Today’s New Reason To Believe

When the Bible tell us that we have been made from the “dust of the earth,” and will eventually “return to the dust,” it is more true than perhaps the authors realized. Prevailing theory for the formation of planets maintains that they form when dust particles in the disk of material rotating around a central star begin to stick together in clumps (just like the dust under my bed!). Gradually they grow in size, from particles the size of sand, to pebbles, rocks, and eventually boulders as big as a meter across. Next, these boulder-sized objects aggregate into objects called planetesimals that can be many kilometers across. Finally, gravity takes over and draws these planetesimals together to form planets.

Scientists have accounted for most of the physical processes necessary to bring about the accumulation of material to finally form planets, except for that one step of going from boulders to planetesimals. On occasion it has been called one of the major unsolved problems in planet formation, and has often been the focus of dispute by some in the young-earth creationist community as grounds for rejecting this explanation for how solar systems like our own were formed.

New research could help resolve the issue. In a paper published in the August 30, 2007 issue of Nature, Anders Johansen and several of his colleagues describe a set of simulations that, to their knowledge, for the first time permits accurate and complete modeling of how these objects go from meter-sized boulders to kilometer-scale planetesimals.

The team needed to solve two major problems: (1) boulders are not expected to stick together very easily because of the weakness of their gravitational interaction, and (2) the time to interact is short because the objects tend to spiral into the central star in only a few tens of orbits, due to the “headwind” from slower rotating gas.

The results of their simulations demonstrate, however, that boulders can, indeed, collapse together under the force of gravity. What they show is that some regions in the disk randomly undergo local increases in the density of boulders. Then gravity can act over a long-enough period of time and with sufficient strength to build up larger bodies.

While the authors are cautious about claiming to have resolved all the difficulties, they do offer a possible path for filling this gap in planet formation. Once again, more detailed studies have yielded an explanation for a particular phenomenon that at first had been criticized.

Certainly there are areas of science where the lack of an explanation is grounds for abandoning a theory, but this is not one of them. Instead, to (the planetary) dust we shall return.

New insight into the origin of agriculture buttresses a weak spot in RTB’s human origins model.

All scientific models have weaknesses. RTB’s creation model is no exception. Even though the RTB human origins model finds powerful support from the scientific record, there is some unease related to the origin of agriculture. Recent discoveries—recounted in an article written by science journalist Michael Balter—help alleviate some of this discomfort.

The RTB model maintains that:

1. Humanity traces back to a single woman and a single man.
2. Humanity’s original population size was relatively small.
3. Humanity originates in a single location at or near the Middle East.
4. Humanity’s origin dates back to between 10,000 to 100,000 years ago.
5. Humanity spread around the world, recently, from near the Middle East.

Studies on the genetic diversity of people groups from around the world are provocative in light of the RTB model. This work indicates that modern humans originated at a single location (at or near the presumed site of the Garden of Eden), recently (less than 100,000 years ago), and from a small initial population that traces back to a single man and woman. The archeological and genetic evidence shows that by 50,000 to 60,000 years ago humans had spread from near the Middle East into Asia and Europe with a migration pattern that fits with the biblical text. For details see Who Was Adam?

Even though the genetic data powerfully affirms the biblical description of humanity’s origin, some are troubled by the dates for humanity’s origin and spread in light of the timing of agriculture’s appearance. The scientific evidence indicates that wide-scale agricultural practices emerged around 10,000 years ago—well after humanity’s origin and migration around the world.

In contrast, the RTB model predicts that some type of farming and animal husbandry were in use close to the time of humanity’s beginning. Genesis 4:1-4 teaches that Adam and Eve’s sons, Cain and Abel, “worked the soil” and “kept flocks,” respectively. This model also maintains that farming and animal husbandry spread from the Middle East to different locations around the world as a consequence of human migrations.

On the surface, the scientific evidence seems to contradict the RTB human origins model.

This discrepancy can be resolved if the archeological and genetic evidence traces the origin of the large-scale domestication of plants and animals, not the origin of agriculture itself. It’s possible that the first humans engaged in farming and animal husbandry well before 10,000 years ago at levels that escape scientific detection. Accordingly, the first humans lived as hunter-gathers, but they supplemented this lifestyle by harvesting and manipulating wild plants and taming wild animals.

The latest understanding of agriculture’s origin supports this assertion. Studies of the Ohalo II site in Israel indicate that humans were engaged in proto-farming practices nearly 12,000 years before the Neolithic revolution. Field evidence suggests that the domestication of plants was a gradual process, occurring over the course of several thousand years. Humans cultivated wild plants for thousands of years before the plants showed the anatomical changes associated with domestication. Once domesticated plants were developed, they were planted in mixed fields along with wild versions of the crop.

New evidence also indicates that domestication occurred independently around the world about 10 separate times. The first large-scale domestication of plants occurred about 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, followed by domestication activities in Southeast Asia and New Guinea 8,000 and 7,000 years ago, respectively. Recent studies have even uncovered evidence for large-scale plant domestication in South America as far back as 10,000 years ago, only a few thousand years after the first humans made their way into the Americas.

The independent, multiple origins of large-scale agriculture support the notion that the first humans engaged in farming and animal husbandry well before 12,000 years ago. It seems highly unlikely that human beings would have independently and simultaneously discovered plant and animal domestication that many times. It appears as if humans took with them a well-developed understanding of farming and animal husbandry when they migrated to different regions of the world.

In the context of the RTB human origins model, these new insights into the origin of agriculture suggest that Cain and Abel were engaged in proto-farming and proto-husbandry.

Editor’s note: today we present an article by guest scholar Dr. Gene Lopata

No one wants to be compared to a sea anemone, but recent genomic studies have done just that. Moreover, scientists have also provided data that helps test the validity of origins models.

The Cambrian Explosion, often described as “Biology’s Big Bang”, refers to the sudden and nearly simultaneous appearance of 50 to 80% of all animal phyla to ever exist on Earth. This event occurred approximately 543 million years ago.¹ Among the animals that suddenly appear in the fossil record at that time is the sea anemone. The earliest known fossil of the sea anemone appears in the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale approximately 513-501 million years ago.

The sea anemone belongs to the cnidarian group of animals and is morphologically simple—a sac-like body plan with a single oral opening, two epithelial tissue layers, numerous tentacles, a nerve net, and characteristic stinging cells.

The genome structure of the starlet sea anemone, Nemastella vectensis, recently reported in Science reveals some remarkable characteristics that are unexpected for a Darwinian evolutionary model.

Nemastella vectensis is a 2-6 cm (1-2.5 inch) long invertebrate creature that burrows into the mud along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America. (Go here for a photo of the starlet sea anemone and a synopsis of the article.)

Before detailing the genomic findings, perhaps a little background information would be helpful.

The ability to sequence the genome of organisms is relatively new; the first genome to be sequenced was that of Haemophilus influenza in 1995.² Genomics provides a key insight into the complexity of life on Earth, and it provides yet another way (in addition to morphology) to clarify the evolutionary Tree of Life.³ This explains why the complexity found in the genome of the starlet sea anemone is so surprising. According to the evolutionary model, complexity in the genome, morphology, and function are expected to evolve over a long period of time. During this long evolutionary period, information is added to the genome. This information, according to the Darwinian model, can only come from random genetic changes operated on by natural selection, which chooses between the better and the good.⁴ Hence, a morphologically simple creature like the sea anemone would be expected to have a relatively simple genome structure. Cnidarians, like the sea anemone, are unrelated (according to the evolutionary Tree of Life) to the bilaterians, which include animals such as flies, worms, snails, and humans.⁵

A number of remarkable findings emerge from the analysis of the genome of the starlet sea anemone:

• the Nemastella genome contains ~ 18,000 protein-coding genes, which is comparable to other, more complex animals
• extensive conservation of gene content, structure, and organization between Nemastella and vertebrates is shown
• nearly 81% of human introns are found in the same position and phase (position of splice sites relative to codon boundaries) in Nemastella vectensis
• nearly two-thirds of human genes (13,830) seem to be descended from the ancestral eumetazoan gene set

The vertebrate-like genome of the invertebrate sea anemone is surprising. For example, it is full of introns, which are noncoding portions of the DNA commonly found in vertebrate animals. Evolutionary biologists often refer to these noncoding introns as “Junk DNA,” and use their existence as evidence for Darwinian evolution. According to the evolutionary model, junk DNA arises from undirected biochemical processes and random chemical and physical events, transforming functional DNA segments into useless molecular artifacts. This junk DNA persists in the genome solely because it is attached to functional DNA.

Finding large amounts of introns conserved in the same position and phase as in the human genome presents a challenge for this view. Since the earliest fossils of sea anemones date from ~500 million years ago, does it make sense that a random process of evolution would leave 80% of human introns unchanged for half a billion years if they serve no function? After all, Darwinian evolution is based upon random processes such as inversions, insertions, deletions, transpositions, and amplifications to drive the evolution of all life on Earth.⁶ In fact, molecular biologists continue to find many functions for “Junk DNA”—contravening evolution while supporting RTB’s biblical creation model.⁷

Exons are portions of the genome that are expressed (encode proteins). As indicated above, the Nemastella vectensis genome encodes for ~18,000 proteins. Since cnidarians are unrelated to the bilaterians and the Darwinian evolutionary model is based upon the concept of descent with modification, the authors of this paper suggest that there must have been a eumetazoan (tissue-grade animal) ancestor that evolved into the cnidarians and bilaterians. They estimate that this hypothetical ancestor (for whom there is no fossil record) lived about 670-820 million years ago.

There are problems with this idea, however. If this eumetazoan ancestor existed, and if humans are somehow descended from this ancestor, how did all the information required to generate the complex animal phyla that populate the Earth today originate? In addition, since the 30 or so complex phyla first appear in the fossil record at the Cambrian Explosion ~543 million years ago, this information in the hypothetical eumetazoan ancestor was unexpressed for 127-277 million years! Moreover, two-thirds of human genes are supposedly descended from this eumetazoan ancestor, implying that those genes were unexpressed for roughly 700 million years! With random mutations, inversions, insertions, deletions, transpositions, and amplifications occurring all the time, it is remarkable that all this information could remain intact over geological time periods.

The surprising genome of the invertebrate starlet sea anemone challenges the Tree of Life based upon morphology in the Darwinian model of evolution, and it reinforces the observation made by Michael Denton over 20 years ago,⁸ in which he wrote about the challenges to orthodox Darwinism posed by new developments in molecular biology. The complexity and similarity of the starlet sea anemone and the human genomes is much more consistent with the biblical idea of an all-knowing God preparing the Earth for the creation of mankind.

The findings coming out of the new science of genomics seem to confirm a statement in Proverbs 25:2:

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.

References

1. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004), 206.
2. Rana and Ross, 160.
3. Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 265-98.
4. Lee Spetner, Not by Chance! (Brooklyn: The Judaica Press, 1998), 70-72.
5. Vertebrate Biology
6. Spetner, 69.
7. Hugh Ross, Creation as Science (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006), Table F.2, Predictive Test #52.
8. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1985), 274-307.