Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA 
by 

Daniel J. Fairbanks

 

Dixie Christianity

Daniel Fairbanks hopes to reconcile science and religion in his aptly named and exceptionally well-researched Relics of Eden. The book is addressed to his fellow Christians in order to help them accept evolutionary theory as consistent with their religious beliefs. He will fail, primarily because he doesn’t understand his intended audience, who are immune to his argument not through ignorance or stupidity but through fear.

Who could have imagined that a century after the notorious Scopes trial in Kentucky (which confirmed the legal prohibition of the teaching of evolutionary theory), there is still a large, and apparently increasing portion of Americans who believe that evolution is a scientific hoax. Given that the evidence for evolutionary development through genetic mutation is overwhelming, I suppose the central question is ‘Why.’ What is it about evolutionary theory that these folk find objectionable? Have they abandoned rationality entirely in a dogmatic haze?

Darwin could only guess at the mechanism of evolution, just as his contemporary, Mendel, could only guess at the hereditary process by which his sweet peas varied from generation to generation. DNA analysis demonstrates not just the process but the history of the process as it occurred. Fairbanks, for example, shows precisely how the chromosome pattern of the great apes was randomly modified to create the humanoid genome. Essentially, an ape chromosome pair frayed at the edges and fused into a single chromosome. The science is complicated but the logic is simple and the evidence is compelling.

The way in which gene mutations actually take place was discovered in 1950 but not recognised generally among scientists for decades. The key to mutation are transposable or so called ‘jumping genes,’ which insert and delete themselves as base pairs within the DNA. These substitutions can turn of and on other gene functions and are then replicated over and over again by the DNA. 

In other words there is a built-in instability in the genome. It is, in effect, designed to change; it is the rough equivalent of a random number generator. In fact, over half of human DNA consists of these transposable and other variable elements. The mutations may be random but the mechanism is not. Most of these variable elements have become inactive, but they are hard evident of past developments.

The mutations of these variable elements can also be used to re-create the history of our species in its progressive separation from the apes, and the apes from each other, through analysis of the so-called Alu elements in the genes. We therefore know that we are more closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas and orangutans. And so are the chimpanzees!

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evolutionary process is not the divergence of species but the development of increasingly complex genomes from those of single celled entities. The history of this development is in the pseudogenes, currently useless genetic material that has at some time been important in expanding genetic complexity. The mistakes as well as the advances are documented in the inert DNA of our genome.

One of these pseudogenes explains why we, unlike most vertebrates, can’t manufacture Vitamin C. More importantly, pseudogenes appear as sorts of experiments with overall functionality of an organism. Those that ‘work’ remain active; if no longer needed (as with Vitamin C production) they become dormant. But they remain as extensions of the genome and their ‘archaeology’ in the human organism is evident.

Mitochondrial DNA, a distinctive sort well-known to detective buffs because of its its importance in identifying matri-lineal relations, is also particularly important in linking humans to their oldest ancestors - not apes but bacteria. mDNA is itself bacterial in both structure and function. It is the rough equivalent of chloroplasts in green plants and is almost certainly the result of the ‘invasion’ of bacteria without nuclei in more developed bacteria with nuclei almost 2 billion years ago.

All of this is not only enlightening, it is also aesthetically satisfying. There is a hidden orderliness in the world. But it is an orderliness which creates (one is tempted to write ‘intentionally’ creates) diversity just for the sake of it. This is what the American philosopher C. S. Peirce called Thychism, a tendency of the universe toward unwarranted, exuberant change and consequent richness. He considered Tychism as a sort of metaphysical law, and modern genetic research clearly confirms his insight.

So genetic science shows evolution to be both a rational and a beautiful process. Certainly this is not contradictory to religious doctrines of creation. It can easily be interpreted poetically as a mechanism devised by a very clever divine entity to allow his (or her) creation to unfold dramatically through time. This is exactly what Peirce thought.

Except for the most literal-minded fundamentalists, therefore, it is difficult to think anyone of even minimal intelligence can object to the conclusions of genetic research on religious grounds. And yet many do. If one takes heed of opinion polls in the United States, the rejection of evolutionary theory is expanding as the evidence for its confirmation grows.

Fairbanks is keen to deny that there is any tension between scientific results and religious doctrine. He uses the same time-worn arguments to make this point that the original defenders of Darwin did in the late 19th century. He is clearly preaching to the choir (to use an entirely unapt metaphor). No evidence, no sensible theory, no proof of any kind is going to convince the large and growing mob of evangelical Americans that all of what we see wasn’t put in place 6000 years ago. For them, all of these results have been achieved only in order to test us in our faith in biblical chronology.

However, to dismiss these people as merely stupid or obdurate is to deny what they in fact have, namely purpose. They want to hide this purpose in their religious protestations, perhaps from themselves more than from their opponents. The Scopes trial of 1925 is in fact a revelation of both the purpose and its intentional obfuscation. In short, the trial was argued theologically. However, the law over which it was fought, the Butler Act, was enacted not on the basis of theology but of race. This was, and remains, the real battleground.

It is race that has been the force behind opposition to evolutionary theory then and now. The prosecuting attorney, William Jennings Bryant, the Great Commoner, was a militant racist (even the defendant Scopes was a white supremacist, and likely a stooge). The universal references to the ‘Monkey Trial’ were clearly racially motivated. White superiority was at issue both in terms of the electoral passage of the law itself, and in terms of its fundamental presumption of the permanent, god-given authority of white men over black.

One black-run newspaper of the time identified the real point of the trial: to promote "that same old brand of white Dixie Christianity.” Where white reporters during the trial often remarked on the locals’ deep religious faith, African American reporters trumpeted the racial hypocrisy that lay behind southern professions of piety.

Fear of Darwin’s racial implications has always driven the anti-evolutionists, and it still does. If blacks and whites have a common ancestry, white racism would appear arbitrary rather than as divinely commanded. In any case it was crucial to maintain the legal fiction of whites and blacks as separate species, thus justifying prohibitions against miscegenation, which, of course, threatened to demonstrate the non-biological character of the prohibitions.

So the explanation of the increasing rejection of evolutionary theory in America really has little to do with theology, as Fairbanks presumes. Theology, or more accurately the racially-motivated, religiously worded preaching to race-sensitive congregations, is a linguistic mask behind which the perennial fear of rural America lurks. The resistance to evolutionary theory has increased proportionately to the evidence supporting it because racial fear, that touchstone of American politics, has increased right along with the evidence not in spite of it.

Postscript: See here for more detail on the deeper racial import of the Scopes trial and the connections between anti-evolutionism and racism:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3660880?...

Postscript 29/02/20: another more recent confirmation of the link between evangelicals and racism: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02...