Before I became a Christian, I was taught that the Word of God was an outdated book written by primitive people who did not have modern scientific knowledge. However, the Bible revealed scientific knowledge thousands of years ahead of its time.
About the same time Charles Darwin was developing his theories of evolution, a man named Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and scientist, was performing scientific experiments with pea plants. His work on breeding pea plants reopened the secrets of God’s plan for the continuity of life and the laws of heredity for which Charles Darwin was ignorant.(1)
In Genesis 1:11 God states that everything was to reproduce after its kind and the seed was in itself. In other words, the ability of an organism to reproduce after its own kind was programmed by God in the seed or DNA. Although we see huge variations within a kind we do not see one kind of organism changing into another kind.(2)
Mendel rediscovered these truths in his studies of the shape and color of peas. By interbreeding a pure yellow round pea with a pure green wrinkled pea he was able to produce all yellow round pea offspring (F1 generation). His work proved that the yellow round genes were dominant over the recessive green wrinkled genes.
Next he interbred the F1 generation to produce the F2 generation. For every sixteen F2 pea plants produced, about 9 were yellow round, 3 were yellow wrinkled, 3 were green round, and 1 was green wrinkled. From just two peas, Gregor Mendel was able to produce great variations of peas.(3)
The results from Mendel’s research were already revealed to us in Scripture long before he was born. In Genesis 30 and 31, Leban agreed to pay Jacob with the spotted and speckled goats and brown-colored lambs from his herds. Jacob separated those animals our and instructed his sons to take them 3 day’s journey away.
As Jacob continued to be herdsman for Laban’s flocks, he was able to observe which solid-colored goats, for instance, were producing predominately speckled and spotted ones. By using these goats as the selective breeding stock, Jacob was able to increase his flock of speckled and spotted goats from Laban’s solid-colored flock. Although Jacob must have had some knowledge of breeding, God showed His favor to Jacob and intervened miraculously so that Jacob’s flocks increased more dramatically than expected.
(1) Wieland C., Muddy Waters, Creation, vol. 23 no. 3, pg. 27.
(2) Morris., The Genesis Record, pgs 62-64.
(3) A Beka Book, copyright 1986, Biology, pgs. 580 – 587.
This was published as an article in the Spring 2002 issue of Think and Believe.
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