Everything is a Tetrapod

Do people really understand evolution?

When I was growing up as a Christian, evolution was a very touchy subject. Taught in schools as fact, alongside sex education and religious pluralism, evolutionary theory was a sinister force that served as the grounding for atheist rhetoric. Anyone raised to be a genuine Christian, and not merely lukewarm, takes their religion seriously.

The moderates who are happy to attend church on Christmas and then forget about it the rest of the year have a thorny theological problem justifying their lackadaisical attitude towards religion. Matthew 5:13 has: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing…” and Revelations 3:16 is: “So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.” Catholics and Othrodox Christians who take the Bible alongside other sources of Tradition may be able to get away with ignoring the Bible now and then, but for Protestants, there’s not much left if you don’t pay attention to the scriptures.

So in my teenage years, lots of other evangelicals rejected evolution for reasons that were simple and direct: That’s not what the Bible tells us. It really doesn’t need to be complicated.

But this way of looking at things forces a difficult conclusion: Everyone is being deceived by sinister forces within the school system. (By the way, if you’ve been wondering what the heck is up with Pizzagate or the staunch belief that Trump won in 2020, this analogous chain of reasoning might prompt some reflection.)

Now I had no trouble with the idea that school is full of teachers, administrators, students, and staff who were bad individually; I saw that every day. But the idea that the forces of evil were colluding on a nationwide level to brainwash teenagers seemed as extreme to me at the time as it probably seems to you as you read this right now.

At the root of my skepticism was a sense that maybe Christianity really was wrong, the Bible really wasn’t true, and, well, all the time I’d been spending at church was a waste. That seemed plausible, too; there were some interesting theological discussions that would emerge from time to time in the weekly sermons, but most of church really seemed mind-numbing.

So how to resolve this problem?

Well, like millions of other Christians who were well versed in the Bible, I hadn’t found fatal problems with my religion (beyond mysteries like Trinitarianism, controversies about faith or works, and the nagging issues about free will). But I wasn’t really that clear on evolution. So, if evolution could be dismantled intellectually, then the problem could be neatly resolved.

Dismantling Evolution

OK, so what about evolution? Was the evolutionists’ explanation for the world around us plausible? I’m going to skip over my research and wrangling and just give the results. As you read, you might see if you know how these three conclusions can be refuted:

1. Abiogenesis is implausible. Life cannot arise from nothing. The probability that inorganic compounds could ever combine to form a viable amino acid is vanishingly low. It’s not enough even for the right amino acids to form and link together—each one much have the correct chirality. (Lucky for you: I didn’t have Walter White to explain the subject, but you do!) Given the length of a typical RNA or DNA molecule, creating a viable life form by accident is vanishingly unlikely. Just to have some kind of number, imagine we need 100 left-handed amino acids to line up; if we flip a coin 100 times, the chance for 100 heads is 1/2^100, or 7.8x10^-31. This assumes we an even find 100 amino acids to line up to begin with, which itself is essentially impossible without some intelligence setting things up.

2. Speciation is impossible, because individuals are only reproductively compatible with their own kind. I programmed computers from a young age, and knew very well that different filetypes and operating systems wouldn’t mesh. If you passed a string into a function expecting an integer, the function wouldn’t work; if you put a disk formatted for Apple computers into an IBM, it wouldn’t read. Well, the great apes have 23 chromosomes, while humans have 24. You can’t gradually go from 23 to 24 chromosomes; you either have 23 or 24. This creates an insurmountable problem for evolution, since as soon as a chimpanzee gives birth to a creature with the human genetic operating system, that child is going to be sterile, just like donkeys and horses, which also have different numbers of chromosomes.

3. Some traits seen in nature cannot be evolved, because intermediate forms are not always more fit. If we start with a legless creature such as a snake, fully formed legs don’t appear suddenly, on their own. The evolutionists’ account is one of slow change over millennia. And a snake trying to evolve into a lizard with nubby, stubby legs isn’t faster or more mobile than a snake just being a snake. Vestigial limbs are going to snag on rocks and brush, and block its ability to enter gopher holes. Though I asked around for explanations of this, no evolutionist was able to give any explanation for where limbs might have come from.

Let me stress here that I asked numerous evolutionists and atheists about this. They were at least able to respond to the first objection I had to abiogenesis, by saying, lamely, “Well, it’s a big universe.” But they were struck dumb by objections 2 and 3. This was all before the days of the Internet, and I was mostly left with outdated science textbooks, barely-trained high school teachers, and a bunch of adolescents to go to for information. So I shrugged, had faith in God, and drew the obvious conclusion that scientists were untrustworthy, and everyone in the school system was part of a conspiracy to brainwash me.

Note well: This conclusion was obvious. I had thought carefully, investigated deeply, and checked against all sources available to me. I wasn’t an isolated Bible thumper who thought he was broad minded because his best friend was a Presbyterian when he was an Episcopalian; my friends were a genuinely diverse bunch. Some were obsessed with science, some with drugs, some with libertarianism, and some with paganism, but with only one exception they were all a bunch of Godless heathens. It always seemed strange to me the way churchgoers were so bourgeois when Jesus himself was such a flaming radical, but, for better or for worse, it looked like the Christians were correct, so that was that.

And Then There Was Light

Years later, God created the Internet (and college math courses). And on the Internet (and math class), actual answers to objections 1, 2, and 3 could be discovered. Just as I glossed over the long hours of reasoning that went into the conclusion in the previous section, I’ll skip most of the time spent thinking and reading, and just give the answers. See how much of this you already knew:

1. The Theory of Evolution doesn’t technically say anything about abiogenesis. But we can still investigate the question mathematically as follows:

   1. The chance for flipping a coin twice and getting at least one heads is (1 - (1/2)^2 =) 0.75.

   2. The chance for rolling a die six times and getting at least one six is (1 - (5/6)^6 =) 0.67.

   3. The chance for rolling a zillion sided die a zillion times and getting at least one result of a zillion is (1 - ((zillion-1)/zillion)^zillion = ) 0.63. If you don’t like the number zillion because it can’t be found on a number line, substitute some really big number that approaches infinity. If you still wonder how this happens, ask in the comments; or you could just check Wolfram Alpha, which knows everything. So:

   4. Abiogenesis is extremely improbable. But even if you have something that is very, very improbable, so long as you are able to try it very, very many times, you can easily get at least one positive result—you can get life from nothing provided that you have enough sludgy tidal pools and enough time for the nutrients to swirl around. Given the numbers of molecules we’re talking about—moles of atoms in a single puddle—however unlikely abiogenesis seems, there are enough opportunities to make it possible.

2. Donkeys and horses are able to reproduce at all, even though they have different numbers of chromosomes. This should be a clue—hybridization is possible across species. When we talk about humans and chimpanzees having different numbers of chromosomes, we’re not talking about trying to hybridize utterly incompatible things, like terrestrial life forms versus alien species using exotic xeno nucleic acids in place of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine to encode information. Different numbers of chromosomes don’t break all possibility for reproduction. And although humans and chimps may have drifted far enough by now that interbreeding is no longer possible, even today the DNA is very similar. In fact, it’s so similar that when we look at our chromosome 2, it is clearly fused from chromosomes 2p and 2q of the other great apes:

   

   These obvious similarities are not what we would expect to exist if humans and other primates were unrelated.

3. Lastly, and most tellingly, lizards did not evolve from snakes. Nobody says this. This is the kind of objection to evolution that only a high-schooler (or Michael Behe) could come up with. Evolution doesn’t need to proceed in a linear fashion; it can take detours. Dolphins left the water and went back in; dodos learned to fly, and then forgot. And it turns out that snakes started out with legs—they are a member of tetrapoda, the superclass of all animals with a four-limbed ancestor, including:

• Lions

• Horses

• Seals

• Wolves

• Those Pesky Dolphins

• The Dodos

• Tyrannosaurus Rex

• Koalas

• Turtles

• Poison Dart Frogs

• Platypuses

• Bats

• Snakes

• You

• Me, and

• Basically Everything

Because basically, everything is a tetrapod, even if it doesn’t have four legs.

Does Anyone Really Believe in Evolution?

All along, the atheists had been telling me that evolution was not just something made up, but a model that matched the available observations. Whatever we might say about the details, the essence of nature is a constant unfolding of new varieties produced by random mutation and natural selection. The subtle variation and distinctiveness of every person, every organism, is the starting point for prismatic and ever-changing hues in the great tapestry of life:

[I]ndividual differences are of great importance for us. They are the first step towards barely noticeable varieties… Then, varieties that are in any degree more distinct or more permanent are steps leading to more strongly marked and more permanent varieties. These more distinct and permanent varieties then lead to subspecies, which lead to species.

—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

From this experience I could have learned two different things: Firstly, I could have learned that the atheists were right, and I could just trust scientists and educators all the time and always be right. Secondly, I could have learned that figuring things out and being right is hard—that even if people can’t give decent arguments for their positions, and even if you can give compelling arguments against them, you still might be wrong.

The first lesson would have led me towards a kind of sleepy atheism; a trust in the authorities to do their job and manage the hard thinking for me. There was zero chance I’d take that route. If you know me at all, you are not surprised that the second lesson is what I took away from the experience: don’t be too confident in the things that you believe, because it is not easy to figure out what is really going on. Even the clearest—and most seemingly obvious—conclusions may still be wrong.

But what should be the takeaway for everybody else? What about the secularists who were right all along? One of the main reasons I wrote this post is that I can see the way most people on substack are atheists, agnostics, or religious moderates who really don’t have much experience with hardcore Christians, let alone actually believing the fundamentalist line for any significant part of their lives. So what’s the lesson for readers who believed in evolution all along?

If they were right, shouldn’t they have been able to say why? They couldn’t answer simple objections, or explain fairly straightforward processes. Atheists like to speak of themselves being “rational,” but the secularists I knew who insisted the Theory of Evolution was true were not believing it because they understood it; they were just deferring to scientific and educational authorities who told them it was true, in exactly the same way that churchgoers defer to the pastor to tell them the truth, or normies defer to the media to tell them the truth. (Note: The media very rarely lies. But no matter what people say in the 21st century about being shocked—just shocked—to discover that the media could not actually be trusted, even in the late 80’s people knew that trusting the media to tell them the truth was a stupid idea.)

It’s extremely common for atheists to describe themselves as “rational” or “rationalists.” Is this what rationalism means? To believe things without being able to explain or defend them? Maybe it’s uncharitable to draw conclusions from my experiences decades ago about adults in the present. But when I look around at atheists as adults today, I don’t see sophisticated thinkers who believe things about evolution with good reason. Instead, I see people who should have learned the same lesson I did: figuring out what’s true is hard.

But if the Theory of Evolution really is sound, then we should understand it and use it to inform the rest of our thinking. Other people seem not to do this, even the atheists who should be most confident in it. The widespread failure to draw conclusions from biology is so striking to me because now I really do believe the Theory of Evolution.

And if you really do believe it—rather than just using it as a patch to take the place of God when you’re talking about how things came to be—if you really grasp Darwin’s Big Idea, then evolution becomes an organizing principle for understanding your entire existence. Every finding in anthropology has an evolutionary root. Every finding in sociology has an evolutionary root. Every finding in psychology has an evolutionary root. The reason for this is that evolution is the fundamental organizing principle of biology, and all humans are living beings. In just the same way that chemistry takes physics as a basis, the soft sciences take biology as a basis—or else, they float adrift.

Things you understand if you understand Evolution

Thing 1: Humans are not special.

The belief that humans are special is belied by our evolutionary origins. Humans exist on a biological continuum with every other living thing. The idea that humans are special is ultimately a religious one, but, it could be rescued if there were some trait common to humans that made them special.

Unfortunately, given that humans are so closely related to other animals, we cannot point to bipedality, the ability to make friends across species, or riding skateboards as a source of human specialness.

We might try to establish our superiority by pointing to something else, like our facility with language, or puzzle-solving abilities. But considering the parrot’s vocalizations, and the ease with which crows solve puzzles researchers put before them, it should be obvious that if such traits differ between humans and animals, it is only a matter of degree, not of kind. In terms of their basic ability to solve problems, use tools, communicate, or follow directions, human infants cannot hold a candle to an ordinary cat or dog.

Understanding evolution entails that we realize the way in which we privelege humanity over other animals is really just speciesism, a habitual way of favoring those who are genetically more like ourselves over those who are different. For example, I really think we should be enlightened by an evolutionary understanding that our common ancestry with fellow tetrapods gives us a number of psychological similarities to our cousins, the pigs. In an investigation of the intelligence of pigs, psychologists note that:

Play is found most predominantly in the most cognitively complex and adaptable nonhuman species… Therefore, play appears to be a marker of cognitive complexity. Pigs, too, are playful animals, exhibiting a wide range of behaviors in this domain. A recent study of play behavior in pigs shows that they engage in quite complex types of play that include social play and object play. Common object play behaviors in pigs include shaking or carrying an object such as a ball or stick or tossing straw… Social play in pigs includes play fighting, pushing and running after each other. Many of these categories of play are combined and the behaviors are similar to play behavior in dogs and other mammals.

But whatever; we’ll just grind them up and feed them to our own infants, criminals, and dogs.

Thing 2: Gender has its basis in sex.

Sex is a biological phenomenon allowing individuals in sexual species to share useful mutations across lineages. Prokaryotes can easily accomplish this asexually, but for eukaryotic life, exchanging gametes is how we get the job done. Depending on the way you want to define it, there are either two sexes or three: Male, female, and other. There are not more than three sexes, so as they say, it’s “highly problematic” to be discussing more than three genders.

But what do the scientists and educational authorities have to say on the matter? Well, Healthline tells us:

Although many are taught that there are only two sexes — male and female — that isn’t true. Some people are intersex or have a difference of sexual development (DSD).

This is good biology—Male, female, and other. There’s more, though:

However, these terms can also be confusing. Read on to learn 68 terms about gender identity and expression and what they mean.

Maybe they learned these 68 terms from the Bible.

Thing 3: Evolution has not ended.

Just as evolution did not stand still for the snake, evolution did not stand still for the dolphin, and will not not stand still for us. The shape of the future is not random: it is determined in the present by the reproductive decisions we all make together.

In 2013, dailymail.uk ran an article titled Religion could disappear by 2041 because people will have replaced God with possessions, claims leading psychologist.

• Dr Nigel Barber's book debunks the popular belief that religious groups will dominate atheistic ones because they collectively have more children

• He said the market for formal religion is being squeezed by modern substitutes such as sport and entertainment in more developed countries

• Added that atheists are heavily concentrated in richer countries and religion will decrease as individuals' personal wealth increases

I have been reading these articles since before the turn of the millennium; mercifully they do seem to be on the wane nowadays, though the market for them will remain so long as there are atheists hoping for religion to disappear. For better or for worse, this hope will not be realized in my lifetime.

The problem is that atheists have taken absolutely no measures to reduce religiosity throughout the human species. The atheist habit of having few children, and then convincing other people’s children to discard religion, is not a winning strategy for the long term. Instead, the only evolutionarily sound way to make religion decline would be to convince the religious people to reproduce less than secularists. If we understand that phenotype relates even remotely to genotype, it’s clear that letting religious groups have most of the children is a way of ensuring atheism will be extremely rare in the future.

Why, then, do atheists go on publishing books and arguing about religion without reproducing above replacement? Do they really want a world with less belief in God, with less religious fanaticism, and less opposition to things like legalized abortion or decriminalized psychedelics? The current worldwide fertility advantage of religious believers is well documented:

Using country-level data from multiple sources (n = 181) and multilevel data from 58 countries in the World Values Survey (n = 83,301), the author documents a strong negative relationship between societal secularism and both country-level fertility rates and individual-level fertility behavior. Secularism, even in small amounts, is associated with population stagnation or even decline absent substantial immigration, whereas highly religious countries have higher fertility rates that promote population growth.

If I were an atheist, this is the kind of development that would leave me absolutely horrified, because I take evolution as a foundational explanation for the way things are, have been, and will be on Earth. Now I have heard Richard Dawkins fret that religious people raising their chidren to be religious is “child abuse,” which is exactly the sort of thing we would expect an atheist to be concerned about if religion were a social phenomenon floating completely free of any evolutionary tether. What I have never once heard is an atheist explicitly decrying the fact that religious people have more children to begin with. (If you’ve come across such statements, please let me know in the comments.)

Conclusion

Different people take a variety of basic principles as the foundation for their beliefs. We should not be surprised when sectarian religious groups oppose abortion, the legalization of psychedelics, or the right of sexual minorities to adopt and raise children. These are values that arise as an inevitable consequence of their philosophical foundations. Similarly, we should not be surprised by the way in which the modern left has come to fight so earnestly for justice and equity across all demographic groups—their foundational belief system takes human equality as its starting point.

But there is another foundation which we can take: the foundation formed by empirical science. For those of us who are not religious in the conventional sense, we should understand and follow through on the principles of biology—that we have come into existence through eons of blind mutation and selection, rather than from the conscious decision of a judgmental deity. And at the heart of human nature lies variation, rather than equality. For we are animals like any other, and our tale stretches back thousands of years, past all of recorded history, into the dusty tombs and temples of our illiterate forebears and beyond, to the furthest reaches of our evolutionary past, down to that humble spark—that very first moment in time, when zero became one, and all life in our galaxy began.