Here, below, Peter takes his early thoughts on evangelical evolutionary creationism and updates them years later based upon what he has learned in his studies, readings, and lectures. Not unlike myself, Peter is choosing to add to his life-journey lessons which we might learn with him, having gone through his own wilderness journeys under the God of renewing, reviving faith.

Thank you again for walking with us.

Peace.

R.E. Slater

February 24, 2021

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https://peteenns.com/episode-148-adam-evangelicalism-the-metanarrative-of-evolution/

Episode 148:

Adam, Evangelicalism, and the Metanarrative of Evolution

by Peter Enns

Last Updated November 22, 2020

In this episode of The Bible for Normal People Podcast, Pete talks about his book, The Evolution of Adam, and how his thoughts have expanded since he wrote it as he explores the following questions:

• Should science influence our theology?

• How does Paul interpret the Adam story?

• What are some ways people try to support an argument for a historical Adam?

• What are entangled particles?

• What is meant by the “theory” of evolution?

• How large is the universe?

• What does it mean for us to call God “Creator” in light of what we know about science?

• What is quanta?

• Why are evangelicals resistant to incorporating science into theology?

• How does quantum physics impact our daily lives?

• What is third millennium theology?

• How do we limit our understandings of God?

TWEETABLES

Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from Pete you can share. 

• “Trying to solder together the biblical story of Adam and evolutionary science is intellectually and spiritually debilitating—it’s stressful.”  @peteenns

• “What is needed is a synthesis of theology and science where science influences our theology.” @peteenns

• “Our state of knowledge of the world today is one that the writers of Scripture—not to mention the first 1500 years of the Church—had absolutely no frame of reference for.” @peteenns

• “The same science that gives us the bizarre quantum world has also had wide-ranging, very practical impact on our daily lives.” @peteenns

• “Theology cannot be dissociated from science, in part because Christians believe that the cosmos is God’s “general revelation” of God’s self.” @peteenns

• “The Christian faith is rooted in an ancient Semitic tradition that had no philosophers or scientists. The traditions that grew out of those times and places were written by men who lived in a very different world than ours, and they cannot be expected to bear for us the burden of doing theology in our moment in time.” @peteenns

• “What of this world do we carry with us and where is this sacred book limiting God and needs to be set aside, given what we know about the nature of the cosmos today?” @peteenns

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Book: The Evolution of Adam
• Book: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
• Book: The Individuation of God
• Website: B4NP Store
• Support: The Bible for Normal People

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Introduction]

0:00

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People. The only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

[Jaunty intro music]

Pete: Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast and today’s topic is all about evolution, but more than just evolution. Let’s get right into this, shall we? Some of you know a few years ago I wrote a book called The Evolution of Adam, came out in 2012 and I’ve been working on a second edition to that book, which is going to come out sometime next year, I think late 2021. And part of what I did was rewrite some of the pretty terrible prose I had in there. It’s amazing how unclear you are when you read yourself a few years later, but anywho, that’s not the point. The point is that I’m also writing an afterword to the book, pretty much, you know, where I’ve stayed the same and where I’ve changed with respect to the book, and it’s a little bit of both. I’ve stayed the same and I’ve changed, but I wanted to share with all of you today some of my thinking on where I’ve really changed my thinking or, maybe put it this way, expanded my thinking on this whole issue of the Bible and evolution.

So, to do that, let’s start if I may, with just a quick synopsis of what the book, The Evolution of Adam was about. I wrote that, as I said, in 2012 and I wrote it to contribute to a familiar and needed, also a little bit contentious discussion concerning the relationship between biological evolution and Christian faith. And, you know, I assumed evolution at the outset. I just assumed that it’s, you know, the essentially universal scientific consensus that common descent is a compelling and powerful account of how we humans came to be. I don’t contest that. My focus was rather on the key biblical passages that tend to be seen as barriers to this discussion among evangelicals; that’s the primary audience for the book. Not the only one, but the primary audience. And of course, those biblical passages are the story of Adam in Genesis 2-3, and Paul’s use of the Adam story in Romans 5:12-21. Paul talks about Adam as well in 1 Corinthians, but I don’t deal with that because, you know, the book was long enough. Plus Romans 5, I think, is the main passage. Anywho, these biblical passages have normally been read in evangelicalism as, you know, sitting a bit uncomfortably with the scientific consensus. You know, a historical Adam is the cause not only of death, but the inbred sinfulness and even guilt at birth for all humanity. A historical Adam is a theological non-negotiable idea within the evangelical system.

Now in the book, if you’ve read it this is not a surprise, but I argue that Adam is not a historical figure at all, but a synopsis of Israel’s national story that ends in disobedience, that ends in exile, so to speak. Just as Adam, you know, was put into a lush land and given a command to obey and if you obey, you stay in the garden; if you disobey, you leave. In the same sense, the nation of Israel was put into a lush land, the land of Canaan, and if they obey God, they stay in the land; if they disobey, they are exiled. And this is a medieval Jewish idea, at least, I did not invent that. I think it’s a great way of looking at the Adam story. And if you look at it that way, the Adam story really has no bearing on the historical/scientific question of human origins. And attempts to make the Adam story fit that, I think are just completely out of place.

Now, with respect to Paul, I said that he did believe in a historical Adam, and I explain why he would think that—because he is a man of his time, a first century Jew. He’s thinking like an ancient person. He also interpreted the Adam story, and this is getting more to the meat of things, he interpreted the Adam story not, not plainly, not in a way that would be recognized by the original author, but he interpreted the story very creatively. And to cut to the chase, Paul’s interpretation, right, it’s an interpretation, his interpretation of the Adam story is a creative Christ-centered Jewish midrash. And midrash is, you know, sort of a fancy term, but it basically means the creative adaptation of a text to speak to a very different circumstance. And that creative interpretation of Paul’s was driven by a pastoral concern to drive home this new reality that he’s talking about where Jew and gentile together are part of one human family who both need Jesus.

4:58

Now, this is an interpretation of the Adam story, it’s not, it’s not a binding comment on what that author of Genesis meant, and neither does Paul answer scientifically/historically, you know, the question of human origins. And we’re just, we’re asking too much. This is sort of one of the main takeaways of the book. We’re just asking too much of Genesis and Paul to answer questions that they’re not even asking. Our questions were about science and history, and theirs were not.

Now, by trying to solder together, if I can put it that way, trying to solder together the biblical story of Adam and evolutionary science is intellectually and spiritually debilitating—it’s stressful. You know, other Christian traditions have come to peace with a symbolic reading of the Adam story, but even the best expressions of evangelical theology are still very much preoccupied to align some sort of literal first man with evolution—sort of having your cake and eating it too. And the solutions that are usually offered, as I see them, they don’t work because they are, they’re ad hoc. They’re made up to relieve some theological pressure. For example, Adam is seen in some evangelical writings not as the literal first man, in fact, not even a man at all, but as a gene pool. You know, some theories say that all of, all present humans descended from a gene pool of between 5,000-10,000 humans that lived about 100,000 years ago or so. I know some of the numbers are a little bit different, but here Adam is not a person, but a gene pool. Other theories are things like, you know, there’s an evolutionary process, sure we agree with that, that’s fine, but there’s still an Adam and Eve and here’s where we get them. God zapped two humans X number of thousands of years ago and made them Adam and Eve, and everyone past and present and future is somehow connected to these two creatures. So, it’s not that people were descended biologically from them, but, in fact they’re not even the first people. They’re just sort of picked specially by God. Those are two options and ironically, I mean, think of is this way. In an effort to protect the non-negotiable biblical truth of a historical Adam, evangelical theology seems to be content by making up an Adam that the biblical story simply can’t bear.

The truth is, evolution has rocked evangelical theology to its core. They can’t coexist as they are. You can’t fix it by pinning the evolutionary tail onto the evangelical donkey. Evangelicals cannot continue making believe that this theology is rock solid, and they just need to find some way of grafting this annoying bit of science onto it. Nothing is served by finding more and more subtle ways of like, shuffling and reshuffling the same deck and not interrogating evangelical theology itself. So, what’s needed, instead, is a synthesis of theology and science, and it’s a synthesis where the science actually influences our theology. And my thinking over the past decade or so has not strayed from this basic outline. So, that’s pretty much what I was trying to do in the book.

Now, what’s changed? Well, this is what’s changed: I have come to see the need for theology to grapple more with the broader scientific landscape. Okay? The broader landscape within which biological evolution is but one small part, and then doing that, seeing how all of this affects and informs how we talk about God.

See, evolution is a theory, and forgive me, but before we go on, just to talk about that word theory. In contract to popular usage, theory, in scientific usage, does not mean like a hypothetical idea that needs to be tested, but an idea that has been tested, widely and over time and has risen to the level of broad scientific consensus. And that’s why the common criticism that we hear sometimes that evolution is “only a theory,” it really mistakes the scientific meaning of that term with the popular one. So, I will say it again, evolution is a theory that explains not just the emergence of life on this planet but the emergence of the cosmos as a whole; that’s part of this landscape that I’m talking about, this broader landscape.

9:54

Science, evolution rather, explains the emergence of the cosmos as a whole from the Big Bang to this moment nearly 14 billion years later, from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest galaxies. Evolution is also the framework for understanding the emergence of our planet from grains of dust orbiting the fledgling sun that lumped together over many millions of years to form a sphere and thus beginning its 15-billion-year transformation. Evolution, in other words, is the indisputable meta-narrative of how all things came to be; it’s the big, overarching story that accounts for cosmological, geological, and biological reality—so pretty much everything. The question of Adam vis-à-vis biological evolution must be set against the backdrop of the meta-narrative of evolution.

You know, our state of knowledge of the world today is one that the writers of Scripture—not to mention the first 1500 years of the Church—had absolutely no frame of reference for. Those previous historical moments, you know, they’re not adequate for addressing many of the questions that we face today. We all know, for example, something of the truly incomprehensible size of the universe, you know, thanks to the breathtaking photographs of the Hubble Space Telescope: the universe is filled will billions upon billions of galaxies.

You know, our universe—to be precise, the “known universe,” which isn’t the whole thing, apparently— is as I said, about 14 billion years old, and now listen to this, 14 billion years old and 546 sextillion miles across. That’s 546 plus twenty-one zeros, or, if this helps, a billion times a billion times a thousand. You know, in an era where Americans are used to hearing about trillion-dollar national debt, speaking of mere billions seems quaint. But, to offer some perspective, think about this – if we were to count to one million, at one count per second, one, two, three, right?  If we were to do that, it would take, to count to a million, it would take about 11.5 days. Think of doing anything for 11.5 days. It takes a long time to count to a million. Now, to count to one billion would take, well, 1000 times that—which comes out to roughly 32 years of counting one, two, three, right? Ugh, that’s a long time. Now, to work up to the size of the 546 sextillion mile universe, we would need to count to one billion, for starters, a thousand times (that’s 32,000 years), and then do all that again another billion times. That would take, hmm, now is when it gets crazier, that would take 32 trillion years and that is incomprehensible and that’s just to reach one sextillion. Do that all again another 546 times, and it would take you—well, this is where my calculator just gives up and punts and spits out 1.75 followed by 16 zeros, which is just south of 20 quadrillion years to count the size of the universe and that number quadrillion means nothing to us. These are incomprehensible, incomprehensible numbers.

You know, the universe is so large, even the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second, even the speed of light takes 93 billion years to go from one end to the other. If we can even talk about the ends of the universe, we probably can’t since apparently space curves in on itself which I don’t understand, so let’s just keep moving. But just for argument’s sake, you know, 93 billion years to go from one end to the other traveling at the speed of light. It’s unbelievable. To bring some of this down closer to our scale, the speed of light covers in one second 7 ½ times the circumference of the earth. To get to the closest star in our galaxy, okay, just the closest star in our galaxy, one would need to keep that speed up every second, of every hour, of every day, of every year, for about 4 years and 4 months. Just imagine that whooshing around the earth 7 ½ times a second, which it itself incomprehensible, and keeping that up for 4 years and 4 months. That’s, that’s what it would take to get to the closest star.

14:57

You know, and there are apparently between 100 and 200 billion stars in our galaxy—which would take about 3,000 to 6,000 years to count and some estimates are closer to 400 billion stars—and on top of that 100s of billions of galaxies in the known universe. And, just to add insult to injury, the closest galaxy to ours (Andromeda) is about 2.5 million light years away. Just imagine that, whooshing around the earth 7 ½ times a second and keeping that up for 2.5 million years.

[Sigh]

Well, to sum up: the universe is big. It is immeasurably large and old, and our speck-of-dust Earth is insignificant on the cosmic scale. Our home planet is, as Carl Sagan famously put it, a “pale blue dot” just in one solar system on the outskirts of one lonely galaxy. This cannot be left to the side when we speak about the God of the Bible. What kind of a God are we dealing with? What does “God” even mean? Where is this God? Is “where” even a meaningful question? And is this God personal, and what would that even mean for the Creator of such an inhuman scale to be personal? You know, the writer of Psalm 19 raises his eyes to the heavens and praises God, for there he sees God’s glory. And this may be all fine and good from an Iron Age perspective, but for, you know, for us, our “heavens” are not “up there.” There is no “up.” The “heavens” surround us on all sides and just keep on going—infinitely, for all intents and purposes—and the thought of it all should be unsettling for all who are paying attention. You know, I’m struck by the words of seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, this rings so true to me. This really, when I first saw this years ago it was like, oh gosh, he’s known me my whole life. 

Here’s what he says:

The eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me. When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?

You know, the universe is disarmingly huge, and the thought of all this makes me freeze in my tracks. We cannot carry on employing pictures of God that arose before our immense, incomprehensible, expanding, and very weird universe came to light. The profound discoveries of the last hundred years especially have changed forever how we perceive reality, of which human origins, really, is just one very, very small part. That’s the much bigger issue before us, and whether Adam was a real person is really, I have to say, easy to figure out against that larger backdrop. Evangelical theology cannot rest content hammering out the Adam question vis-à-vis biological evolution in isolation from the bigger picture of the evolving cosmos that physicists have discovered.

The age and size of the universe are just the beginning of the scientific challenges to evangelical theology. Einstein’s work in the early twentieth century resulted in a fundamental shift in how we look at the universe and our existence in it. Among his many accomplishments, Einstein demonstrated that the passage of time, listen to this, the passage of time is not constant for everyone but experienced differently by, say, someone on the earth’s surface and someone orbiting the earth in a satellite—which is too profound a thought to be skimmed over. Time slows down the closer one is to a massive object (like the earth) and speeds up the further one is away from the object. Time is slower even for those living in a valley compared to those living in the hills above. Time is not stable. In fact, as physicist Carlo Rovelli explains, “Physicists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion and that the ‘flow’,” so called flow, “of time is a generalization that doesn’t work.”

19:56

If you’re interested, Carlo Rovelli is an Italian physicist. He wrote this beautiful little book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and I got that quote from page 60 if you’re interested. But right below that, I just love this part, right below that Rovelli goes on to cite a letter that Einstein wrote after the death of his longtime friend Michele Besso to Besso’s grieving sister, and this is what Einstein wrote. He says: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction made between past, present, and future, is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” Yeah, time is not the constant forward arrow we perceive it to be.

Jared: Stay tuned for more Bible for Normal People.

[Music begins]

[Producer’s group endorsement]

[Music ends]

So, time is relative, and that relativity can only be perceived by atomic measurement devices. It would be experienced more dramatically if one were traveling near the speed of light or were near a massive black hole—you know, a few minutes there might be equivalent to ten years or decades or something to those outside of its gravitational pull (and this was depicted very well in the 2014 film Interstellar). What is truly odd about all this is the fact that gravity is not a “force” at all that “pulls” on things, but it’s only experienced as such by us. And in truth, what we call gravity is the effects of the bending of space and time by the Earth’s mass. Einstein showed that space and time, in fact, are not two independent entities but together form a single space-time “fabric,” which is affected by mass. See, how we perceive space (as like, the “pull” of gravity) and how we perceive the passage of time going in a forward, linear direction, that’s all determined by how close we are to a massive object as well as the speed one is traveling. We may experience our reality as stable (time passes at a constant rate), but the actual reality is much different.

Now, how all this works is well above my paygrade; if you’re confused, so am I. But whatever it means and whatever its implications, I think some pressing questions come to mind, namely this one: you know, if the physical universe is really such a place that at the end of the day doesn’t match our experience, could we really say any less of our experiences, and perceptions, and thoughts about the Creator of that universe? How can all of this not affect our God-talk? What would it look like for us to call God “Creator” in light of these scientific theories of the creation? How would theology change? I’m not sure, but the question can’t be avoided, and, again, in comparison, dealing with the Adam question, is not really that sophisticated or difficult.

Now, as if Einstein’s space-time continuum weren’t enough to process, and it is, his theories led others in his day to discover a world on the other end of the cosmic scale. Apparently, everything—so we’re told—everything, including space/time is made up of incomprehensibly small, discrete units or packets, “quanta” is the word that’s used, the small packets of matter and energy. This subatomic “quantum” world acts in ways that are IMPOSSIBLE according to the mathematical laws, so called, that govern the massive objects that occupied classical physics, like Newton and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Another kind of physics, quantum physics, with its own set of mathematical formulas, was needed to account for this reality.

25:00

One of the better known, and among the more bizarre, notions of quantum physics is that light on the subatomic scale, light behaves like a wave until it is measured by an outside observer, at which point it behaves like a particle. Light is not one or the other, but potentially both—until you look at it. Likewise, electrons that “orbit” the nucleus are actually not orbiting at all but are clouds of probable locations that only pop into existence when measured. Electrons aren’t really anywhere, strictly speaking, until measured.

Now, pardon me folks as I fumble through this, this is a bit comic here almost. You know, this isn’t my area, right? And I just, I’m working with this stuff as best as I can, but you know, another piece of quantum physics that has found its way into popular culture is called “entanglement.” When a particle like a single photon has been split in half (granted, that’s enough of a thought to make me want to go take a long walk somewhere) but a photon that’s been split in half, just imagine that, and the two halves are placed at a distance from each other, the two halves are still instantly entangled—which means something like the behavior of one is instantly mirrored in the other. Now here’s the thing, this happens, this could be called a fact of quantum physics, like, no one really disputes this from what I understand. But, this happens, this entanglement of these two particles, this happens no matter how far apart the entangled particles are. Well, how can that be? Well, if the two particles were, like, “communicating” with each other (whatever it means for particles to communicate, let’s leave that to the side), but if they were communicating with each other, the mirroring of the two particles could not be instantaneous, why? Because nothing exceeds the speed of light. But quantum entanglement is instantaneous. Two entangled particles could be on opposite ends of our galaxy, 200,000 light years apart, and one would still mirror the other instantly. Now, physicists are still debating what all this means, but on the quantum level of the universe, it seems that distance at the speed of light, fundamental to laws of physics, are not laws that entangled particles obey.

Now, one might think that these observations are too weird to be true, but physicists assure us that the math works and has proven itself countless times. And the same science, getting more practical here, the same science that gives us the bizarre quantum world has also had wide-ranging, very practical impact on our daily lives: things like atomic clocks, supercomputers, transistors, uncrackable codes, GPS, MRI, lasers, and a bunch of other things. Many aspects of quantum physics have been debated for a century, and there’s a lot of disagreement on things, and there’s a lot still hidden from us, but quantum physics is not smoke and mirrors. It’s science, showing us something of the universe that we inhabit. 

Now, this is as good a time as any to make clear what you have no doubt sensed already, and that is that I am not a scientist. I’m not trained in physics, you know, though, I have to say learning about the world that I live in has always fascinated me. A basic grasp of evolutionary biology, well, I think that’s possible for most people, but when it comes to relativity and quantum physics, most human beings are in exactly the same boat as I—the science is too technical, it’s too mathematical for the public to be able to follow, let alone incorporate into our theology somehow. And just a side issue here, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not suggesting that the various dimensions of the study of evolution are, you know, easy to understand. They’re not. These are also things that happen in highly specialized fields that requires years of training. You can’t talk your way around the ins and outs of evolutionary biology after doing a Google search. But given some time and effort, I think most of us can follow more easily basic points concerning things like the fossil record or maybe even the human genome much, much better than something like Schrödinger’s equation, which is a basic building block to quantum mechanics and you can Google that if you want to. But any formula that basically is mostly made up of letters and not numbers and they call it math, I know I’m in over my head at that point. See, most of us, my point, most of us, including myself, should be very cautious about bringing highly specialized sciences into conversations about what God is like.

30:05

But what I will say is this: even a nontechnical, general, superficial grasp of the scientific landscape I think is enough for us to marvel at the mystery, the complexity, the incomprehensibility, the unpredictability of the cosmos in which we find ourselves. How we conceive of God needs to keep pace with what we know about the cosmos on the scale of the very large and the infinitesimally small. This would not require anyone to, you know, solve the mysteries of the physical universe, but simply to acknowledge that the mysteries are profound, not going away, and—whether we admit it or not—do not leave theology unaffected.

Theology cannot be dissociated from science, in part because Christians believe that the cosmos is God’s “general revelation” of God’s self. Special revelation, in technical theological terms, that usually refers to the Bible and/or Jesus. Mainly Jesus, but the Bible as well, that’s a special revelation, but creation is a general revelation. We learn something of God from creation. Right, the declaration of Psalm 19, I mentioned earlier, that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” that still holds, but our “heavens” today are markedly different from what medieval theologians or Iron Age psalmists understood—we know more. The staggering dimensions and vast age of the universe coupled with the revolutions of relativity and quantum physics are psychologically and spiritually disorienting. I mean, particularly for Christians whose theology, what they believe about God and all sorts of things, for people whose theology was shaped fundamentally in the 16th century and the wake of the Protestant Reformation—and that is the roots of evangelical theology today. For us to declare along with the psalmist that God’s glory is seen in our cosmos, that takes theological energy, it takes imagination, it takes an all-in embrace of mystery and ambiguity, and above all, it takes a willingness to allow for and to experience and to embrace theological change. In my experience, however, these are not always the marks that are typically associated with evangelical theology.

Now another reason why theology and science can’t be kept at a safe distance from each other, they simply CANNOT be kept at a safe distance from each other, is that they are never actually distant to begin with. Theology is a discipline that has ALWAYS expressed itself in the contexts of current ways of thinking about the world and anything else. And here, just a quick shout out, hopefully this is a good resource for you, we did a podcast a while back with Ilia Delio, a Villanova theologian, and she also has a book The Unbearable Wholeness of Being where in the first thirty or forty pages she fletches things like this out pretty well. But anyway, theology

reflects our human context. There is no “theology from above” because people do theology and all theology is a human endeavor, and this is certainly true within the Bible itself, the ancient Israelites, whose origins stories in Genesis 1,2, and 3 reflect ancient views of the cosmos in general. It’s true of the timeless Gospel which is nevertheless expressed in the clearly NOT timeless categories of 1st century Judaism. Similarly, the Early Church, which was gentile, left behind the Jewish apocalyptic vibe of the New Testament to embrace another worldview. You know, the Jewish apocalyptic view of the New Testament, it is Jewish, Jews were writing it, they’re writing it within the context of the Jewish tradition and it’s apocalyptic, meaning God’s gonna set all things right pretty soon. And Jesus’ resurrection is like the first stage of that, and the second stage is coming like, real, real, real soon. That is the context of the New Testament, that’s sort of its structure almost, but with the Early Church that was left behind. The Jewish apocalypticism of the New Testament is not a factor anymore, and another worldview is embraced, Greco-Roman philosophy.

34:54

And so they spoke of God as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and Christ as, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten of the Father, not made, being of one substance with the Father. . . ..” You know, all this stuff which is fantastic and wonderful, but strictly speaking, none of this is a biblical concept, it’s all shaped by the “state of knowledge” at the time.

Even the God that many take for granted today—sovereignly directing all things along the axis of linear time according to inviolable laws—well, this God owes a great deal to Newton’s mechanistic cosmos, were what we see is what is and can be explained by conventional “laws” of physics. Speaking of God in such ways has grown steadily obsolete over the last century. Astrophysics, relativity, and quantum physics have presented us with models of the cosmos that have fundamentally changed our understanding of reality—these models did not exist even remotely in the minds of those who gave the church much of its theological language over the centuries, including the biblical writers. These scientific models of the cosmos stagger the imagination and are placing increasing and relentless pressure on the church to develop accessible theological models that can keep pace with the science.

Historically, Christian theology has been geocentric with humans as the crowning centerpiece. This is why the church strongly resisted the heliocentrism, sun at the center of the solar system, the heliocentrism of Copernicus and Galileo, not just because the notion was not found in the Bible, but because decentering earth and humanity – we’re not the center of everything – that really destabilized the worldview within which the church has always conceived of God. You know, we’re it, and we’re at the center of the center. We’re on earth, and this is, everything is the focus of what’s happening on this planet. The Christian faith has largely come to terms theoretically with the idea of a solar system in a vast cosmos, but you know, it took time—and a willingness to conceive of God differently as our understanding of the universe changed. This posture must continue even with—I’m gonna say especially with—the unique challenges of relativity and quantum physics. And that is the real challenge before us, far more sweeping in scope and far more necessary for the church’s thriving than fixating on whether Genesis should be taken literally. Of course it shouldn’t. Why are we still talking about this?

Perhaps the time has come for what Peter Todd calls “third millennium theology,” and this is a very provocative book, Peter Todd, The Individuation of God in Integrating Science and Religion, it’s 2017. But, you know, maybe it’s time for a third millennium theology, a theology that’s suited for our state of knowledge in the third millennium. We can’t know beforehand, at least I can’t, what that third millennium theology might look like and where it might lead, I don’t know. But one thing I do know: continuing to talk about the Creator while keeping our understanding of the creation at arm’s length will ensure a parochial theology, one that’s more centered on self-defense than actually helping explain the Creator and our place in the world with, you know, I think what’s really needed, with a sense of conviction and also a sense of hope and a sense of compassion.

The Christian faith is rooted in an ancient Semitic tradition that had no philosophers or scientists. The traditions that grew out of those times and places were written by men who lived in a very different world than ours, and they cannot be expected to bear for us the burden of doing theology in our moment in time. To claim that God does not change does not mean that our understanding of God should never change. Moving forward on the question of evolution would mean embracing the fact that the biblical story reflects an ancient world, and then to have the freedom to ask, “What of this world, of this biblical world, do we carry with us and where is this sacred word limiting God and needs to be set aside, given what we know about the nature of the cosmos today?” But whatever we do, we can’t simply merge the ancient world and the modern scientific one. Yet that is exactly what evangelical theology has been trying to do by saying yes to science and then quickly adding “but we need a historical Adam, too.” Drawing a historical Adam of the Bible into the story of evolution can only fail. It may serve as a temporary sort of holding pattern, but it will not give us a true and lasting synthesis. 

The future of evangelical theology, if it wants to have a future, will have to be in true theological conversation with the meta-narrative of evolution, cosmic, geological, and biological.  This is not time for a hesitant, protective, or ad hoc posture. The question evangelicalism has to ask itself is whether its theological temperament is constituted for this theological task, for it will mean allowing in an uncomfortable degree of theological flexibility—or perhaps even rethinking core elements of that theology altogether.

The question of Christianity and evolution is only one small piece of a much larger and more pressing conversation. The first step in entering that conversation would be for evangelicalism to interrogate its own theology, especially with respect to the alleged necessity of a historical Adam when all evidence is to the contrary.

[Music begins]

Pete: All right folks, that’s enough of me on my soap box for a week, but listen, thanks for listening. Just before you go, just a quick plug here: did you know, I hope you know, did you know that we have an online shop with tons of Bible for Normal People merch and swag and every book that I’ve written and Jared too? And we have books for normal people and books for abnormal people, geeky scholars and stuff, and all the snarky theological swag that you can think of – even onesies for littles ones of Noah’s flood and all that kind of stuff. It’s fantastic. Listen, head over to https://peteenns.com/store/ and buy at least one thing for every person you know. I think that’ll pretty much cover your bases. Okay, or do the best you can. That’s fine too.

Hey listen folks, again, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

Narrator: Thanks to our team: Executive Producer, Megan Cammack; Audio Engineer, Dave Gerhart; Creative Director, Tessa Stultz; Marketing Wizard, Reed Lively; transcriber and Community Champion, Stephanie Speight; and Web Developer, Nick Striegel. From Pete, Jared, and the entire Bible for Normal People team – thanks for listening.

[Music ends]

[End of recorded material]

Scientists Find The First Animal That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive

Scientists Find The First Animal That

Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-the-first-animal-that-doesn-t-need-oxygen-to-survive

by Michelle Starr

May 10, 2020

Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one.

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that a jellyfish-like parasite doesn't have a mitochondrial genome - the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency.

This discovery isn't just changing our understanding of how life can work here on Earth - it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life started to develop the ability to metabolise oxygen - that is, respirate - sometime over 1.45 billion years ago. A larger archaeon engulfed a smaller bacterium, and somehow the bacterium's new home was beneficial to both parties, and the two stayed together.

That symbiotic relationship resulted in the two organisms evolving together, and eventually those bacteria ensconced within became organelles called mitochondria. Every cell in your body except red blood cells has large numbers of mitochondria, and these are essential for the respiration process.

They break down oxygen to produce a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which multicellular organisms use to power cellular processes.

We know there are adaptations that allow some organisms to thrive in low-oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions. Some single-celled organisms have evolved mitochondria-related organelles for anaerobic metabolism; but the possibility of exclusively anaerobic multicellular organisms has been the subject of some scientific debate.

That is, until a team of researchers led by Dayana Yahalomi of Tel Aviv University in Israel decided to take another look at a common salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola.

(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

It's a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful, and will live with the salmon for its entire life cycle.

Tucked away inside its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But exactly how it does so is difficult to know without looking at the creature's DNA - so that's what the researchers did.

They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a close study of H. salminicola, and found that it has lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it's also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration, and almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcribing and replicating mitochondria.

Like the single-celled organisms, it had evolved mitochondria-related organelles, but these are unusual too - they have folds in the inner membrane not usually seen.

The same sequencing and microscopic methods in a closely related cnidarian fish parasite, Myxobolus squamalis, was used as a control, and clearly showed a mitochondrial genome.

These results show that here, at last, is a multicellular organism that doesn't need oxygen to survive.

Exactly how it survives is still something of a mystery. It could be leeching adenosine triphosphate from its host, but that's yet to be determined.

But the loss is pretty consistent with an overall trend in these creatures - one of genetic simplification. Over many, many years, they have basically devolved from a free-living jellyfish ancestor into the much more simple parasite we see today.

(Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

They've lost most of the original jellyfish genome, but retaining - oddly - a complex structure resembling jellyfish stinging cells. They don't use these to sting, but to cling to their hosts: an evolutionary adaptation from the free-living jellyfish's needs to the parasite's. You can see them in the image above - they're the things that look like eyes.

The discovery could help fisheries adapt their strategies for dealing with the parasite; although it's harmless to humans, no one wants to buy salmon riddled with tiny weird jellyfish.

But it's also a heck of a discovery for helping us to understand how life works.

"Our discovery confirms that adaptation to an anaerobic environment is not unique to single-celled eukaryotes, but has also evolved in a multicellular, parasitic animal," the researchers wrote in their paper, published in February 2020.

"Hence, H. salminicola provides an opportunity for understanding the evolutionary transition from an aerobic to an exclusive anaerobic metabolism."

* The research has been published in PNAS.

**A version of this article was first published in February 2020.

* * * * * * * * *

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The Amazing Story of Oxygen

Methane-filled Atmosphere of Early Earth

Helped ‘Clear the Air’ for Oxygen

The Story of Oxygen in Early Earth

Oxygen was a toxic gas in primordial earth's early history until it was not. How and why did this happen? It begins with the story of methane gas. Further, it seems to explain quite sufficiently the explosion of life in the Cambrian Period which everyone seems to make a fuss over (Why All the Fuss over Earth's Remarkable Cambrian Explosion?). The article that follows explains this....

R.E. Slater

August 15, 2018

FROM THE MARCH 2009 ISSUE

They Don't Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To

article link

By Kathleen McAuliffe|Monday, February 09, 2009

Our species—and individual races—have recently made

big evolutionary changes to adjust to new pressures.

For decades the consensus view—among the public as well as the world’s preeminent biologists—has been that human evolution is over. Since modern Homo sapiensemerged 50,000 years ago, “natural selection has almost become irrelevant” to us, the influential Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proclaimed. “There have been no biological changes. Everything we’ve called culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” This view has become so entrenched that it is practically doctrine. Even the founders of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, signed on to the notion that our brains were mostly sculpted during the long period when we were hunter-gatherers and have changed little since. “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” they wrote in a background piece on the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

So to suggest that humans have undergone an evolutionary makeover from Stone Age times to the present is nothing short of blasphemous. Yet a team of researchers has done just that. They find an abundance of recent adaptive mutations etched in the human genome; even more shocking, these mutations seem to be piling up faster and ever faster, like an avalanche. Over the past 10,000 years, their data show, human evolution has occurred a hundred times more quickly than in any other period in our species’ history.

The new genetic adaptations, some 2,000 in total, are not limited to the well-recognized differences among ethnic groups in superficial traits such as skin and eye color. The mutations relate to the brain, the digestive system, life span, immunity to pathogens, sperm production, and bones—in short, virtually every aspect of our functioning.

Many of these DNA variants are unique to their continent of origin, with provocative implications. “It is likely that human races are evolving away from each other,” says University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who coauthored a major paper on recent human evolution. “We are getting less alike, not merging into a single mixed humanity.”

Harpending theorizes that the attitudes and customs that distinguish today’s humans from those of the past may be more than just cultural, as historians have widely assumed. “We aren’t the same as people even a thousand or two thousand years ago,” he says. “Almost every trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.”

Not surprisingly, the new findings have raised hackles. Some scientists are alarmed by claims of ethnic differences in temperament and intelligence, fearing that they will inflame racial sensitivities. Other researchers point to limitations in the data. Yet even skeptics now admit that some human traits, at least, are evolving rapidly, challenging yesterday’s hallowed beliefs.

A BONE TO PICK

Bones don’t lie. John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin at Madison likes evidence he can put his hands on, so he takes me on a tour of the university’s bone laboratory. There, the energetic 36-year-old anthropologist unlocks a glass case and begins arranging human skulls and other skeletal artifacts—some genuine fossils, others high-quality reproductions—on a counter according to their age. Gesturing toward these relics, which span the past 35,000 years, Hawks says, “You don’t have to look hard to see that teeth are getting smaller, skull size is shrinking, stature is getting smaller.”

These overriding trends are similar in many parts of the world, but other changes, especially over the past 10,000 years, are distinct to specific ethnic groups. “These variations are well known to forensic anthropologists,” Hawks says as he points them out: In Europeans, the cheekbones slant backward, the eye sockets are shaped like aviator glasses, and the nose bridge is high. Asians have cheekbones facing more forward, very round orbits, and a very low nose bridge. Australians have thicker skulls and the biggest teeth, on average, of any population today. “It beats me how leading biologists could look at the fossil record and conclude that human evolution came to a standstill 50,000 years ago,” Hawks says.

By his account, Hawks’s theory of accelerated human evolution owes its genesis to what he could see with his own eyes. But his radical view was also influenced by newly emerging genetic data. Thanks to stunning advances in sequencing and deciphering DNA in recent years, scientists had begun uncovering, one by one, genes that boost evolutionary fitness. These variants, which emerged after the Stone Age, seemed to help populations better combat infectious organisms, survive frigid temperatures, or otherwise adapt to local conditions. And they were popping up with surprising frequency.

Taken together, the skeletal and genetic evidence convinced Hawks that the ruling “static” view of recent human evolution was not only wrong but also quite possibly the opposite of the truth. He discussed his ideas with Harpending, his former postdoc adviser at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, a physicist and adjunct professor of anthropology there. They both agreed with Hawks’s interpretation. But why, they wondered, might evolution be picking up speed? What could be fueling the trend?

Then one day, as Hawks and Cochran mulled over the matter in a phone conversation, inspiration struck. “At exactly the same moment, both of us realized, gee, there’s a lot more people on the planet in recent times,” Hawks recalls. “In a large population you don’t have to wait so long for the rare mutation that boosts brain function or does something else desirable.”

The three scientists reviewed the demographic data. Ten thousand years ago, there were fewer than 10 million people on earth. That figure soared to 200 million by the time of the Roman Empire. Since around 1500 the global population has been rising exponentially, with the total now surpassing 6.7 billion. Since mutations are the fodder on which natural selection acts, it stands to reason that evolution might happen more quickly as our numbers surge. “What we were proposing was nothing new to animal breeders of the 19th century,” Cochran notes. “Darwin himself emphasized the importance of maintaining a large herd for selecting favorable traits.”

The logic behind the notion was undeniably simple, but at first glance it seemed counterintuitive. The genomes of any two individuals on the planet are more than 99.5 percent the same. Put another way, less than 0.5 percent of our DNA varies across the globe. That is often taken to mean that we have not evolved much recently, Cochran says, “but keep in mind that the human and chimp genomes differ by only about 1 to 2 percent—and nobody would call that a minor difference. None of this conflicts with the idea that human evolution might be accelerating.”

CULTURE SHOCK

If their hunch was correct, the scientists wondered a few years back, how could they prove it? As it turned out, it was an opportune time to pose that question.

For decades theories about human evolution had proliferated despite the absence of much, if any, hard evidence. But now there were finally human genetic data banks large enough to allow the scientists to put their assumptions to the test. One of these, the International Haplotype Map, cataloged differences in DNA collected from 270 people of Japanese, Han Chinese, Nigerian, and northern European descent. Moreover, Harpending knew two geneticists—Robert Moyzis of the University of California at Irvine, and Eric Wang of Veracyte Inc. in South San Francisco—who were at the forefront of developing new computational methods for mining this data to estimate the rate of evolution. Harpending contacted them to see if they would be willing to collaborate on a study.

Human races are evolving away from each other. We are

getting less alike, not merging into a single mixed humanity.

The West Coast scientists were intrigued. On the basis of their own preliminary data, they, too, suspected that the pace of human evolution was accelerating. But they had arrived at the same crossroads by a different route. “We were focused on cultural shifts as a prime driving force of our evolution,” Moyzis says. As he explains it, an exceptional period in the history of our species occurred about 50,000 years ago. Humans were pouring forth from Africa and fanning out across the globe, eventually taking up residence in niches as diverse as the Arctic Circle, the rain forests of the Amazon, the foothills of the Himalayas, and the Australian outback. Improvements in clothing, shelter, and hunting techniques paved the way for this expansion.

Experts agree on that much but then part ways. These innovations, prominent evolutionary theorists insist, insulated us from the relentless winnowing of natural selection, thereby freeing us from the Darwinian rat race. But Moyzis and Wang looked at the same developments and came to the opposite conclusion. In our far-flung domains, they point out, humans presumably encountered starkly different selective forces as they adjusted to novel foods, predators, climates, and terrains. And as we became more innovative, the pressure to change only intensified. “If you’re a human, what is your environment but culture?” Moyzis asks. “The faster our ingenuity alters our habitat, the quicker we have to adapt in response.”

As for the role of population size in spurring our evolution, he and Wang had not given it much thought, but they saw the idea as complementary to their own view, since cultural innovations allowed more people to survive. So when Harpending’s group came calling, Moyzis says, “we were happy to combine ideas and work together.”

To study natural selection, the team combed the International Haplotype Map for long stretches of DNA flanked by a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, or “snip”)—that is, an altered base, or “letter,” in the genetic alphabet. When the exact same genetic block is present in at least 20 percent of a population, according to the scientists, it indicates that something about that block has conferred a survival advantage; otherwise, it would not have become so prevalent. Because genes are reshuffled with each generation, Moyzis adds, the presence of large unchanged blocks of DNA means they were probably inherited recently. In the parlance of scientists, it is “a signature of natural selection.”

Scanning genomes in the haplotype map for these clues, the researchers discovered that 7 percent of human genes fit the profile of a recent adaptation, with most of the change happening from 40,000 years ago to the present. As predicted, these apparent adaptations occurred at a rate that jumped almost exponentially in prevalence as the human population exploded. To rule out the prevailing view—that our evolution has proceeded at a steady rate all along—the scientists ran an additional check. They performed a computer simulation to see what would have happened if humans had evolved at modern rates ever since we diverged from chimpanzees 6 million years ago. The steady-state test led to a nonsensical result: The difference between the two species today would be 160 times greater than it actually is. To Moyzis and the others, the results confirmed that human evolution had only recently hit the accelerator.

MORPHING AT HIGH SPEED

All of these findings mesh beautifully with the notion that cultural and demographic shifts sparked our transformation. Our exodus out of Africa, for example, paved the way for one of the most obvious markers of race, skin hue. As scientists widely recognize, paler complexions are a genetic adjustment to low light: People with dark skin have trouble manufacturing vitamin D from ultraviolet radiation in northern latitudes, which makes them more susceptible to serious bone deformities. Consequently, Europeans and Asians over the last 20,000 years evolved lighter skin through two dozen different mutations that decrease production of the skin pigment melanin.

Similarly, the gene for blue eyes codes for paler skin coloring in many vertebrates and hence might have piggybacked along with lighter skin. Clearly something made blue eyes evolutionarily advantageous in some environments. “No one on earth had blue eyes 10,000 years ago,” Hawks says.

The transition to an agrarian existence after hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering was another key catalyst of evolution. Once people began keeping cattle herds, for example, it became an advantage to derive nutrient calories from milk throughout life rather than only as an infant or toddler suckling at its mother’s breast. A mutation that arose about 8,000 years ago in northern Europe, Hawks says, allowed adults to digest lactose (the main sugar in milk), and it propagated rapidly, allowing the rise of the modern dairy industry. Today the gene for lactose digestion is present in 80 percent of Europeans but in just 20 percent of Asians and Africans.

Agriculture may have opened up other pathways for evolution by supporting an ever-growing population that eventually began to congregate in the first cities. In crowded, filthy quarters, pathogens spread like wildfire. Suddenly there were epidemics of smallpox, cholera, typhus, and malaria, diseases unknown to hunter-gatherers, and so began an evolutionary arms race to fend off the assault through superior immunity.

“The clearest example of that is malaria,” Hawks says. “The disease is about 35,000 years old, with the most lethal form of it just 5,000 years old.” Yet in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions where it is endemic, “people have already developed 25 new genes that protect against malaria, including the Duffy blood type, an entirely new blood group,” he notes. More recently, HIV resistance has appeared due to a genetic mutation now found in 10 percent of Europeans. Scientists speculate that the variant may have originally evolved as a protection against smallpox.

Paralleling the constant war against pathogens, human sperm may also be evolving at high speed, driven by the race to get to the egg before another man’s sperm. “It could be that cities create more sexual partners, which means fiercer competition among males,” Hawks says. Because sperm can fertilize an egg up to 24 hours after being ejaculated in the vagina, a woman who copulates with two or more partners in close succession is setting up the very conditions that pit one man’s sperm against another’s. Hawks infers that “sperm today is very different from sperm even 5,000 years ago.” Newly selected mutations in genes controlling sperm production show up in every ethnic group he and his team have studied; those genes may affect characteristics including abundance, motility, and viability. The selection for “super sperm,” Hawks says, provides further corroboration that our species is not particularly monogamous—a view widely shared by other anthropologists.

At the other end of the human life span, “genes that help us live longer get selected,” Hawks reports. This may seem counterintuitive, since evolutionary biologists long assumed that the elderly do not contribute to the gene pool and hence are invisible to natural selection. But as studies of the Hadza people of Tanzania and other groups suggest, children doted on by their grandmothers—receiving extra provisions and care—are more likely to survive and pass on their grandmothers’ genes for longevity. (Grandfathers were less involved with their grandchildren in the cultures studied, so the phenomenon is known as the “grandmother effect.”) Old men can also pass on their genes by mating with younger women.

As agriculture became established and started creating a reliable food supply, Hawks says, more men and women would have begun living into their forties and beyond—jump-starting the selection pressure for increased life span. In support of that claim, Moyzis is currently performing a genetic analysis of men and women in their nineties who are of European ancestry. He has traced many early-onset forms of cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s to older human gene variants. “The idea is that people with more modern variants tend to have greater resistance to these chronic illnesses of old age and should be overrepresented in the age 90-plus population,” Moyzis says.

EVOLUTION AND THE BRAIN

Perhaps the most incendiary aspect of the fast-evolution research is evidence that the brain may be evolving just as quickly as the rest of the body. Some genes that appear to have been recently selected, Moyzis and his collaborators suggest, influence the function and development of the brain. Other fast-changing genes—roughly 100—are associated with neurotransmitters, including serotonin (a mood regulator), glutamate (involved in general arousal), and dopamine (which regulates attention). According to estimates, fully 40 percent of these neurotransmitter genes seem to have been selected in the past 50,000 years, with the majority emerging in just the past 10,000 years.

Addressing the hot-potato question—What might these changes signify?—Moyzis and Wang theorize that natural selection probably favored different abilities and dispositions as modern groups adapted to the increasingly complex social order ushered in by the first human settlements.

When people in hunter-gatherer communities have a conflict, Moyzis reports, usually one of them will just walk away. “There is a great deal of fluidity in these societies,” he says, “so it’s easy to join another group.” But with the establishment of the first farming communities, we put down roots figuratively as well as literally. “You can’t just walk away,” Moyzis notes, a fact that would have created selection pressure to revise the mechanisms regulating aggression, such as the glutamate pathways involved in arousal. “When you domesticate animals, you tend to change genes in that system,” he says.

For decades theories about human evolution proliferated 

in the absence of hard evidence, but now human genetic

data banks are large enough to put assumptions to the test.

The rise of settlements also promoted the breakdown of labor into specialized jobs. That, coupled with food surpluses from farming, led to systems of trade and the need to track the flow of resources, which in turn could have selected for individuals with specific cognitive strengths. “Mathematical ability is very important when it comes to keeping track of crops and bartering,” Wang says. “Certainly your working memory has to be better. You have to remember who owes you what.” The researchers point to China’s Mandarin system, a method of screening individuals for positions as tax collectors and other government administrators. For nearly 2,000 years, starting in A.D. 141, the sons of a broad cross section of Chinese society, including peasants and tradesmen, took the equivalent of standardized tests. “Those who did well on them would get a good job in the civil service and oftentimes had multiple wives, while the other sons remained in a rice field,” Moyzis says. “Probably for thousands of years in some cultures, certain kinds of intellectual ability may have been tied to reproductive success.”

Harpending and Cochran had previously—and controversially—marshaled similar evidence to explain why Ashkenazi Jews (those of northern European descent) are overrepresented among world chess masters, Nobel laureates, and those who score above 140 on IQ tests. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Biosocial Science, the scientists attributed Ashkenazis’ intellectual distinction to a religious and cultural environment that blocked them from working as farm laborers in central and northern Europe for almost a millennium, starting around A.D. 800. As a result, these Jews took jobs as moneylenders and financial administrators of estates. To make a profit, Harpending says, “they had to be good at evaluating properties and market risks, all the while dodging persecution.” Those who prospered in these mentally demanding and hostile environments, the researchers posit, would have left behind the most offspring. Critics note that the association between wealth and intelligence in this interpretation is circumstantial, however.

Stronger evidence that natural selection has continued to shape the brain in recent epochs comes from studies of DRD4, a mutation in a neurotransmitter receptor that Moyzis, Wang, and many others have linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children diagnosed with ADHD are twice as likely to carry the variant gene as those without the diagnosis. DRD4 makes a receptor in the brain less effective in bonding to dopamine, which might explain why Ritalin, which increases the amount of dopamine in the space between neurons, is often helpful in treating the problem.

Sequencing studies suggest that the DRD4 mutation arose 50,000 years ago, just as humans were spreading out of Africa. Its prevalence tends to increase the farther a population is from Africa, leading some investigators to dub it “the migratory gene.” At least one allele (or copy of the gene) is carried by 80 percent of some South American populations. In contrast, the allele is present in 40 percent of indigenous populations living farther north in the Americas and in just 20 percent of Europeans and Africans. Children with the mutation tend to be more restless than other youngsters and to score higher on tests of novelty-seeking and risk-taking, all traits that might have pushed those with the variant to explore new frontiers.

In the context of a modern classroom, it may be hard to understand why kids who appear distractible and disruptive might have a survival advantage. But research shows people with DRD4 do not differ in intelligence from national norms; if anything, they may on average be smarter. Moreover, behavior that may seem like a drawback today may not have been so in ancient environments. When broaching foreign terrain filled with unknown predators, “having the trait of focusing on multiple directions might have been a good thing,” Wang says. “People focused in one direction might get eaten.”

Humans in far-flung domains encountered starkly different selective

forces, adjusting to novel foods, predators, climates, and terrains.

NOT SO FAST

Despite all these clues that human evolution has continued and accelerated into modern times, many evolutionary biologists remain deeply skeptical of the claims. Their resistance comes from several directions.

Some independent experts caution that the tools for studying the human genome remain in their infancy, and reliably detecting genomic regions that have been actively selected is a challenging problem. The hypothesis that human evolution is accelerating “all rests on being able to identify recent areas of the genome under natural selection fairly accurately,” says human geneticist Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago. And that, he warns, is tricky, involving many different assumptions (about population sizes on different continents, for instance) in the poorly documented period before recorded history.

Given such uncertainties, researchers are more likely to be persuaded that a mutation has been recently selected if they understand its function and if its rise in prevalence meshes well with known human migratory routes. Genetic variants fitting that description include those coding for lighter skin coloring, resistance to diseases such as malaria, and metabolic changes related to the digestion of novel foods. There is broad consensus that these represent genuine examples of recent adaptations.

Question marks surround many other recent genetic changes. We know almost nothing about most regions of the genome that have been identified as potential targets of natural selection, observes Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Until scientists understand more of the landscape of the human genome, she says, she will have a hard time believing that adaptive genetic differences between ethnic groups have mushroomed over the past 20,000 years. She is particularly wary of claims that selective pressures recently played a role in shaping different cognitive abilities and temperaments among ethnic groups. “We have no strong evidence of that,” Tishkoff says.

Francis Collins, who until last year headed the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, concurs. “This is not a place to idly speculate about possibilities,” he says. “When it comes to brain functioning, let’s be honest: That is a tinderbox of possible explosive reactions based upon a very unpretty history of discrimination and of demagogues using information that they claimed came from biology in order to put down some groups that they didn’t like.” Even when it comes to the ADHD connection, Collins is a skeptic. “I want to see DRD4 replicated by independent investigators on an independent sample of children,” he says.

In some circles, Moyzis says, to suggest that natural selection is acting on the human brain is tantamount to heresy—an incredible hypothesis that demands extraordinary proof. Harpending, Cochran, and their collaborators are mystified as to what it is that makes their theory so incredible. “I would turn that statement on its head,” Moyzis says. “The extraordinary claim is that evolution somehow stopped once we developed culture.” Coch­ran says, “You’re allowed to change, but only if it’s below the neck. Many people think the brain has to be immune to natural selection; if it isn’t, they don’t want to hear it.”

Harvard University evolutionary biologist Pardis Sebati defends that view. “The immune system and skin interact directly with the outside world,” she says. “They are our first line of defense.” Based on the current evidence, she concludes, sunlight and pathogens were among the strongest selective forces, and skin and the immune system underwent the most dramatic change; evolutionary pressures on the brain are not nearly as clear-cut. As Harvard geneticist David Altshuler wrote in response to one of Sebati’s articles, “It’s reassuring that differences between the races seem to be mostly skin deep.”

The “reassuring” quality of that belief makes those in the opposing camp wonder if some of the logic of skeptics is tinged with wishful thinking. Harvard’s Steven Pinker, the celebrated author of The Blank Slate and an expert on the evolution of language and the mind, addressed that point in an interview in New Scientistmagazine: “People, including me, would rather believe that significant human biological evolution stopped between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, before the races diverged, which would ensure that racial and ethnic groups are biologically equivalent.”

Many scientists apparently worry that proof of divergent brain evolution could be so racially polarizing that we, as a society, would almost be better off in the dark. Hawks responds that the best safeguard against bigotry is educating the public. He thinks we understand enough about human genetics to know that the notion of racial superiority is absurd. Intelligence, he argues, is not a single trait but a vast suite of abilities, and each ancestral environment may have favored a different set of talents. What is sorely needed, he says, is “an ecological framework” to interpret the results. “Groups are best adapted to their own environment, which eliminates the question of superiority.” Even he concedes, though, that communicating the nuances will be no easy task.

“Whatever we find,” Wang says, “it would never be justification for abandoning the egalitarian value that all individuals, regardless of their ethnicity, are deserving of the same rights and opportunities.” Moyzis expands on that line of reasoning, putting a sunny spin on the group’s findings. “It would be boring if all the races were fundamentally the same,” he argues. “It’s exciting to think that they bring different strengths and talents to the table. That is part of what makes melting-pot cultures like our own so invigorating and creative.”

Of course, in melting-pot cultures all kinds of ethnic groups intermingle freely, and the children who result literally meld our DNA together. Even if those groups were diverging, international travel is now causing the diversity to get lost in the genetic reshuffling. “That’s the ultimate irony,” Moyzis says. “By the time we finally settle this debate, we’ll all be such a mixture of genes that we won’t care.”

THE HUMAN JOURNEY

Y-DNA Human Journey