Former Atheist Unimpressed by Snaky Evolution Claim

A story of “blindingly fast evolution”
reported for Burmese pythons shows
the flexibility of Darwinist thinking

 

‘An up-tempo version of Darwinian evolution‘: How a mega freeze in Florida may have caused Burmese pythons to evolve at a blindingly fast speed (Live Science, 21 April 2025). Science writer Stephen S. Hall claims that a cold snap in the Florida Everglades in 2010 caused non-native Burmese pythons to evolve “blindingly fast” to handle cold weather. He says, on the other hand, that they were “genetically predisposed” for this evolutionary change.

Guest response by Dr John D. Wise*

Paganism is alive and well in the scientific community!

Our evolutionary ‘first parents’ – Mother Nature (Gk. Gaia) and Father Time (Gk. Chronos) – are at it again, creating new and improved images of themselves before our very eyes!

The 2010 cold snap may have created a subset of pythons better able to survive cold temperatures — and thus better adapted to spread beyond the northern boundaries of its current range.

For what we are told is a mindless and purposeless process of accumulated random mistakes, it never ceases to amaze how ubiquitous the verb to create seems to be in the writings of evolutionary thinkers. Wasn’t the purpose of evolutionary thinking to free us from silly personifications of transcendent beings?

Fifteen years ago, a cold snap froze much of Florida’s wildlife to death — including many of the state’s invasive Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus). But in this excerpt from “Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World” (Gand Central Publishing, 2025), science writer Stephen Hall reveals that a subset of these pythons were genetically predisposed to survive the cold, setting the stage for rapid evolution that could help the invasive snakes spread further into North America.

In stunning confirmation of the central dogma of evolutionary theory, Stuff Happened in Florida and, as a result, Stuff Happened to Burmese pythons in Florida. Whaddya know? Evolutionary explanation carries the day again! An undeniable confirmation of the Stuff Happens law! It got cold in Florida; many Burmese pythons died, BUT some Burmese pythons lived!

See, creationists, how evolution works?

(Please don’t notice that we used “that” word in our opening blurb – it was a Darwinian Freudian slip.)

Stuff happened and Emperor Charlie has once again been confirmed, and this time stuff happened so fast that even you silly theistic cavemen can’t deny it!

We typically think of evolution as occurring over generally quite long timescales, on the order of several generations at the low end up to potentially thousands to millions of years. I think with a lot of the tools that we’ve developed more recently, especially in things like genomics, people have taken a harder look at how quickly evolution can occur… And generally, when you see such an extreme thing occurring, it really suggests that there’s very strong selection. Something’s happening. (Daren Card, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Edwards Lab at Harvard U).

And whenever “something’s happening,” we know how to explain it, don’t we?

At a time when roughly 40% of Americans do not accept the notion of evolution, the pythons that survived the Big Freeze in Florida appear to believe in it 100%. The take-home genomics message from the snakes is that evolution is real, it’s apparently happening at blindingly fast speed, and it argues that the 2010 cold snap may have created a subset of pythons better able to survive cold temperatures.

So … again we are taking the word of a serpent? How’d that go for us last time?[1]

Does lightning-fast evolution contradict long-age evolution? Of course not. Never mind the old saw that evolutionary processes are too slow to perceive at the human timescale (THAT was an explanation for another time), which is why so many unimaginative Neanderthals (that is, Creationists) reject it.

Now we understand that evolution happens both slowly and quickly!

The suggestion of rapid adaptation in the Burmese python population in Florida again contradicts our traditional notions of evolution as a glacial process of genetic selection and refinement that requires millennia, eons and geological epochs.

In an argument reminiscent of Dawkins himself, if you can’t imagine slow and steady as an evolutionary explanation, then imagine lighting fast and sudden! (Despite the fact that Dawkins eschews any form of saltation).

Stuff happened, therefore, evolution is true!

And don’t bother us with words like “contradiction” – we’re used to having our cake and eating it, too! Like any good Hegelian logician, when the evidence contradicts your position, ignore the contradiction and embrace the evidence as if it’s what you’ve been saying all along!

Dawkins would be proud!  In The Blind Watchmaker, he said:

The [explanatory] difference is one of complexity of design. Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.

That’s right, 1) blame common sense for standing by Occam’s razor, and 2) undermine the whole basis for scientific research – the reliance on reason in the face of evidence:

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.” (emphasis mine).

Hmmm … sometimes even Richard Dawkins, like Caiaphas, can say something true while intending something else altogether.

And Creationism is considered pseudoscience?

Who is teaching backdoor religion here?

Reviving pagan religion/mythology with anthropomorphic and articulate Burmese Pythons who “believe in” evolution “100%,” a Mother Nature (Gaia) who “selects” that which works best – and a Father Time (Chronos), who is now (apparently) so flexible that his role in (re)production is valued about as highly as any self-respecting feminist today values fatherhood, it is clear that we’ve come to a binary choice of faiths.

Given the explanatory power of the Judeo-Christian God, why would anyone “buy” the polytheistic pantheon being peddled by evolutionary biologists?

Reference:

[1] And lest I be accused of bringing the Bible in first, how’s this statement from the article itself?

By 2014, the number of python removals in Everglades National Park had returned to pre-freeze levels. In genetic parlance, the 2010 freeze was a “bottleneck event” — only a few squeezed through and survived. But the ones that did, in the biblical sense, went forth and multiplied.

---

*Dr John D Wise is known online as ‘The Christian Atheist’ and runs a podcast of the same name. He underwent a remarkable conversion to Christianity after 25 years as an atheist philosophy professor. His bio for an interview last year at ID the Future reads, “For 25 years, Dr. John D. Wise considered Darwinian evolution the most plausible explanation for life’s origin and development. But as he studied the latest evidence in molecular biology, genetics, astronomy, and other fields, he began to realize that modern science was confirming many of the predictions and arguments of intelligent design…. As an atheist professor, Wise was convinced that a Darwinian paradigm best explained the world around him. But a season of personal tragedy and loss brought about a crisis of worldview, and Wise’s materialist assumptions began to crumble. In this conversation, Dr. Wise discusses his journey into atheism and how the work of intelligent design scientists like biochemist Dr. Michael Behe convinced him to leave Darwin behind.” CEH is pleased to introduce Dr Wise to our readers. We hope to hear more from him and his wife Jenny in days to come.