{"id":1157,"date":"2014-05-25T14:45:31","date_gmt":"2014-05-25T21:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:56:42","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:56:42","slug":"its-in-the-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2014\/05\/25\/its-in-the-dna\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s in the DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"

The controversy about the revised \u201cstatement of belief\u201d professors at the evangelical Bryan College, in Tennessee (named after Scopes trial prosecutor William Jennings Bryan), are being asked to sign, gets a fairly even-handed coverage in the New York Times: Bryan College Is Torn: Can Darwin and Eden Coexist?<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The \u201cstatement of belief\u201d involves affirming the creation of man by God, and the declaration that Adam and Eve \u201care historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life-forms.\u201d<\/p>\n

I couldn’t help but notice the irony in the last paragraph of the NYT story, quote Bryan College’s president:<\/p>\n

\n\u201cI don\u2019t think you have to believe the Bryan way in order to be a strong evangelical,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this is Bryan College, and this is something that\u2019s important to us. It\u2019s in our DNA. It\u2019s who we are.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, evangelicals who believe in the factual existence of Adam and Eve as the ancestors of all humanity, also believe in DNA? The irony is, as Jerry Coyne points out in his reaction to this article<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nWhat\u2019s in our DNA, in fact, is evidence that we all come from a minimum of 12,250 ancestors. How funny and ironic that they say that their rejection of that fact is also<\/i> in their DNA!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coyne has pointed this out before: given the present diversity of humanity across the globe — that is, DNA analysis of — there’s no biological way that diversity could have arisen from *two* people who existed a few thousand years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The controversy about the revised \u201cstatement of belief\u201d professors at the evangelical Bryan College, in Tennessee (named after Scopes trial prosecutor William Jennings Bryan), are being asked to sign, gets a fairly even-handed coverage in the New York Times: Bryan … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,22,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-evolution","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}