The Journal of Crime & Punishment
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Editor,
Malcolm Baker,
Baker Publishing,
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NEW ZEALAND.
Genesis 2
18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
But for Adam[f] no suitable helper was found. 21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs[g] and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib[h] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”
24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
The Journal of Crime and Punishment- Religion 19th May 2014
So why would God want a man to create all the plants and animals by genetic engineering, and what does this do to the idea of evolution? Just because an individual has two parents does not mean that the descendants, (children) do not evolve gradually over time. Now that we are in the age of genetic engineering, with Monsanto selling a variety of genetically engineered soya beans which are resistant to glyphosphate, we are aware of the power of this science, but have yet to discover the pitfalls. Plants growing in natural sunlight are subject to cosmic radiation which wll damage DNA and distort it. Would we rather have plants producing a complex variety of new seeds, or a plant modelled on the parent? God has ensured that at least seeds are produced, despite nature. That could be one reason.
DNA structure. Bases are in the centre, surrounded by phosphate–sugar chains in a double helix.
Another reason is that when a new species of animal, such as a mammal, is produced by genetic engineering it must have a food supply and it must have its behaviour mapped for it. This does not matter so much if evolution produces all the changes because they are very gradual. So how do we know that genetic engineering is even possible? Here I don't mean the random changing of an animal, but controlled engineering such as a hereford cow or bull without horns; a polled Hereford, or a sheep without a tail, so that it doesn't have to be docked.
Another thing about genetic engineering is that it isn't as easy as one may think for other reasons beside the technical ones. Lets say you have a strawberry or a banana already, it may be a relatively easy task to swap the genes for colour or flavour between to fruit. You could then have a strawberry flavoured banana, or a red one, but how do you come up with a new flavour altogether, such as vanilla? How would you describe this new flavour, and how would the human tongue detect the flavour. What would it taste like to other animals, and what would the plant look like? A peanut plant? And where would it grow? What would polinate it? Where would it fit in the food chain of predators and insect species? It is a very complex task.
What about DNA itself? It would have been no use Jesus even trying to explain to his contemporaries that a man's sperm is DNA and uniquely identifies him. Jesus on the other hand could hold that conversation with God.
Evolution
Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.[1]
Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring from its parents or ancestor. This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve. The study of heredity in biology is called genetics, which includes the field of epigenetics.
Evolution of photosynthesis
The biochemical capacity to use water as the source for electrons in photosynthesis evolved once, in a common ancestor of extant cyanobacteria. The geological record indicates that this transforming event took place early in Earth's history, at least 2450–2320 million years ago (Ma), and, it is speculated, much earlier.[2][3] Available evidence from geobiological studies of Archean (>2500 Ma) sedimentary rocks indicates that life existed 3500 Ma, but the question of when oxygenic photosynthesis evolved is still unanswered. A clear paleontological window on cyanobacterial evolution opened about 2000 Ma, revealing an already-diverse biota of blue-greens. Cyanobacteria remained principal primary producers throughout the Proterozoic Eon (2500–543 Ma), in part because the redox structure of the oceans favored photoautotrophs capable of nitrogen fixation.[citation needed] Green algae joined blue-greens as major primary producers on continental shelves near the end of the Proterozoic, but only with the Mesozoic (251–65 Ma) radiations of dinoflagellates, coccolithophorids, and diatoms did primary production in marine shelf waters take modern form.
Charles Darwin proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species, saying, "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."[9]
The last universal ancestor (LUA), also called the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), cenancestor, or progenote, is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[2] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all current life on Earth. The LUA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[3][4] The earliest evidences for life on Earth are graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland[5] and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[6]