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DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

254 

          Article 
 

Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden:  

Our Celestial Prison 
 

Robert Campbell 
*
 

 

ABSTRACT 

The analogy of supernovae is applied to the information explosion taking place on our planet that 

he calls the replication bomb, linking it to DNA. The exponential growth of information is 

unrelated to the growth of digitized DNA information, because the linear branches of the 

evolutionary tree are unrelated acccording toDawkins’ reckoning. The vast majority of historical 

species are extinct so the river of genes must be drying up. He cites a simple self replicating 

chemical of two links in its chain as evidence that life must have started as a chemical accident 

while DNA can have billions of nucleotide links wrapped around complex histone spools. 

Chemical reactions in a cell require protein enzymes that employ non-covalent forces to catalyze 

them in highly recursive patterns so the cell survives by complex energy patterns that are not 

chemical in nature. Dawkins proceds to identify ten thresholds triggered by the replication 

threshold, essentially following a process of hierarchical order contrary to the Darwinian position 

of random order that he is otherwise committed to.  

 

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

spirituality, atheist, Richard Dawkins. 

 

5- The Replication Bomb: 

  

Dawkins begins this chapter of his book with reference to the three supernovas that have been 

observed in our galaxy since Chinese astronomers first documented a star exploding in 1054, to 

leave the Crab Nebula in its wake. He applies the analogy to the information explosion that he says 

has occurred on our planet, and that he calls the replication bomb, linking it to DNA. “The reason 

self-replication is a potentially explosive phenomenon is the same as for any explosion: 

exponential growth—the more you have the more you get.”  

  

Double speak creeps in again here for he jumps from DNA replication to our technological culture. 

We have seen that the latter is dependent upon language and is not genetically programmed by 

accident. It is through us, he says, “—through our brains, our symbolic culture and our 

technology—that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep 

space.”   

  

But why, in the first place, are we to assume that there has been an exponential explosion of 

digitized information via DNA survival? If less than one percent of species have survived to the 

                                                 
*
 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. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

255 

present, this indicates a growing proportionate loss of information that has been accumulating 

through the evolutionary process. The only way it could be preserved is if some intelligent process 

could reemploy the information gained from extinct lineages to enhance the evolving 

characteristics of surviving lineages. The mammals for example diverged early in the reptilian age 

some 160 million years before the demise of the dinosaurs.  

  

We might expect an intelligent process to work in much the same way that we humans are able to 

reemploy the lessons we learn in one circumstance to help us cope in certain other circumstances 

that arise in the future, since different experiences are frequently presented to us with inherently 

similar characteristics. Intelligent creatures are endowed with memories and a capacity for recall 

that permits the spanning of space and time. To the extent that we can understand the ever 

changing stream of circumstance we can tailor old memories to reapply similar techniques to new 

situations. Memories are not hard wired to the thought process, since the abstract concepts of 

thought are not hard wired.  

  

However, the recall process is tensionally coupled to sensory input such that it is always relevant 

to the ongoing stream of circumstance. As a simple example, when we see that we are out of 

groceries, we remember that we must go shopping to stock up for future needs based upon our past 

experience. We span space and time through our perception of appropriate needs and we respond 

accordingly. It is in this way that we effect the integration of history, and the evolutionary process 

is busy at the same endeavor. So is the whole cosmic order that turns the heavens. But all of this is 

contrary to the Darwinian position. So accordingly information digitized by DNA must be being 

lost.   

  

Dawkins then turns to the origins of life. He concedes that there is no direct evidence of the 

replication event that started life on the planet, but insists that it must have begun as a chemical 

event. There is no evidence whatever for that either, but most Darwinists seem certain that it was 

through a series of chemical accidents that biological life got started. That is blind unsubstantiated 

belief. It is difficult to understand why anyone should volunteer to be so totally committed to a 

mindless idea that requires their own complete psychic demise at death.  

  

After an excursion through right and left handed stereoscopic chemicals that rotate polarized light 

in opposite directions, and that can act as a template for their mirror image forms, Dawkins comes 

to the work of Rebek and colleagues. These researchers demonstrated that true self replication is 

possible among simple molecules, something that molecules don’t normally exhibit. Two small 

molecules are shown to join in solution to make a third, which then acts as a template to promote 

the formation of more of itself from the two starting molecules still in solution. The population of 

the product molecule thus grows exponentially. One of the starting molecules comes in a variety of 

forms so that there can be competing varieties of the product molecule replicating itself. 

Ultraviolet light can also mutate one of the products into a slightly different form which is more 

adept at replicating itself and soon dominates the test tube population. 

  

Dawkins is so sure that Rebek and colleagues are on the road to replicating the origins of life that 

he refers to these simple chemicals as “protocreatures.” One can hardly construe this as impartial 

science. These “protocreatures” consist of a chain with only two links and the two starting 

molecules chemically combine to produce them initially, without benefit of their template. One 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

256 

might as well say that they can jump to Jupiter because they can jump a foot. All it takes is a little 

more practice. 

  

DNA can have billions of links in its chain and its monomers do not join up spontaneously without 

benefit of a template and a great deal more. They need enzymes to specifically catalyze thousands 

of essential chemical reactions in the life of a cell. Enzymes are large protein molecules that fold 

up in specific ways to fit the reactants together in just the right way for them to combine in each 

reaction. They can speed up the reaction rate millions of times, so that each chemical reaction in a 

cell needs one. They are produced by the machinery in the cell, with the aid of still other enzymes, 

according to DNA blueprints that encode their amino acid sequences, typically hundreds to 

thousands of units long for each enzyme. Enzymes have active sites that bind reactants by non-

covalent forces and they are not themselves chemically altered in the process of catalyzing 

reactions. They are themselves transcribed and translated with the aid of enzymes so the whole 

process is a highly recursive energy pattern distinct from the covalent molecular chemistry that 

forms the cell and its organelles.
1
 

  

Selection must take place from twenty amino acids that must each be identified and brought into 

place for assembly in a very precise order. The assembly machinery consists of many ribosomes 

which are chains of RNA, also produced with the aid of still other enzymes from DNA, and these 

are precisely connected and folded into complex nodules. The assembly machines themselves are 

useless without both transfer and messenger RNA, both of which are transcribed with the aid of 

still more enzymes from DNA which must partly unravel from the histone spools it is wrapped 

around in exactly the right place for this to happen. A host of transcriptions factors and epigenetic 

factors are essential to the process. Messenger RNA brings to the ribosomes the section of 

blueprint from DNA that encodes the amino acid sequences for making a specific protein, while 

transfer RNA collects the necessary amino acids and brings them to the ribosomes for assembly. 

Non-coding DNA and RNA comes into play in a complex variety of ways. 

 

It is obvious that migrations throughout the cell must be specifically directed, timed, and 

integrated, according to an incredibly complex host of needs, yet the direction process is a 

complete mystery. The cell membrane must also remain in contact with the external environment 

and for this purpose it has complex proteins embedded in it that contact numerous external 

chemical messengers and trigger complex internal sets of chemical messengers, many of them in 

cascades of reactions that transmit chemical instructions to DNA. The cell must also acquire 

essential raw materials and cut them up like vegetables for a stew but in precise ways with the aid 

of still more enzymes. And the cell must identify and dispose of waste materials as well as repair 

itself and maintain a membrane together with its internal architecture. Then every once in a while 

it must spontaneously divide itself in two, each half containing precisely one complete set of 

encoded plans, together with all of the other equipment and enzymes necessary to continue the 

work. 

   

Miss out a few critical enzymes and the whole thing won’t work. Bacteria typically have a few 

thousand enzymes to catalyze the necessary chemical reactions. The eukaryotic cells that are the 

building blocks of all plant and animal life are much more complex, somewhat like comparing a 

                                                 
1
 http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Gene_Expression.html 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

257 

747 to a motorcycle. They have many more enzymes that are required to function in a much more 

complex environment with a nuclear envelope and a complement of other organelles. But even the 

simple bacterium has as much traffic within it as a large city crammed with motorcycles, cars, and 

trucks, each headed for specific destinations to perform a great diversity of tasks and guided by 

processes that we can hardly guess at.  

  

The simple truth is that it remains a complete mystery how these diverse and incredibly complex 

and interdependent processes ever came together into a functional whole by any means 

imaginable, much less by accident. The simple truth is that the collective ingenuity of all of the 

biologists on earth still cannot begin to fathom how the many pieces of the puzzle work together, 

even after having identified much of the chemistry involved. They have no means at their disposal 

by which to research how experience itself is organized and integrated. The Darwinian paradigm 

precludes it, since Darwinists believe they already know. 

  

Undaunted, Dawkins plods onward. He points out that it is only in the last few decades of our four 

billion year evolutionary saga that our nervous systems have developed radio technology and now 

an expanding shell of information-rich radio waves is advancing outward from the planet at the 

speed of light and might one day be detected by remote civilizations far out in space. He calls it 

“...the radio threshold—the moment when a proportion of the information overflows from the 

parent world and starts to bathe neighboring star systems with pulses of meaning.”   

  

Note the double speak use of the word “meaning.” Here Richard Dawkins unwittingly confirms 

that he himself believes that there is such a thing as a basis to meaning that is not genetically 

programmed and that altogether completely transcends DNA survival. How else could alien 

creatures hope to intelligently identify it? He has just finished saying, “The Centaurian radio 

astronomers would report, amid fanfares of excitement, that the star Sol had exploded in the 

informational equivalent of a supernova (they’d guess but might not be sure, that it was actually a 

planet orbiting Sol.)”  

  

From this he says we can guess that information explosions “...pass a graded series of thresholds.” 

He has now begun to talk about the nature of a tiered order that transcends and subsumes random 

mutation and natural selection, in open contradiction to his own earlier position, which somehow 

seems to conceal the meaning in his own words from himself. He certainly isn’t a bad fellow at 

heart.   

  

He first identifies five major thresholds in reverse historical order: the radio threshold, the 

language threshold, the nerve-cells threshold, the many-cells threshold, and the replicator 

threshold. The last one is now called “...a triggering event that made the whole explosion 

possible.” 

  

From here he jumps back to his old position and uses the example of chain letters to emphasize the 

enormity of the numbers that result from geometric progressions, and different strategies that 

people may invent to get the letters duplicated. Then he says, with reference to the letters, “It is 

important to understand that none of these replicating entities is consciously interested in getting 

itself duplicated.”  

  



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

258 

Of course chain letters are not interested in getting themselves duplicated. That’s exactly the point! 

Neither are inert chemicals like DNA. Chain letters have intelligent agents behind them, namely 

people that are manipulating their content in order to achieve their replication. So does DNA have 

intelligent energies working behind it, manipulating its content so that it relates meaningfully to 

the working machinery of the whole cell, as well as to organs and host in complex multi-celled 

creatures.  

  

Like chain letters, living creatures are complex communications systems in intimate contact with 

themselves and their environment. “But it will just happen that the world will become filled with 

replicators that are more efficient,” he says, ignoring the fact that people are writing the letters, 

just as all Darwinists ignore so much obvious evidence that intelligence is implicitly at work in the 

creative process. Just because a letter may be left unsigned is no reason to assume that it wrote 

itself. 

  

Dawkins adds the example of the “St. Jude Letter” to show how easily people may be duped into 

believing, implying that anyone who believes there is anything more than random chemistry at 

work in the creative process is also easily duped. On the face of the evidence the opposite is true. 

  

“A successful replicator molecule will be one that, for reasons of detailed chemical technicality, 

has what it takes to get duplicated,” says Dawkins, implying that although the technical details are 

beyond most readers, we may take his word for it. “All the organs and limbs of animals; the roots, 

leaves and flowers of plants; all eyes and brains and minds, and even fears and hopes, are the tools 

by which successful DNA sequences lever themselves into the future,” he says. But you can 

extract pure DNA from a cell and place it floating freely in a jar with all the necessary monomers 

to replicate itself and it will not do so. Naked DNA is an inert chemical. That is why it is able to 

preserve genetic integrity.   

 

By stressing this theme over and over Dawkins expects us to believe that life got started by simple 

self-replicating chemicals that by some completely unknown series of accidental steps became 

DNA, a complex chemical that is not remotely similar. But even if we take raw DNA or RNA as a 

starting point, we are still no closer to life. We can sprinkle DNA in the earth, and streams and 

lakes and rivers and oceans and organic soups forever and it will not initiate new life. This in fact 

happens daily on a huge scale, complete with the cellular machinery that surrounds it, every time a 

leaf falls or a creature bleeds or kills or dies, but new life does not reassemble itself and come 

creeping out of our graveyards. The host creature is not something physical, and when it dies, the 

life disappears from the chemistry. The host is a manifestation of the intelligent processes that 

guide and direct the chemistry of life. The host is a microcosm in the universal chore of integrating 

history. 

  

Dawkins next turns back to thresholds for a guess at the steps in the chronology of a life explosion 

on any planet, anywhere in the universe, the series of thresholds through which life must pass. He 

is entitled to his guess, even though he is unaware that he is back to sniffing out the nature of 

hierarchies in the cosmic order. He is talking about deciphering an order to life that transcends and 

subsumes its primary chemistry. He is also talking to a certain extent about climbing a ladder of 

sentient awareness to conscious thought. But then, typical of his science training, he reverts to a 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

259 

linear progression of technical achievements rather than stick with our continued evolution as 

intelligent beings. 

  

He then adds to his initial five thresholds and identifies ten thresholds in all, and some of them are 

legitimate levels in a universal hierarchy of a higher order than the three levels 

Idea→Routine→Form identified earlier. He even says that some of these steps are likely to be 

genuinely universal, while others may be peculiar to our own planet. “It may not always be easy to 

decide which are likely to be universal and which local, and this question is interesting in its own 

right.”  

  

So Dawkins does have some inspiring glimpses into reality. He really does believe in transcending 

universal influences that are operative in the creative process. He is even attempting to integrate 

history through the chronology of the thresholds. And him a Darwinist no less!  

  

Before reviewing Dawkins’ ten thresholds it is worth diverging for a moment to explain a little 

about hierarchies. Since we all encounter them in business organizations it will be convenient to 

explain how they become established there.  

  

In a one man business there are no hierarchies apparent because they all exist in the intelligence of 

one man and he does all the physical work. To an outside observer the physical work is all that is 

seen and we may call this the form level. Behavior takes a certain form and gives a specific form 

to a product.  

  

Let’s say our businessman is making stainless steel screw nails for the marine industry. Lets call 

him Hank. Hank has one machine that he operates himself, he purchases and stocks the raw 

materials he needs, he keeps his own books, he services and repairs the machine, and he makes his 

own sales and deliveries. He is a factory laborer, purchasing agent, warehouseman, accountant, 

repairman, salesman and delivery boy all wrapped up in one. All the variety of jobs that Hank does 

are form level work, that we might better call functional work in the case of a business.  

  

Hank’s business is good and in no time he has twenty machines making stainless bolts and a 

variety of fittings as well as screw nails, and all the jobs that he used to do have been delegated to 

fifty or sixty employees. They are divided into departments that each do different kinds of 

functional work. Even the foremen or heads of these small departments are concerned with the 

form of their final product and thus do functional work through focusing on task cycles.  

  

Does that mean that Hank now has nothing to do? Not on your life. Now he has headaches with 

matching up work schedules with sales commitments, and cash flow financing with customer 

credit, and inventory levels with turnover, and costing with pricing, and quality control verses 

customer satisfaction, and equipment maintenance versus replacement, and rental space versus 

purchase, and more, that all used to fall into place simply in his head. Now he has to commit plans 

to paper and keep records that never used to be needed. He has to budget all his resources against 

all his commitments according to product cycles.  

 

This is a new kind of work that does not directly involve the form of the end product that 

employees in each department produce, whether it be a balance sheet or screw nails. Hank’s work 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

260 

now involves the routines of his business that are predominantly associated with product cycles as 

opposed to task cycles. We may call this kind of work supervisory work, keeping in mind the 

special meaning associated here with the word supervisory to distinguish it from functional work. 

A supervisor in this sense works on a higher level of abstraction than a functional foreman. And 

now Hank has to do hiring, and evaluate pay levels, and train and discipline as well, but this is 

usually of a functional nature. 

  

Hank’s business continues to prosper and grow. He has started to cast, forge and machine larger 

stainless fittings, valves, and small pumps, all for the marine industry. He has put a down payment 

on factory space and offices that now house five hundred employees. He has had to further 

delegate the personnel function at the functional level, and he has also had to appoint a Plant 

Superintendent responsible for supervisory level work in the Operations Department, with plant 

foremen, maintenance foremen, scheduling, quality control inspection, and cost accounting, all at 

the functional level reporting to this superintendent. He has also had to develop an Engineering 

and Design Department with delegation of supervisory work to a Chief Engineer, with design 

engineers, draftsmen, mold makers, costing and budgeting, scheduling, materials testing, and 

technical inspection all at the functional level reporting to him. He has also had to delegate work at 

the supervisory level to a Sales Manager over a Sales Department, and to a Chief Accountant over 

a Treasury Department, each with a variety of tasks at the functional level reporting to them. 

   

Hank himself is now obliged to concentrate primarily on what we will call administrative level 

work, concerned with the assimilation, maintenance and development of knowledge implicitly 

essential to the facilities, to the technical and human resources, and to the infrastructure of the 

organization generally. He is concerned with these kinds of infrastructure cycles, as opposed to 

product or task cycles.  

  

A three level universal hierarchy was previously identified but it subsumes and transcends a four 

level universal hierarchy in which explicit knowledge becomes distinct from the integrating idea. 

A four level hierarchy may therefore be described as follows: Idea→Knowledge→Routine→Form. 

Four levels are common in large organizations whether economic or biological. Hank’s work has 

now graduated to administrative knowledge level work. 

  

It soon becomes apparent to Hank, however, that conditions are just right for him to go 

international and if he doesn’t do so, it could adversely affect his business at home since boats and 

ships travel the world and they need service. In order to do so he must fill out his line of products, 

have a network of international distributors and a couple of manufacturing plants abroad. He has to 

delegate administrative level work to develop the necessary facilities, resources and infrastructure. 

He also needs a Marketing Department, probably at the supervisory level, completely distinct from 

Sales, to assess international markets and keep the stream of available products current with 

market needs. The other five departments, Operations, Engineering, Sales, Treasury, and 

Personnel, will probably all be promoted to administrative level work with Vice President chiefs.  

  

Hank has had to move up another level of abstraction in his everyday thinking. As President and 

Managing Director, he is now concerned primarily with idea level managerial work. This kind of 

work integrates, maintains, develops and diversifies, or consolidates his far flung organization. 

This work gives overall coherence and direction to the organization. It was there when he was a 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

261 

one man operation too, but he was too busy to give it much notice. Nor did he need to. Now it 

requires nearly all of his time.  

  

The point in all of this is that every business organization during its growth goes through these 

same four major stages of delegation up a hierarchy of different levels of work. (In still larger 

organizations the process starts again with a broader focus, involving considerable diversification.) 

As delegation proceeds the same six departments always break out, tailored only to the nature of 

the business they are in. Within the larger departments, especially operations, the same six sub-

departments break out again within it as it grows. In practice intermediate levels of work creep in 

and the six departments are not always separately delegated, but invariably when this happens 

bureaucracy and political in fighting begin to erode the organization from within. The organization 

loses its transparency and ceases to operate intelligently and responsibly.
2
 

  

Note, however, that direction in the hierarchy always comes in reverse order to that in which 

delegation occurs. Idea gives direction to Knowledge which gives direction to Routine which gives 

direction to Form. Thus it is also in the evolutionary order. We have evolved up through the plants 

(cellular form), the invertebrates (motor sensory routine), the vertebrates (cerebral awareness in 

knowledge), to Homo sapiens (idea integrating history). The history of our evolution has been 

incorporated into our anatomy such that our creative ideas give direction to our accumulated 

knowledge which gives direction to our motor sensory routines which animates our physical form. 

But this pattern is surely a reflection of a self-similar pattern to universal intelligence that has 

directed the evolutionary process in the first place, as the evidence clearly and powerfully 

indicates, culminating in the delegation of conscious intelligence to humans. 

  

When we come to assess the evolutionary process in this light, the futility of the Darwinian 

position becomes apparent. It fatally cripples itself by focusing exclusively on the physical form of 

chemical processes, which are valid enough in their own right, but they don’t give direction to the 

evolutionary process. By concentrating exclusively on the lowest level in the hierarchy Darwinism 

has no hope of ever advancing up through the hierarchy to understand the integration of living 

processes. The more Darwinists win, the more we all lose. 

  

With these thoughts in mind let’s return to Richard Dawkins’ ten thresholds. 

  

The first threshold, he says is the arising of some kind of self copying system with some 

rudimentary form of hereditary variation, with occasional random mistakes in copying, which he 

says will result in a mixed population competing for resources which will become scarce.  

  

Now the earliest fossil evidence of life has recently been pushed back to nearly four billion years 

ago, almost immediately after the planet had cooled sufficiently for life to survive, so it didn’t take 

                                                 
 
2
 A full description of the principles involved in structuring a business organization, and how to apply them, is given 

by the author in Enlightened Management and the Organizational Imperative. http://www.cosmic-

mindreach.com/Management.html . See also http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Organize_structure.html and 

http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Three-Brains.html  

 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

262 

vast spans of geological time for life to evolve, despite infinite odds against it happening by 

accident. This should lead us to look for another route as to how it began.  

  

One reasonable alternate was suggested early in the century by Svante Arrhenius, and it was 

promptly ignored. A Nobel prize winner in 1903, he suggested that the earth could have been 

seeded by spores arriving from interstellar space. Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe 

have further investigated the possibility and found it quite possible that bacterial spores and 

perhaps very small eukaryotic spores could survive the rigors of interstellar space and be carried 

by comets to the inner solar system where solar radiation pressure is sufficient to carry them to a 

soft landing on planets with atmosphere. It offers a credible mechanism by which life could be 

seeded on suitable planets from an interstellar gene pool. There are also mechanisms by which 

dormant spores can be ejected from planets to maintain the pool. Asteroid impacts, for example, 

are common in the early life of planets and they can readily eject spores into interstellar space.  

  

These efforts to investigate alternate origins to life on the planet have been largely ignored. The 

Darwinist lobby is powerful. Even though the findings make a lot more sense than bacteria 

forming themselves spontaneously by accident in a primordial inorganic soup, they are dismissed. 

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe conservatively computed the odds of producing by chance from 

twenty amino acids just the two thousand enzymes necessary for a simple bacterium to function. 

They are 10
40,000

 to one, against. There are no names for such vast numbers. It would take ten 

pages just to type out forty thousand zeros after a one. It is infinitely more than all of the electrons 

and protons in the universe. (That number can be written in a couple of lines.) And those odds only 

get us the enzymes. They do not tell us how the enzymes work together with DNA and RNA to 

produce the organized machinery of the cell. 

  

But Darwinists turn their heads and go back to talking about chemical accidents, ignoring odds 

that a bookmaker wouldn’t take if the planet had a billion billion years to work the result. It’s more 

possible that life was seeded intentionally by advanced alien civilizations. The appearance of 

eukaryotic cells is as much a mystery as that of prokaryotes, for their level of complexity is several 

orders of magnitude greater. Even the “miracle” option is more possible than chance. It would 

entail a transcendent intelligence “moving on the face of the deep,” directly assembling the first 

living cells and setting them about the task of replicating. There are surely organized energies of 

some kind at work in the cell that govern the complex migrations of chemicals to the right places 

at the right times as if they were all in communication in response to mutual needs. But it’s not 

necessary to invoke this kind of speculation when the panspermia theory of Arrhenius, Hoyle and 

Wickramasinghe can be tested.
3
 

  

In any case the development of the plants and their competition for resources did not deplete the 

planet’s resources so much as enhance them. Plants capture the sun’s energy and store it, in 

apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, since even in death their decay products 

leave the environment more ordered. Each chemical reaction in a cell or a plant obeys the second 

law, leading to an increase in disorder, and yet the intelligent integration of all the interdependent 

                                                 
3
  A description of the Panspermia Theory and evidence as to how it may work is given in Evolution From Space, by 

F. Hoyle and C. Wickramasinghe, Granada Books, London, 1983. 

 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

263 

reactions and processes going in a cell, taken together as an integrated whole, generates an 

increase in order. It cannot be an accidental process attributable to atomic billiards. But however 

life got started it was a first threshold. We may assume that much. 

  

Threshold 2 is the Phenotype Threshold. “On our planet, phenotypes are easily recognized as those 

parts of animal and plant bodies that genes can influence. That means pretty well all bits of 

bodies.” Now even single celled creatures have a complex cell body, and since we don’t find 

chemicals in nature replicating themselves nude, including DNA or RNA, how can this be 

assumed to be a threshold at all? The living record is replete with surviving examples of every 

other major step in the evolutionary process. The self-replicating mechanism, as we know it, is 

utterly dependent upon the complex machinery of the whole cell and there is no sound reason to 

expect that it has ever been otherwise. There are many hundreds of enzymes in the simplest 

bacterium that are necessary to catalyze the chemistry essential for replication together with the 

growth and maintenance of cells generally. Let’s set this threshold aside as redundant.  

  

Threshold 3 is the Replicator Team Threshold, “...which may on some planets be crossed before, 

or at the same time as, the phenotype threshold. ...The genes work in teams.” Genes are obviously 

organized in some way to integrate information and to produce a coherent result, and again there is 

no sound reason to expect that it has ever been different. The simplest free-living cells, 

pleuromona, are estimated to have about a thousand genes, most of them committed to encoding 

the amino acid sequences in making the protein enzymes that are essential to catalyze the 

chemistry essential for replication, maintenance and growth. Escherichia coli, a more typical 

bacterium, has about 4000 enzymes. The latter translates to about 4,000,000 base pairs in precise 

sequence, a far cry from two links in the chain of a self replicating chemical under controlled 

conditions. A human being has about 2.9 billion base pairs in its genome, and for some strange 

reason the genome of the South American lungfish is about thirty-five times larger than that of the 

human. In any case there is a total absence of evidence to indicate a progression from replicating 

chemicals to a cell body with genes working in isolation, to genes working in teams. The evidence 

in fact indicates that Threshold 3 came at the same time as Thresholds 1 and 2, that the living cell 

is so interdependent on all of its working parts that it somehow appeared on the planet as a 

functioning whole.  

  

But Dawkins doggedly pushes his point further: “...it is obviously tempting to leap to the 

assumption that Darwinian selection nowadays chooses among rival teams of genes—to assume 

that selection has moved up to higher levels of organization. Tempting, but in my view wrong at a 

profound level,” he says. It is hard then to understand why a hundred and sixty million years of 

prolific reptilian evolution should be wiped out in favor of a few ancient rodents, asteroid 

catastrophe or not. Perhaps there is a fear that selection moving up to higher levels of organization 

directly implies that there is a more fundamental order to the creative process than random chance. 

That would be a crack in the armor that would bring down the Darwinian edifice. And yet there 

are hierarchies recognized in gene expression, since homeotic genes are known to activate teams 

of genes in concert.   

  

Dawkins identifies Threshold 4 as the Many-Cells Threshold. He skips over the big event that 

made this possible, the appearance of eukaryotic cells. When cells divide, he observes: “If two 

cells do not separate fully but remain attached to one another, large edifices can form, with cells 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

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ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

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playing the role of bricks.” He doesn’t address the question of why cells should not separate fully, 

but remain in obvious intimate communication with one another and develop diverse specialized 

functions which mutually cooperate to some collective end. They are obviously more than 

insentient bricks.  

  

He explains that “...many-celled organs acquire their characteristic shapes and sizes because layers 

of cells (bricks) follow rules about when to stop growing.” Really! How are insentient bricks to 

follow rules? There must be a development plan that is communicated to all cells in the organ and 

the organism, all of which have identical genes. Some communication system must be operative to 

switch specific genes on and off in each cell at just the right time for it to assume a specialized 

function in relation to all the other cells. And genes themselves must be hierarchically ordered in 

an intelligent way if some are to act in a directing capacity over others.  

  

It’s good of Dawkins to make the admission that “Cells must also, in some sense know where they 

sit in relation to other cells. Liver cells behave as if they know that they are liver cells and know, 

moreover, whether they are on the edge of a lobe or in the middle.” This is a clear admission that a 

communicative intelligence is at work in the collective organization of cells.  

  

One can hardly assume from this, that how intelligence works is local to our planet. On the 

contrary intelligence displays all of the earmarks of being universal in its operation. But Dawkins 

has only lapsed back into double speak, for he then says, “Whatever the details, the methods have 

been perfected by exactly the same general process as all other improvements: the nonrandom 

survival of successful genes judged by their effects—in this case, effects on cell behavior in 

relation to neighboring cells.”  

  

This is more jumping to Jupiter. Dawkins’ bucket just doesn’t hold water. You can’t write off 

obvious communication between cells as just “a difficult question” to be explained one fine day in 

the future, not when the evidence so obviously contradicts the only mechanism Darwinists allow 

to explain it. We may nevertheless accept that multicellular Threshold 4 represents another level 

up an intelligent hierarchy that is implicit in the evolutionary process, the first level being the 

living cell, that is, the combination of Thresholds 1, 2 and 3.  

  

Dawkins now jumps several hundreds of millions of years in the evolutionary process, from the 

appearance of multicelled plants to the development of the neuron, which emerged with the 

invertebrates.  

 

Threshold 5 is the High Speed Information Processing Threshold, which on our planet may be 

called the Nervous System Threshold. Dawkins believes in his theme, “...because now action can 

be taken on a timescale much faster than the genes, with their chemical levers of power, can 

achieve directly. Predators can leap at their dinner and prey can dodge for their lives, using 

muscular and nervous apparatus that acts and reacts at speeds hugely greater than the 

embryological origami speeds with which genes put the apparatus together in the first place.” 

Dawkins doesn’t see anything fundamentally meaningful in this development other than the 

survival of DNA, and the leverage it gains. But DNA survives comfortably in creatures without 

nervous systems, so where is the leverage?  

  



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ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

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But then again he turns around and among the consequences he acknowledges “...large 

aggregations of data handling units—‘brains’—capable of processing complex patterns of data 

apprehended by ‘sense organs’ and capable of storing records of them in ‘memory.’ A more 

elaborate and mysterious consequence of crossing the neuron threshold is conscious awareness, ...” 

So Richard does after all acknowledge that there is something mysterious going on in that mystic 

jelly called a brain, at least to the extent that we don’t yet understand it. He calls Threshold 6 the 

Consciousness Threshold.  

  

Of course everything is mysterious until we understand it properly. Without mystery there 

wouldn’t be science. We have seen, however, that awareness is associated with the evolution of an 

autonomic nervous system in concert with cerebral hemispheres, such that the vertebrates are able 

to reflect emotive patterns of behavior in cerebral awareness. Because all vertebrates are anchored 

to a common skeletal, sensory, motor, and visceral arrangement, we have access to the emotive 

feelings of others than our isolated physical selves. Awareness begins to transcend the self in 

awareness of others’ feelings. We all empathize with domestic pets, and they with us.  

  

Now what has that got to do with the blind survival of DNA? It’s very difficult to see how it may 

convey a survival advantage if predators start to empathize with their prey. And if intelligent social 

creatures have evolved anywhere else in this vast universe, they too must have acquired an ability 

to reflect on experience and make sense of it. In humans this awareness of other than self is 

compounded by the development of language and the ability to abstract experience, to think and 

plan, incurring a need for intuitive insight into the dynamics of experience itself in order to 

function at all. And the meaning inherent in words is not genetically programmed. It is intuited 

from general experience that is independent of our individual genetic makeup, whatever the 

blessings or burdens endowed by the latter may be.  

  

Dawkins calls Threshold 7 the Language Threshold, which may or may not be crossed on a planet. 

But if there is no conscious ability to deal with experience in abstraction, as we do with words, 

there can be no independent creative activity, no ability to consciously plan, and no consciously 

entertained collective social endeavors. These things are all dependent on three focal points to the 

process of thought, namely one intuitive, one emotive, and one behaviorally explicit. This allows 

for the conscious expression of the universal hierarchy idea, routine and form.  

  

Dawkins sees all of this as a flat, mechanically interconnected networking system “...by which 

brains ...exchange information with sufficient intimacy to allow the development of a cooperative 

technology.” Notice how he slips in that word intimacy, a value. How can there be intimacy 

without consciously abstracting meaning from experience and recognizing another as sharing 

similar conscious intentions? Cooperative technology depends upon it. If this is all genetically 

programmed there is no meaning to the word intimacy.   

  

But Dawkins goes on to Threshold 8, the Cooperative Technology Threshold. “Indeed it is 

possible that human culture has fostered a genuinely new replication bomb, with a new kind of 

self-replicating entity—the meme, as I have called it in The Selfish Gene—proliferating and 

Darwinizing in a river of culture.” It is all so easy, once one realizes the hypostatizing power of 

words. Just give cultural traits another name and make it out to be another progression of accidents 

devoid of any transcending meaning, now even divorced from DNA. Just pure greed proliferating 



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

266 

through the cosmos! “Beautiful and inspiring!” No wonder he calls it “...too big a subject for this 

chapter.” 

  

Threshold 9 is the Radio Threshold, “...the power to make an impact outside the home planet...” 

May God forbid! It might be better to hope that some alien intelligence may contact us with some 

constructive advice, especially in the sciences. Of course radio messages have been rocketing into 

space at the speed of light for nearly a century and in a mere sixty or seventy thousand years 

increasingly faint echoes of our collective global radio racket could begin reaching most star 

systems in our galaxy, but not in a meaningful form. 

  

“After radio waves, the only further step we have imagined in the outward progress of our own 

explosion is physical space travel itself: Threshold 10, the Space Travel Threshold.”  

  

But where are we going to go? The moon is barren, Mercury or Venus would boil our blood, Mars 

would freeze it, the outer planets would crush and smother us, and we can’t work things out where 

we are. The other planets in our solar system are also very unlikely to be populated by highly 

evolved intelligent creatures and the next nearest star system is over four light years away. To get 

there and return with our present understanding of the physics of the universe would take a 

lifetime, and the relative time distortion would mean that several life times had elapsed on Earth in 

our absence. Perhaps it is fortunate that there are built-in restrictions to space travel, lest our own 

barbaric ways become contagious before we mature to a responsible age. Our current science 

makes a celestial prison of our planet. 

  

If interstellar space travel is possible for intelligent beings anywhere in the universe, they must 

have a vastly superior understanding of the cosmic order than the simplistic understanding we 

have so far devised. It is very unlikely that space travel could ever be a practical affair for beings 

anywhere by traveling through space and time. But a proper insight into the cosmic order 

transcends space and time. In some vastly superior science this may ultimately make quantum 

leaps through space possible, but this brings with it other restraints. It is highly probable that 

intelligent insights into the cosmic order present value constraints of powerful proportions, 

associated with the mutually conscious evolution of beings from different star systems. It would 

undoubtedly be an awesome mind expanding evolutionary event. If it was not to have negative 

consequences for either or both parties, one would expect that it would require highly responsible 

preparation and planning, as yet far beyond our current capacity to comprehend or relate to.  

  

For Darwinists the outward vision ends on a sadly impotent note, with a space capsule plummeting 

outward beyond Pluto toward the empty reaches of interstellar space, containing a picture of a 

naked man and woman. The coordinates of our planet are iconically engraved in relation to the 

galaxy, in the hope that this tiny craft will someday be met by an alien intelligence that can 

understand the message. The hope is far more remote than slipping a note in a tiny bottle and 

setting it adrift, for the ocean of space is immense beyond our accustomed conceptions. To a 

Darwinist we are forever condemned to the cell, imprisoned with the survival of DNA in the cell, 

and the whole vast universe can hold no meaning. Although the Ten Thresholds may at first 

appear to offer hope of more, it seems that Dawkins hasn’t grasped the elements of an intelligent 

hierarchy after all. Dawkins’ heart is obviously in the right place, for his hopes are high, but the 

Darwinist logic precludes their realization.  



DNA Decipher Journal | November 2012 | Volume 2 | Issue 3 | pp. 254-267 

Campbell, R., Part I: A Critique of River Out of Eden: Our Celestial Prison 

 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

267 

 

 

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. http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Gene_Expression.html 

 

7. Fred Hoyle, Chandra.Wickramasinghe. Evolution From Space. London: Granada Books (1983). 

 

 


