A team of researchers from Israel and Ghana has produced new evidence that strikes at the central pillar of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Published in PNAS, the findings show that a key human mutation connected to protection from African sleeping sickness appears far more frequently exactly where it is beneficial. This pattern, the researchers argue, cannot be explained by random mutation—the assumption Darwinian theory has treated as unshakeable for more than a century.

Their conclusions echo another study led by University of Haifa researcher Prof. Adi Livnat, which examined the emergence of the hemoglobin S (HbS) mutation that protects against malaria. Using a highly precise method for detecting de novo genetic changes, Livnat’s team found that the mutation arises far more frequently in African populations than in Europeans—again, precisely where the protection is needed. These converging studies present a direct challenge to the belief that mutations occur by pure chance.

This scientific dispute touches directly on a question that has defined the modern conversation about human origins: is Darwin’s theory—which holds that accidental mutations provide fuel for natural selection—compatible with the Bible’s account of creation?

The new research raises a sharp question for readers who take the Bible seriously while following the scientific world closely: If mutations appear more frequently where they are beneficial, is nature operating with a deeper guidance than Darwin imagined?

The Bible presents a world governed by purpose rather than accident. The prophet Isaiah declared: “For so says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and that which grows from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk on it” (Isaiah 42:5). This verse is not a scientific claim. It is a statement that creation has direction, order and intention.

The Sages taught that the world is sustained through layers of concealed wisdom. They described chochmah nisteret—a hidden structure within creation that unfolds over generations. A scientific finding that mutations appear preferentially where they are beneficial does not “prove” anything about theology. But it reinforces a simple observation that many scientists have avoided confronting: the machinery of life may not be governed only by randomness.

In the Israeli–Ghanaian study, the APOL1 1024A>G mutation appeared far more frequently in sub-Saharan Africa than in Europe. The mutation protects carriers from African sleeping sickness, a deadly disease transmitted by the tsetse fly. Yet carrying two copies sharply increases the risk of kidney disease. Darwinian theory explains its prevalence in Africa as a trade-off: protection early in life outweighs health problems later.

What Darwin’s theory does not explain is why the mutation appears de novo in Africans at a much higher rate—right where it is advantageous. Lead author Dr. Daniel Melamed and Prof. Livnat argue that the genome seems to contain internal information that influences where and how new mutations originate. Livnat described this internal guidance as a type of long-term biological memory that responds to environmental pressures.

While 98% of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science say they believe humans evolved over time, one-third of all Americans believe that humans existed in their present form since the beginning of time, and much more have a hybrid perception of evolution and creation working in tandem.

Many believe that the theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than by an undirected process such as natural selection. Intelligent design contradicts specific aspects of evolutionary theory, which claim that genetic mutation is random and a slow process that leads to mutations best suited to the environment.

Livnat said the new evidence “contradicted the commonly-held random mutation belief held by Darwinists.” In his earlier research on malaria resistance, he reached a similar conclusion. “Evolution is influenced by two sources of information: external information that is natural selection, and internal information that is accumulated in the genome through the generations.”

For scientists committed to the classical Darwinian model, these studies pose a direct challenge. If mutations emerge preferentially where useful, the foundation of evolutionary theory—random accidents filtered by selection—must be revised. If the genome responds to long-term pressures in a directed way, evolution becomes a process shaped by information, not only chance.

One such inconvenient challenge to random natural selection is the Cambrian Explosion that took place an estimated 541 million years ago when all major animal phyla simultaneously appeared in the fossil record. Previous to the Cambrian explosion, all fossils were microscopic. Darwin himself noted that the lack of fossil evidence for a gradual and random process of evolution posed a difficulty for his theory.

“To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer,” Darwin wrote. As per his theory, Darwin insisted several times in his book Natura non facit Salturum (Nature Does not Make Jumps). The fossil evidence of the Cambrian Explosion directly contradicts this non-jumping aspect of his theory.

This anti-evolutionary gap in the fossil record has not been resolved in the more-than 150 years since Darwin wrote those words yet most modern scientists refuse to cope with the contradictory evidence.

Darwin’s theory of evolution argues that random genetic mutations appear in living organisms; natural selection then preserves the rare mutations that improve survival. For many scientists, this framework leaves no role for directed purpose in the development of life. The account in Genesis describes a world brought into being not by random accidents but by deliberate Divine intention. For generations, this perceived contradiction has shaped debates in both science and faith.

It should be noted that the final paragraph in Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859 expressed a strong belierf in the divine..

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

For readers grounded in the Bible, the implications are clear. The world described by the prophets is not ruled by chaos. Creation unfolds through structure and intention. When researchers uncover patterns that point toward direction within biological systems, they are not replacing Darwin with theology. They are observing a world that behaves less like a casino and more like the ordered creation described in Bereishit.

This debate is not finished. But the studies emerging from Israel and Ghana show that the most basic assumptions of neo-Darwinism are now under scrutiny. The scientific community will have to grapple with the possibility that life operates with guidance embedded within its very structure.