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DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

221 

          Article 
 

Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden:  

The Digital Adam and Eve 
 

Robert Campbell 
*
 

 

ABSTRACT 

The incredibly complex interdependent structural processes of the cell as it relates to organs and 

the host creature are not understood and yet Darwinists of Dawkins’ persuasion insist that it 

works and evolves by accident. The only purpose is the survival of DNA sequences in a digital 

river out of Eden that reduces us all to mindless robots driven by greed. Recent evidence 

confirms each protein coding gene can code for many proteins through a complex variety of 

processes and epigenetic factors that can also employ the non coding sequences that constitute 

more than 95% of the human genome. New behavioral patterns are accommodated and can be 

heritable over generations without altering base-pair sequences of DNA. The emergence of the 

relatively fixed vertebrate body plan with cerebral hemispheres anchored to an autonomic 

nervous system anticipated developments 400 million in the future together with hierarchical 

developments in the plants and invertebrates in tandem with geological evolution.      

 

Key Words: Charles Darwin, Theory of Evolution, Cosmic Order, intellegent direction, 

spirituality, atheist, Richard Dawkins. 

 

River Out of Eden - Ch. 1-The Digital River: 

 

The double speak proceeds in Dawkins’ first chapter [3] by suggesting that religions are grounded 

in ancestor worship and that it is real ancestors not supernatural gods that hold the key to 

understanding life. Is religion really grounded in ancestor worship? According to the founders they 

are based upon direct experiential insights into a transcendent and intelligent creative order 

involving Divinity, the Dharma, and the Tao in various traditions. 

 

The point here is not to justify traditional religions, nor the cultural biases that have become 

associated with them. The point is that Darwinism is an unsubstantiated belief that cannot claim to 

be based upon direct experiential insight into the creative process. It is pure conjecture, yet 

Dawkins insists that life is just digitized information in a river of genes out of Eden. 

 

Dawkins points out that ancestors were survivors and are rare compared to descendants, but this is 

not a very “astonishing” fact as he claims. It is hardly a profound or meaningful basis for a new 

belief system to explain the whole creative order. 

 

                                                 
*
 Correspondence: Rober Campbell,  Independent Researcher. Website: http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com   

   E-mail: bob@cosmic-mindreach.com  

   Note: The articles presented in this issue are based on my book “Downsizing Darwin: An Intelligent Face for Evolution” self-published in 1996 

[1]. More information  is available at my website [2].  



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

222 

If a successful life is measured solely by prolific numbers of offspring, thus determining 

successful genes, and if this is the sole reason why birds fly well, fish swim well, and why we love 

life, sex and children, then the selfish gene is ultimately the only reality and greed is the only 

moral. By this standard we may be able to understand why we “love” our own children or close 

kin, but why should we love or even respect the children of others, except as potential mates to 

propagate our own greedy genes? Social relationships all become reduced to strategic alliances of 

mutual greed. Better to kill off others outside our alliances to make more room for own greedy 

genes to succeed, at least to the extent that we can do it successfully.  

 

Mother Theresa was obviously severely deranged, to say nothing of Jesus Christ or the Buddha, or 

the countless selfless contributors to enhancing the human condition. And childless souls like Isaac 

Newton, Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were likewise all losers, unless we are to think 

of them as worker ants foregoing offspring so that others, who might happen to share some of their 

genes, may better survive. The most intelligent and compassionate among us must be blind slaves 

of genes, along with the most mindless of the propagating majority. This view of Darwinism 

denigrates us all. It would leave us bereft of any sense of meaning to our being except the blind 

gratification of animal drives. Insight into the creative order begins and ends with our own greedy 

flesh. 

 

Darwin himself did not endorse such an extreme view. He took issue with the dogmatic Genesis 

view held by the church, however he was not an atheist in the same extreme sense that a modern 

Darwinist is. Nothing was known of molecular biology during his time.  

 

Genes, it is claimed, are not upgraded or otherwise altered in the using. They are passed on 

unchanged except for very rare random errors, a few of which may bestow certain advantages. 

Now how does any biologist know with such supreme certainty that this is so? How does one 

know that a so-called “error” is really an error, not just sometimes, or most of the time, but always. 

Since there is no decisive “proof” available, this must be accepted as an article of faith, along with 

the rest of the package.  

 

Evidence to the contrary has been mounting over the past decade or more. The number of protein 

coding genes in the human genome, originally thought to be over 100,000, is now estimated at just 

over 20,000 and yet it is known that one gene can code for many proteins through a variety of 

processes. Non-coding DNA sequences called introns account for more than 95% of the base pairs 

in the human genome and used to be called junk DNA. It is now known that non-coding 

sequences, together with epigenetic factors can drastically alter the pattern of gene expression. 

Although epigenetic factors
1
 such as DNA methylation patterns and histone tail modifications, do 

not alter the base pair sequences of DNA they are known to adjust gene expression to reflect 

specific behavior and circumstances
2
. Acquired traits have been shown in various remarkable 

cases to be heritable from generation to generation.
3
  

  

                                                 
1
 Campbell R. Gene Expression, 2011:  http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Gene_Expression.html  

2
 Morgan DO. The Cell Cycle, Principles of Control. Ch. 4.12. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.   

3
 Carey, Nessa. The Epigenetics Revolution. London: Icon Books, 2012 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

223 

There are related processes such as gene splicing that alter transcription. Some DNA sequences 

can change relative position (self-transpose) within the  genome of a single cell by "copy and 

paste" or "cut and paste". Transposition can create phenotypically significant mutations and alter 

the cell's genome size. And a host of small RNAs transcribed from non-coding DNA sequences 

are also known to regulate gene expression in various ways.  

 

There is also compelling evidence that evolution cannot proceed exclusively by rare random 

mutations since many processes in the cell are mutually interdependent as a set. Professor Michael 

J. Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box, uses the example of a mouse trap to show that if any one 

part of even such a simple apparatus is missing the mouse trap will not work. A single cell is a far 

more complex interdependent apparatus.
4
    

 

Genes, in this strange language of double speak, are then invested with values such as 

companionship. Genes must be good at working cooperatively with other genes of the species, it is 

maintained, while at the same time maintaining that they compete with other genes. “Good genes” 

know when and how to be altruistic to good collective advantage. These clusters of inanimate 

molecules that we call genes are invested with complex intentions and value judgments. This is 

quite apart from any sense of social propriety that we may entertain as individuals, and yet 

Dawkins implies that our genetic inheritance predetermines our judgments as well. If our 

judgments are in fact predetermined why does Richard Dawkins feel a need to sway the world to 

his view?  

 

Now genes of different species are said to be in different rivers that don’t have to cooperate, at 

least not in the same way, according to Dawkins. It is an inverted river that keeps branching 

downstream, all the rivers diverging from common ancestors, all the way back to invertebrates, 

plants and bacteria and presumably to the first living cell, however it came to get started.  

 

It is maintained that major divergences of rivers, such as the mammals from the reptiles, did not in 

fact represent major events at the time, that they were no different in kind to any other divergence 

in species brought about by geographical separation. This is a little like saying that because a work 

of art begins with a single meaningless pencil stroke, the end result is only a meaningless scribble. 

Accidental geographical separation is also considered necessary in order for diverging species to 

evolve in parallel. 

 

Both the fossil record and the living record provide powerful evidence to the contrary. The first 

mammals diverged from the mammal-like reptiles in the Triassic period early in the Mesozoic era, 

about 225 million years ago
5
, when the reptiles were beginning to bloom into a great divergence of 

species. Yet during the reptilian period the mammals experienced very little evolution apart from 

refinements associated with warm blooded activity, all being confined to small rodent-like 

creatures until nearly the end of the reptilian reign.
6
 The reptiles completely dominated the scene, 

then abruptly became almost totally extinct about 65 million years ago.  

 

                                                 
4
 Behe, M.J. Darwin’s Black Box. New York: Touchstone Books, 1998  

5
 Purves B, Orians G, Heller C, Sadava D. Life, The Science of Biology, p 680. Sunderland MA: Sinauer. 1997.  

6
 Pough FH, Janis CM, Heiser JB. Vertebrate Life, Ch 19. Prentice Hall, 1999   



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

224 

Despite all the reptilian “success,” it wasn’t mammalian divergence from the end of the reptilian 

period that survived and blossomed in its turn. It was those tiny shrew-like rodents that had 

emerged near the beginning of the reptilian period, and that had undergone little change for 160 

million years, that suddenly and rapidly exploded into a great divergence of mammalian species 

ancestral to those that we know today.  

 

The mammalian expansion had even started just before the dinosaurs met their demise, along with 

a global explosion of the flowering plants, and a diversification among the insects, which 

happened to provide a more efficient pollinating vector. A few flowering plants and insects  had 

typically diverged much earlier, but not in abundance. After many millions of relatively stagnant 

years why should they choose that precise period to diversify? At the same time India had begun 

slamming into Asia, pushing up the Tibetan plateau. Continents around the globe were under 

compression, rising and eventually creating vast areas of savanna where successive waves of 

mammalian herbivores could thrive and explore new mammalian forms.  

 

So it wasn’t just an accidental series of mutations among a few primitive mammalian rodents that 

heralded the beginning of the mammalian age. Concordant developments among the plants and 

invertebrates provided an enriched food supply to support the higher metabolic rate of the 

mammals and birds. And global tectonics cooperated by providing appropriate terrain. A 

genetically unrelated diversity of factors converged in a relatively short space of time to make the 

event possible. The reptiles had had their day in the sun and it was time for them to make room for 

new developments not associated with the survival of DNA sequences in their genes.  

 

Should we now believe that the genetic sorting out of 160 million years of highly successful 

reptilian evolution, after the early rodent-like mammals had branched off, turned out to be a waste 

of time and a nearly complete failure? If they were so successful for so long, why didn’t they 

evolve again from the remaining reptilian stock? And are we to believe that all of the information 

genetically assimilated for successful survival strategies was suddenly forever lost to surviving 

reptiles, as well as to future generations of mammals?  

 

Why then had mammalian evolution been so lethargic for so long, only to burst forth so quickly in 

such great diversity with the reptilian extinction? Was it really just that they couldn’t compete with 

dinosaurs? It took the reptiles over 200 million years to explore the limits to size, while the 

mammals did it much faster in more refined body plans, once they got started. Is this just another 

advantageous series of accidents that didn’t happen to come along until late and then came in a 

flurry? Was there no integrating intelligence in the works that could reinvest the lessons learned by 

the dinosaurs to the advantage of the mammals? 

 

Dawkins goes on to chastise his zoologist colleagues, some of whom are tempted to assign deep 

structural significance to the great divisions in the animal kingdom, since they represent the 

emergence of new blueprints or bauplans as they are sometimes called. He apparently believes 

that humans and cockroaches are equal players in the evolutionary theater, with any competitive 

edge going to the roaches, since they have been here relatively unchanged for a couple hundred 

million years and so have a highly successful survival record. Is that beautiful and inspirational? 

 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

225 

The fact remains that however modestly and gradually the vertebrates diverged from the 

invertebrates, there was a vastly different body plan associated with their emergence, linked to a 

completely new way in which to integrate their experience.  

 

With the primitive fish came the emergence of an autonomic nervous system coupled to cerebral 

hemispheres. Worms, crabs, insects and the like, don’t have this complex apparatus. With the 

vertebrate animals emotive experience, associated with the autonomic nervous system, could be 

mirrored in cerebral awareness to some extent.  

 

The cerebral hemispheres are like a screen on which emotional experience is projected as if onto a 

TV screen where it can be observed.
7
 This is the basis of self consciousness and it evolved into the 

remarkable ability to intentionally modulate emotive or emotional behavior in the higher 

vertebrates. Higher vertebrates can select from a variety of emotional responses and tailor them to 

suit their circumstance. 

 

No one but Dawkins is insisting that this unique new ability must have come into being perfectly 

formed. This is a smoke screen that he injects to refute the evidence. For some three hundred 

million years prior to the first vertebrates, the invertebrates were busy developing many different 

body plans with different sensory modalities and diverse means of locomotion, exploring them all 

to the full, from sponge and jelly fish to millipede, mollusk, ant, bee and octopus.  

 

Then suddenly a whole new plan emerges that becomes anchored to a relatively fixed internal 

skeletal arrangement and limb structure, even similar sense and visceral organs from the reptiles to 

man. Integrating the sensitive mobility of the vertebrates is an autonomic nervous system coupled 

to cerebral hemispheres. However it got started this is a profoundly different new body plan 

capable of higher levels of sentient awareness. This evolutionary development reflects an 

intelligence inherent in the creative process capable of anticipating future developments in broad 

outline, hundreds of millions of years in advance.  

 

There has been no significant vertebrate divergence from this common plan for three hundred 

million years, no millipede lizards or eight legged spidermen, no compound eyed aardvarks or 

hummingbird cocoons. The fact is that with the vertebrates the whole focus of evolution changed 

to a higher level of integrating experience, a more conscious and sentient level harnessed to a 

common skeletal and nervous system format.  

 

This did not occur within the infinitely more diverse format of invertebrate evolution. Neither did 

invertebrate evolution have to explore the same limits to size that the vertebrates have. The 

invertebrates were focusing on methods of sensing and responding to a huge variety of 

circumstance, not on the limits to behavior associated with four limbs. There’s never been a forty 

ton spider, ant, or crab. Even the giant mollusks and cephalopods are no match for dinosaurs and 

whales. These obvious facts have been conveniently ignored. 

 

The climb up the ladder of sentient awareness has integrated the whole of vertebrate evolution into 

a common scheme that has obviously drawn on the several hundred millions of years of prior 

                                                 
7
  MacLean PD. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. NY: Plenum Press, 1990. 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

226 

invertebrate experience. All the diverse modes of sensitive motility did not have to be re-explored 

again in order to settle on a single quadruped format with a common mode of nervous system 

integration. This is a powerful indication that the whole creative process is in communication with 

itself, just as the various parts of the human body are. Why is no scientist trying to determine how? 

The current constraints of the Darwinian paradigm preclude the question.  

 

It isn’t an easy thing to formulate an alternate paradigm. It is commonly believed that it all has to 

do with chemical messages. Of course there is chemical signaling, but that isn’t all. It’s like saying 

because we send letters that we can’t sense another’s mood or meaning, or the feeling of spring. 

How is the sense in the message to be read and understood if there is no more to the creative order 

than inanimate messages going from place to place like billiard balls. 

 

There is nevertheless a rather obvious hierarchical order to the evolutionary process in which each 

higher level is dependent upon the capabilities achieved by the lower levels in the long hard climb 

toward higher levels of sentient awareness. We are indebted to plants for oxygen and food, to 

invertebrates for the basics of sensory response, and our autonomic nervous system is anchored 

firmly to the primitive parts of our cerebral hemispheres associated with the reptile and lower 

mammal. These are well established biological facts. 

 

Although we are emotionally anchored to our early vertebrate ancestors, the neocortex (or new 

brain) has exploded in size with the higher mammals and man. This enhanced intellectual capacity 

is not directly colored by emotional input and thus has brought with it an increasing ability to 

modulate and tailor more primitive emotional urges to better consciously suit the needs of 

circumstance. We will return to this later. 

 

Dawkins keeps shifting back and forth in double speak. His rivers of genes are now digital rivers, 

physical bits of genetic know-how that offer no place for values and purpose. But somehow there 

is only one genetic code for the whole of earthly life, from bacteria to humans (and perhaps only 

one in the universe if life originated from space). The chances of this happening twice by accident, 

he says, are about a million million million million million to one, so life on Earth must have 

evolved from a single cell, he insists. There are other scientific options possible, which we will 

come to later, but he doesn’t acknowledge them since it would erode his argument. In fact the odds 

against life emerging on Earth, or anywhere else, by accident are infinitely greater than those that 

he quotes but this fact is also ignored.  

 

Genes are digital information and this, Dawkins claims, has dealt the final killing blow to vitalism. 

By implication he means to also sweep aside any other possible belief about the nature of life. By 

some unexplained leap of logic he makes the remarkable statement that it is no longer possible to 

believe that there is anything fundamentally mysterious in living protoplasm.  

 

I am not contending here that genes do not encode discrete bits of information but how does one 

conclude from that bit of knowledge that there is nothing else whatever involved in the creative 

process? And if less than one percent of the diverging branches of the evolutionary tree have 

survived, are we then not forced to conclude that over ninety-nine percent of the information 

accumulated through the evolutionary process is forever lost to future generations and a waste of 

time? According to the same logic we may expect the percentage of retained information to get 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

227 

smaller and smaller as the process proceeds. The genetic river must be drying up, despite all its 

branching and diversification. The DNA struggle for survival is destined to lose. The 

contradictions to the exclusive Darwinian argument keep multiplying with the diverging branches 

of the evolutionary tree. 

 

Jumping from genes being encoded information to genes being capable of exclusively directing 

living processes is like saying that because a set of engineering drawings and specifications 

contain all the information necessary to erect a building that they can do it themselves. There is no 

team of architects or engineers producing the most incredibly complex of plans. They happen by 

accident, even though countless useless mistakes can apparently perpetuate themselves in reptiles 

for 160 million years before their demise. There is no construction company reading the plans, 

organizing and assimilating the skills, the equipment and the materials and then erecting the 

structures. All this happens by itself without supervision or management. And there is no 

budgeting, or financing, or sales involved. The chemical resources are assumed to be gratis and if 

there’s a surplus of cement more buildings can go up, whether there’s plumbing or electricity 

available for them or not, and without regard for whether the buildings are of the slightest use to 

anyone. Buildings are infinitely simpler things than cells, not to mention multi-cellular creatures. 

 

There is no intelligent direction integrating and balancing the diverse requirements of biological 

structures, nor are there intelligent occupants in the biological buildings of Dawkins’ world. That 

would include Dawkins himself. “Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” he 

says. Let’s all go out and propogate as much as we can, for it is only the survival of our genes that 

matters, and for that who needs to study genetics, or anything else. 

 

Not quite. There’s a bit more to it than that, says Dawkins. Bodies are important too. Genes inhabit 

bodies he observes. A polar bear has about 900,000,000 cells grouped into a couple of hundred 

types for different body parts, he says, all with the same genes. How do the body parts 

differentiate? Only certain genes are programmed to turn on in certain cells. How are they 

programmed? By the computer method known as bootstrapping, says Dawkins, who confesses that 

there is an element of the chicken and egg paradox here, then hurries on to say it is not 

insuperable. How does bootstrapping work? By chemical differences caused by “polarities” within 

the fertilized egg as it divides again and again. How does the polarity come into being and 

function? He doesn’t pursue this process of regress further, for there surely seems to be some kind 

of incredible communication system at work, which intelligently organizes the orderly 

development of polar bears. That discovery would refute his whole argument.  

 

Then there is the physical shaping of the embryo as it develops. How does a glob of replicating 

cells assume a complex functional form. He marvels at the process but he doesn’t touch on how 

this works. Nor does he comment on how all the cells in the mature body somehow communicate 

with one another to maintain a balanced commitment of available resources to meet an immensely 

complex priority of mutual needs. The truth is that no scientist knows how it all works together. 

Science doesn’t know how experience is organized and integrated. When it gets down to this 

fundamental level of abstraction the inquiry stops. Dead in its tracks! It stops even though science 

implicitly acknowledges that genes are hierarchically ordered, that some genes control other genes 

that in turn control others. But if there is hierarchical order at work this contradicts random order 

as the driving mechanism. We can hardly believe that one of those billiard balls could suddenly 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 221-228 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: The Digital Adam and Eve 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

228 

become a cue ball and cue with the ability to shoot other billiard balls around at will with unerring 

accuracy. 

 

Then come the blind assertions, the leaps of faith. Dawkins invents a “...throbbing, heaving, 

pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly,” new descriptions of life’s animating reality coined to 

ridicule all opposition to atomic billiards. “Nineteen fifty-three, the year of the double helix, will 

come to be seen ... as the end of mystical and obscurantist views of life...” he says. Really! What 

can it be but another obscurantist view of life!  

 

 

References 

 
1. Robert Campbell, Downsizing Darwin: An Intelligent Face for Evolution. MindReach Library (1996). 

 

2. http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com 

 

3. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. Basic Books (1996). 

 

4. Richard Dawkins, the Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without 

Design. W. W. Norton & Company (1996). 

 

5. Richard Dawkins, the Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press (1990). 

 

6. Pough FH, Janis CM, Heiser BH. Vertebrate Life 5
th
 Ed. NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999 

 

7. Purves WK, Orians GH, Heller HC, Sadava D, eds. Life: The Science of Biology 5
th
 Ed. Sunderland 

MA: Sinauer Assoc, 1998.  

 

8. Morgan DO. The Cell Cycle, Principles of Control. Ch. 4.12. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.   

 

9. Gilbert SF. Developmental Biology 5
th
 Ed. Sunderland MA: Sinauer Assoc, 1997 

 

10. Voet D, Voet JG, Pratt CW. Principles of Biochemistry 4
th
 Ed.  John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 

 

 


