Adam and Eve in the Eden- (file:///C:/Users/Aida.HFC05201-WL/Pictures/%E1%90%88%20Garden%20of%20eden%20stock%20pics,%20Royalty%20Free%20adam%20and%20eve%20pictures%20_%20download%20on%20Depositphotos%C2%AE.html)
2020’s Columbus Day weekend has
certainly reflected the spirit of those marauding bands of conquistadores who
descended on the new world wreaking havoc, enslaving and devastating its
population, and setting a legacy of violence that still inflicts us.[1]
The
week that preceded this year’s Columbus Day saw the thwarting of a plot by an extremist
militia to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in a “stunning indication of
the potential for domestic terrorism.” [2] As we entered the weekend,
on Saturday evening, October 10th, rallying right-wing and left-wing
activists clashed, ending in a fatal shooting in Denver. That same night, Portland,
Oregon police broke up “the 123rd night of protests for racial justice” by
arresting “almost all of the demonstrators outside the Portland Police Bureau’s
North Precinct.” Objections were raised by “The Oregon Justice Resource Center,
a civil rights-focused legal group which said in a statement that the arrests
effectively chilled free speech and fit into a pattern that could put the city
on an authoritarian path,” while Police charged, “‘The crowd’s posture,
including their armored attire’ suggested to police that protesters planned to
have another event that could lead to ‘arson, riots, and assaults on officers.”[3] Also that night, backed by
the National Guard, police terminated three nights of protesting the fatal
shooting by a police officer of a black youth, Alan Cole, killed while running
from police at Wauwatosa, Wisconsin’s Mayfair Mall. The police tear-gassed
protestors for throwing bottles at them on the charge that the crowd had
ingredients in some confiscated backpacks for eventual Molotov cocktails. Sunday’s
daily headline website, The Day, observed: “The protests in Wauwatosa
are just the latest in a series of demonstrations against police racism and
brutality that have erupted across the country since George Floyd’s death.”[4] The Wisconsin Police
appeared to be reacting in fear to the prospect of a similar result yielded by just
such a recent demonstration in Louisville, Kentucky (my wife and my home in the
late 1970s – early ‘80s) where a protest against a grand jury ruling on the
death of Breonna Taylor, the
26-year-old emergency medical technician
who was a shooting victim caught in police retaliation after her boyfriend
fired on them,[5] included the
wounding of two police officers by a protestor. By Sunday night, October 11,
2020, Portland “Protesters overturned statues of former Presidents Theodore
Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday night in a
declaration of ‘rage’ toward Columbus Day.”[6] And so, in the midst of
the crisis over the corona virus, when we should be banding together to protect
each other and stop this pandemic, the United States is seized in the grip of
racial ideological estrangement and
violence on all sides, the right-wing, the left-wing, police, and protestors.
All of these incidences at their core appear to be racially-driven, the result
of a pernicious belief by all sides that the United States as a nation is
deeply involved in a clash between races for the survival of its sectarian members.
From a Christian perspective, however, all of this ideology
is based on a myth – a fallacy that is contradicted by the Bible, a
contradiction recently supported by the brilliant and innovative work of Dr.
Bryan Sykes and his team of genetic researchers.
The Bible is very clear in its united witness. In
Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), we see God
creating two human beings, a man and a woman, and all succeeding humans,
including every human alive today, descending from these. This revelation is
repeated by the brilliant philosopher/theologian Paul of Tarsus, as recorded in
the New Testament, in his address to the Greek intellectuals at their forum
center on the Areopagus in Athens before the Parthenon, when he announces God “made
out of one human [anthropos] all humans that live upon all the face of
the earth” (Acts 17:26).
Today, this primal view has been challenged by a
secular theory called multiregionalism, a speculation that many different
progenitors produced the different people groups that we see in today’s world,
so that these people groups are indeed separate races, hence the clashes that
we see for survival and supremacy.[7]
But this prevalent idea has been exposed as a myth by the work of Dr.
Bryan Sykes, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford
and currently a Fellow at Wolfson College, science advisor to the British House of Commons.
Chairman of the Oxford Ancestors, Ltd., 2001-, along with his able staff.
Finally
gathered into his groundbreaking 2002 book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, which
was based on research Bryan Sykes recorded in a long series of technical
articles stretching back as early as 1983,[8] he and his team explode
the common but now antiquated definition of race: “a group of persons related
by common descent or heredity.” In light of their discovery, that definition only
appears to be salvageable if restricted to individual family lines or if expanded
to the human race as a whole. How did they do that?[9] After testing the
mitochondrial DNA of thousands of people of all nationalities, they discovered
Europeans were not that much different from the rest of the world.”[10] All of us humans, around
the world share a common ancestry, whether we are Polynesian or Celtic, or any
other nationality. We are all related through our DNA.
Further,
Dr. Christopher Stringer, a Natural History Museum principal researcher in
London with the Science Editor of Britain’s Observer Robin McKie in their
research summarized in the book, African Exodus, concluded, “Though
modern humans may not always look alike, our biological constitutions are
unvarying: An Eskimo and an Australian aborigine, a Chinese and a Swede –
people worlds apart – are more alike than two gorillas from the same forest. It
is the same DNA lineage that points unmistakably to a common ancestor whose
offspring evolved into Homo Sapiens shortly before the African
Exodus.”[11]
From
the beginning of their announcements, independent researchers checked their
findings, and as early as January 26, 1987 Time Magazine recorded, that,
“Now biologists suggest in a report to Nature that a single female living
between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago in Africa was an ancestor of everyone on
the earth today. Inevitably – and to the probable delight of creationists –
many scientists are calling her ‘Eve.’”[12]
Again,
because we know from the study of techtonics, which records the shifting of the
plates of the earth and maps the changes due to earthquakes and volcanos and
other factors, [13]
the Mediterranean Sea did not exist in the earliest years. Eden’s garden, where
Adam and Eve were first formed could easily have been in the area of what has
since become Africa, divided from the upper land mass up the upheaval that
created the Mid-land, or Mediterranean Sea. The human population then spread out
across the world from what was now the more southern land mass (see, for
example, the journey further eastward of Eve and Adam’s son, Cain, in Genesis
4:16).
Essentially,
that is, as we consider the essence of all humans on the earth, it is clear
that multi-regionalism, the theory that humans descended from various pockets
of Neanderthals or Apes or Mud People or Clay People, or whatever else one
speculates, all evolving in different locations from different progenitors, is
a modern myth, neither based in any biblical text nor scientifically supported
in the light of the establishment of common ancestry, demonstrated by the
checked and double-checked mitochondrial research of the Oxford Genetics lab
and the corresponding studies elsewhere.
Therefore,
all United States citizens, even the extremist groups, whether they call
themselves “Three Percenters” or “Five Percenters,” “The Black Guerilla Family”
or “Wolverine Watchmen,” neo-Nazis or Marxists/Maoists, all share the same
common ancestor. All human beings on the earth today share a common DNA descent
from a single progenitor, a single ancestor, a single set of parents.
There
are no “races,” separate people groups descended from separate initial
progenitors, but only brothers and sisters who may have different degrees of
melanin, i.e., skin and hair tint, varying nose, eye cavity, or cheek shapes,
different accents and languages, due to “clines,” caused by “the gradual change
in certain characteristics exhibited by members of a series of adjacent populations
of organisms of the same species.”[14] But everyone’s species is
exactly the same, homo sapiens, human being.
What
we are seeing today is not an heroic racial war but a deplorable family feud, a
fight not among separate “races” for supremacy but a squabble among relatives
motivated by fear, greed, lust for power, and all the other failings that
destroy families on the nuclear and extended level.
What
the United States, and any similar nation in such a plight, needs is a reality
check. Whatever loyalty combatants think they have is only partial. Blind brutality
is a devil’s game that pits a house against itself and ensures an eventual
fall. Nobody should want to commit fratricide, or matricide, or patricide (1
Tim. 1:9-11). Everyone is a brother’s and sister’s keeper. As Cain was warned
by God, sin lurks at each door, lusting to possess us, but we must master it
(Gen. 4:7).
As
a result, no one has an excuse for prejudice against a family member – no
police, no protestors, no “Oath Keeper,” no “Liberator.” We are all sisters and
brothers according to God’s revelation in the Bible and the demonstration of
our common heritage by mitochondrial research. We need to stop fighting and
start talking with respect, civility, and love to each other.
Bill
Anyone interested in
further information, please see our new book, which we edited: Christian
Egalitarian Leadership, House of Prisca and Aquila Series (Eugene, OR,
Wipf and Stock, 2020).
[1] For an explanation of this legacy
of violence, see my chapter, “God of Power versus God of Love: The United
States of America” in Aída Besançon Spencer and William David Spencer, eds., The
Global God: Multicultural Evangelical Views of God (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker, 1998).
[2] By Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Jaweed Kaleem, Los Angeles
Times, What if armed, far-right groups go to the polls? Some
plan to be there, https://www.theday.com/nationworld-news/20201011/what-if-armed-far-right-groups-go-to-polls-some-plan-to-be-there. Published October 11. 2020 1:40AM | Updated
October 11. 2020 1:43AM, accessed October 11, 2020. See also Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, New York Times, “What We Know About the Alleged Plot
to Kidnap Michigan’s Governor,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/us/michigan-militia-whitmer.html
October. 9, 2020,
accessed October 11, 2020.
[3]Sergio
Olmos (OPB),
“Portland Police make blanket arrests minutes after Saturday protest starts.” https://www.opb.org/article/2020/10/11/portland-police-make-blanket-arrests-minutes-after-saturday-protest-starts/. Posted October 11, 2020, accessed
October 12, 2020.
[4]
“28 arrested, tear gas used in Wisconsin police
protests” 12:05AM https://www.theday.com/nationworld-news/20201011/28-arrested-tear-gas-used-in-wisconsin-police-protests. Posted October” 11. 2020, accessed Oct 11, 2020.
[5] By
Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder, U.S. News and World Report, “Protesters, Police Clash in Louisville
Following Breonna Taylor Ruling,” https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-09-24/protesters-police-clash-in-louisville-following-breonna-taylor-ruling, Sept.
24, 2020, at 1:11 p.m. The city of Louisville agreed earlier this month to pay
$12 million to Taylor's family to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. More than
six months after her death, protesters who were angered and saddened over the
grand jury decision took to the streets chanting ‘No lives matter until Black
lives matter.’" “Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called on Attorney General
Daniel Cameron to release the evidence from the investigation to the public.
‘Let people read it,’ he told CNN. ‘Put it out there. Trust people with the
truth.’ [Breonna]Taylor, was killed during a police raid on her home after her
armed boyfriend confronted the officers and fired at them. Police shot Taylor
at least six times.” Posted Sept 24, 2020, accessed Oct 11, 2020
[6] Ellington CMS, News for Monday, Portland, Ore.
(Ap), “Protesters knock down Roosevelt, Lincoln statues in
Portland “ October 12, 2020,
https://dailyinterlake.com/news/today/ Posted October 12, 2020 1:09 a.m.,
accessed October 12, 2020.
[7]
“Advocates of the rival multiregional theory say modern humans evolved
simultaneously in Africa, Europe, and Asia from multiple early humans, maybe
including Neanderthals and Homo erectus who left Africa in a much earlier
wave.” However, a study based at the University of Uppsala y Swedish and German
geneticists using refined techniques from the Human Genome Project supported
the common ancestor findings, discovering “a common ancestor of all modern
humans might have lived about 170,000 years ago in Africa.” According to chief
researcher Ulf Gyllenstein, “modern humans left their African homeland
relatively recently, perhaps 50,000 years ago.” Reacting to the study,
University of Pennsylvania evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges commented. “I
think people are not going to be too much concerned with the multiregional”
anymore, see Jeff Donn, Associated Press, “DNA study backs ‘out-of-Africa’
theory for origins of man,” The Boston Globe, December 7, 2000, A40.
[8] See a list of Bryan Sykes 77
articles at Research Gate, https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Bryan-Sykes-38917996
[9] Random House Webster’s
Unabridged (New York, NY: Random House, 2001), 1590, col. 2.
[10]. Bryan Sykes, Seven Daughters of
Eve (New York, NY: Norton, 2002), 125-126: “When we looked at the data, the
biggest number of mutations we found between two people was the fourteen that
separated Teri Tupuaki, a fisherman from Mangaia in the Cook Islands, and Mrs.
Gwyneth Roberts, who cooks the school lunches in Bala, North Wales. These two
people, half a world apart, between them solved a puzzle that had divided
scholarship for most of the twentieth century. Europeans were not that much
different from the rest of the world; certainly nowhere near different enough
to justify believing that they were all descended from Neanderthals. And since
it was all or nothing, the Neanderthals [a previous humanoid species] must have
become extinct. All modern Europeans must today trace their ancestry back to
much more recent arrivals – to the Cro-Magnons, with their lighter skeleton,
their much improved flint technology and their wonderful art. This was an
absolute replacement of one human species by another…replacement was so
complete…These were not our ancestors.”
[11] Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie,
African Genesis, cover summary.
[12]
Michael D. Lemonick, reported by Cristina Garcia/San Francisco, with other
bureaus, “Everyone’s Genealogical Mother: Biologists speculate that “Eve” lived
in sub-Saharan Africa,” Time, January 26, 1987, 66. Interesting to note
is that Thomas J. Parsons, et. al in an article entitled, “A high observed
substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region,” note their
data “indicate that extremely rapid segregation of CR sequence variants between
generations is common in humans,” which, along with other factors, drops their
date for a “most-recent common ancestor” as low as 70,000 years ago. Nature
Genetics vol. 15 (April 1997), 363, http://nature.com/naturegenetics
[13] See a list of studies at https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=study+of+ancient+techtonic+changes+in+the+earth
[14] Random House Webster’s
Unabridged Dictionary, 386, col. 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment