Replacing Darwin

This post is for my science-minded friends, though I think others may enjoy it as well. I just finished reading Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species, by Nathaniel T. Jeanson. (It almost makes me wish I’d continued my biology studies after college, but God had other plans.) Jeanson shares a lot of research that has been done in the years since Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species (1859), and his conclusions point strongly to a young earth model that aligns with Scripture. The following are just a few quotes to illustrate his argument.

“Like the 18th century, the scope of species diversity in Darwin’s day was a fraction of today’s variety. In 1859, the scientific community had no knowledge of the majority of species we have now documented… Since 1859, we’ve had time to reevaluate his picture—much more time than he had to propose and appraise it… Furthermore, the Internet makes information sharing faster than ever before” (ch. 1).

In 1865, “Gregor Mendel… solved the paradox of family trees… One of the first discoveries that Mendel made was the discrete nature of genetic information… Mendel’s experiments demonstrated the fact of particulate inheritance rather than blended inheritance… Together, the discovery of unit factors, of dominant and recessive traits, and of the segregation of genetic information began to define clear rules for the ways in which traits behave each generation… For reasons unknown, Darwin appears to have been unaware of Mendel’s work. Conversely, for equally unknown reasons, when Mendel died in 1884, his discoveries died with him, not to be resurrected until the turn of the century” (ch. 2).

“Prior to the 1950s, Mendel’s unit factors had been renamed genes… The origin of traits now seemed to be just a matter of understanding the origin of genes... By the late 1960s and 1970s, the first complete DNA sequences—the genomes—from various species were trickling in… In the 1960s, DNA was detected elsewhere—in a different sub-cellular compartment termed the mitochondria… When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, he had no knowledge of the genetic processes… No one had any idea how many DNA differences divided species. In fact, the DNA sequence of our own species wasn’t solved until 2001” (ch. 3).

“If Darwin had no knowledge of genetics, how could he write a book on the origin of species? …Fossils don’t directly record genealogical relationships… Similarly, geography doesn’t directly record inheritance… Finally, anatomy and physiology have a nonlinear relationship with DNA sequences… The problem with inductive reasoning is that there may be multiple explanations for an observation” (ch. 4).

“Over the last few years, one of the most critical genetic observations came from analysis of DNA sequences, not between species, but within species… In the parent-offspring pairs... the offspring contained DNA sequences that could not be traced to either parent… [They] didn’t just document the fact of mutation. They also measured the rate. Since the reported units of measurement from these studies were mutations per generation, these experiments naturally had implications for the timescale over which DNA differences arose… The mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] findings contained in this chapter called into question the entire foundation of the evolutionary timescale… [The] millions-of-years paradigm rests on the assumption that rates of change have been largely constant. Yet, in the field of genetics, the assumption of constant rates of change… yields a 6,000-year timescale, not an ancient one” (ch. 7).

“Unlike mtDNA, nuclear DNA has been much more difficult to compare across species… Too few results have been obtained to see a general pattern of what precise percentage of nuclear DNA differences are preexisting, and what percentage are due to mutation… [The] results that have been obtained thus far for the YEC [Young-Earth Creationist] model suggest that the majority—if not the vast majority—of nuclear DNA differences in species were preexisting [i.e. created at a point in time]” (ch. 8).

I’ll leave you to read the details for yourself if you’re interested. (I would recommend getting the physical book so his charts can be seen correctly.) You can also check out the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis. I’ll close by saying that his arguments have gone a long way in changing my own interpretation of our origins from a generally theistic evolutionary position to a more literal reading of the Creation narrative in Scripture. To use Jeanson’s analogy, we simply do not have all the pieces of the puzzle yet and we can easily misinterpret the picture from the pieces we do have.

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it... Wonderful are Your works; my soul knows it very well” (Psalm 139:6, 14b).

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© 2019 Dawn Rutan. Cover photo courtesy of Amazon.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.