The following is a lengthy discussion of evolutionary science. I think it deserves space here because it deals with the origins and diversification of life in a way that directly contradicts literal religious or mythological accounts of creation. It is certainly possible to remain religious while accepting evolution—many people do—but for some believers, evolutionary biology feels like an unacceptable affront to faith, because it replaces a story of intentional design with a story of natural processes unfolding over vast time.
There are experts in evolutionary science who can explain this far better than I can. Still, I want to set aside space for it in my own voice, because (1) the basic logic is not hard to understand, (2) the evidence is overwhelming, and (3) the emotional resistance to it often has very little to do with evidence, and a lot to do with identity, belonging, and sacred narratives—topics I’ve already been discussing.
What follows is a tour through the core mechanism (natural selection), a few common misunderstandings, the idea of speciation, and then a few “side corridors” that matter for this essay: cultural (memetic) evolution, sexual selection, and the uncomfortable fact that even religiosity itself is partly shaped by temperament and biology, not only by culture.
Natural Selection
Natural selection is the central guiding principle of evolutionary theory. The logic is profoundly simple. It requires only that we accept three basic facts:
Organisms vary (physically, physiologically, behaviorally).
Some variation is heritable (traits are influenced by DNA, even though environment matters enormously too).
Some traits affect reproductive success—not in a morally loaded sense of “deserving,” but in the literal sense that some variants leave more surviving offspring than others.
If a heritable trait increases the probability of leaving more surviving offspring in a particular environment, then—over generations—the population will contain more of that trait. If a trait reduces reproductive success, it tends to diminish. That’s it: differential reproduction plus heritable variation, iterated over time.
You can see the basic logic everywhere, from selective breeding in crops and animals, to antibiotic resistance in microbes, to the obvious family resemblance in both physical and psychological traits among human relatives. None of this requires the belief that genes are the only cause of traits; it requires only the admission that heredity is a major contributor.
A point worth emphasizing (because it is often misunderstood): natural selection is not about "improvement” in any moral or progressive sense. It is simply a filter that favors whatever works well enough in a local environment at a given time.
DNA replication is extraordinarily accurate, but not perfectly so. Across generations, there are small changes—mutations—introduced into genetic material. “Mutation” here does not mean “bad.” It means “change.” Most mutations are neutral; some are harmful; a few are beneficial in a given environment. In addition to mutation, sexual reproduction creates variation through recombination—shuffling existing variants into new combinations.
A crucial clarification: the useful statement in evolutionary theory is not that mutations are “random” in some metaphysical sense, but that they are not produced because they would be useful. In other words, variation arises without foresight; selection is the non-random sieve that preserves what works.
When small genetic changes happen to produce a trait that improves survival or reproduction in a particular environment—say, a slightly different beak shape that accesses food more efficiently—those variants can become more common. Over many generations, accumulation of such changes can produce substantial transformations, including changes in complex organs and behaviors.
Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos remain a famous entry point into this idea: different ecological niches favor different beak shapes. The underlying point generalizes: ecological pressures shape populations.
One reason evolution feels counterintuitive is that large organisms reproduce slowly relative to a human life. Big evolutionary changes can take thousands or millions of years, just as major geological or astronomical processes do. We don’t “watch” a canyon form or a star evolve within a single afternoon, but the evidence for those processes is still decisive. Evolution is similar: you infer long processes from converging lines of evidence.
Fossils are one line of evidence—imperfect, but immensely powerful. Fossilization is rare and biased toward certain environments and tissues, so the record will always be incomplete. Still, the overall pattern—order in time, transitions, branching diversification—fits evolutionary predictions. Many intermediate forms for major transitions are known, and “gaps” often shrink as new discoveries accumulate.
And importantly: many “intermediate” forms are living, not fossil—species that preserve traits that help us understand evolutionary branching, even though they are not literally our ancestors.
A cliché objection goes like this: “Evolution says humans descended from chimpanzees.” That is not what evolutionary biology claims. The evolutionary picture is a branching family tree. Humans and chimpanzees are not ancestor and descendant; they are evolutionary cousins who share a common ancestor in the deep past.
The same logic generalizes outward. All living creatures on Earth are related in a vast genealogical sense: a branching history of common ancestry over deep time. For many people, this is not depressing at all—it is a source of awe, a kind of cosmic kinship.
One of the most beautiful things about modern evolutionary science is that it does not rely on any single line of evidence. Comparative anatomy, fossils, biogeography, embryology, and genetics all converge on the same branching structure.
At the genetic level, you can compare DNA or protein sequences across species. The patterns of similarity and difference allow reconstruction of phylogenetic trees that match what we see in fossils and anatomy. You can also use calibrated rates of genetic change (with many caveats and error bars) to estimate when lineages diverged. The key point for this essay is not the exact date of every branching event—it’s the scale: the story is unimaginably older than the few-thousand-year timeframes implied by literalist readings of sacred texts.
Over the short term, evolution often looks like shifting trait frequencies within a species. Over the long term, divergence can accumulate until populations become reproductively isolated—meaning they can no longer interbreed successfully under natural conditions. That is speciation.
Speciation isn’t always a sharp on/off switch. In nature it often behaves like a continuum, with partial compatibility, hybrid zones, and gradual divergence. A famous teaching example is the Ensatina salamander complex, often discussed as a “ring species”: neighboring populations can interbreed around a geographic region, while populations at the far ends of the chain have diverged enough that interbreeding breaks down. This is one of those cases that makes the underlying idea vivid: species boundaries can be the end-point of gradual divergence, not a magical dividing line.
One thing I want to state explicitly (because people often get confused here): even if a behavior or trait has evolved, that does not mean it is morally “right,” or that we should accept it. Evolution describes how traits spread; it does not tell us what we ought to value.
Evolution also does not produce “perfect design.” It modifies what already exists. That is why we see compromises and oddities in anatomy—structures that work well enough, but are constrained by history. Humans are full of such examples. The moral point for me is simple: if we want to become more humane, we have to build culture—rules, norms, education, and institutions—that restrain some evolved tendencies and cultivate better ones.
A parallel kind of evolutionary logic shows up in culture. Dawkins coined the term “meme” to describe cultural units that replicate—ideas, phrases, rituals, styles—that spread, vary, and undergo selection in minds and communities.
Language evolution is a clean example. Languages branch and drift. Over time, groups can become mutually unintelligible. You can even reconstruct “family trees” of languages and infer common ancestors like Proto‑Indo‑European.
Religions, interestingly, also behave this way. Doctrines split. Schisms occur. New denominations form. Over time, groups can diverge so far that they no longer recognize each other as part of the same tradition, while each insists it is the “correct” branch. The “family tree” metaphor is not perfect, but it is illuminating: religions do not descend from heaven fully formed; they evolve within history.
And this matters psychologically: people sometimes treat their local, historically contingent version of a faith as if it were timeless and universal—when in reality it bears the fingerprints of cultural inheritance, conflict, politics, and geography.
Another important evolutionary idea is sexual selection: traits can spread not because they help survival directly, but because they affect mating success. The peacock’s tail is a classic case—beautiful, costly, and dangerous, yet selected for because it becomes desirable within the mating preferences of the species.
There is a long debate about what sexual ornaments “signal.” Some theories emphasize indirect signals of health and robustness. Richard Prum argues, persuasively in my view, that sexual selection can also reflect an evolving aesthetic culture—preference itself becoming a driver of biological change.
This is relevant to humans not because we are peacocks, but because it reminds us that biology is not only grim survival calculus. It includes courtship, display, aesthetic preference, and the strange feedback loops between bodies, brains, and culture.
Religiosity itself—along with the tendency toward mystical or paranormal belief—is not only cultural. Twin studies suggest that as people reach adulthood, genetic differences contribute meaningfully to individual differences in religious values and practices, while shared family environment tends to matter less than it does in childhood. Genetic differences account for a portion of the variability in religiosity, alongside development, culture, peer groups, and life events.
It’s also worth noting that intelligence and religiosity show a small-to-moderate negative association on average in some large literatures, particularly for more literalist or fundamentalist belief styles. This is not a claim about any individual believer (many brilliant people are religious), but about population-level tendencies and the cognitive styles that different religious environments reward or discourage.
A related trait dimension that matters here is schizotypy: a spectrum of unusual perceptual experiences, magical ideation, and pattern sensitivity. At mild levels it can correlate with creativity and a “poetic” mode of experience; at extremes it can shade into pathology. A mind more prone to vivid pattern-finding and unusual salience can be more vulnerable to interpreting internal experiences as external revelations.
And moral psychology matters too. Some people are more temperamentally drawn to moral foundations like loyalty, authority, and purity—dimensions that many religious communities strongly emphasize. Others prioritize harm reduction and fairness. These differences shape who feels “at home” in particular religious cultures, and who experiences them as suffocating.
I’m aware that this chapter is long. But I think the payoff is worth it: once you really absorb the logic and the evidence for evolution, it becomes hard to view literal creation myths the same way again. And yet—this is crucial—it does not require cynicism. For many people, it opens a door to a deeper, cleaner awe: a reverence for reality as it actually is, not as we once wished it to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment