Darwin’s Name-It-and-Claim-It Scheme

Naming a mystery is not the same
as solving it. Here we meet the
secular equivalent of “abracadabra”

Name It and Claim It: Evolutionary Biology as Faith-Based Science
and a Secular Theourgia

by John Wise, PhD

In health-and-wealth televangelism, the “name it and claim it” doctrine operates on a magical premise: if you speak the desired reality aloud with sufficient faith, God is obliged to comply. It is a theology that substitutes wishful declaration for causal mechanism. The Greeks called it theourgia, and it involves the invocation of a divine name[1] (or a magic word of power) to manipulate reality to conform itself to human will.

To observe this doctrine at work in modern biology, take a look at a recent popular science press report:

Scientists found evolution repeating itself in the Galapagos Islands (ScienceDaily, 30 July 2026). In this instance, magical thinking is applied to a species of plants that live on islands famous for Darwin’s finches.

… researchers analyzed the complete genomes of every known Scalesia species. Their results showed that deeply lobed leaves evolved independently several times in separate branches of the Scalesia family tree….

“Even more surprising was that each time this trait evolved, it did so through different genes – even though all of them belong to the same biological system controlling leaf development,” says Bieker.

“This provides a clear example of parallel evolution: nature arriving at the same solution multiple times, but through different genetic pathways.” … Rather than relying on one gene to determine leaf shape, evolution appears to modify different parts of a larger genetic network. Those separate genetic changes can ultimately produce similar physical traits. The discovery gives scientists a clearer picture of how complex features can repeatedly emerge in unrelated populations or in different branches of the same evolutionary family.

So … random mutations managed to somehow cause the same phenotypical “solution” to a fitness puzzle taking entirely disparate genetic pathways. What are the odds? Wait, don’t ask that. Instead, call it “parallel evolution,” note its ubiquity as an adaptive strategy and … let’s move on, shall we?

Naming a mystery is not the same as solving it.

This is the secular equivalent of “abracadabra.” By invoking parallel evolution, the storytellers exempt themselves from demonstrating how blind, unguided cosmic-ray mutations could hit upon the same functional geometry through different genetic pathways over and over again. And to put a fine point on it, consider the time-frame:

Scalesia is a relatively young plant genus. Every species that exists today emerged during the past one million years. Despite that short evolutionary history, the plants have adapted to remarkably different habitats across the islands, including humid highland forests and hot, dry lowlands.

Like Galapagos finches over that same “short evolutionary history,” however, all the Scalesia remain Scalesia, just as those famed finches remained finches.

But what if we turn-up the temporal dial, say to 50 million years?

Demolishing Mount Improbable

In Richard Dawkins’ 1996 Climbing Mount Improbable, he offered a striking metaphor for Neo-Darwinian gradualism. Absolute biological complexity, he argued, is a sheer vertical cliff. You cannot jump to its top in a single leap without invoking a miracle of creation. But if you walk around to the back of the mountain, you find a gentle, continuous slope where millions of tiny, imperceptible, step-by-step mutations gradually carry life to the summit over vast spans of deep time. This, we are told, is the essence of “Darwin’s genius.”

Illustration of a gradual staircase to the summit of Mt. Improbable. (Credit: Illustra Media, Darwin’s Dilemma.)

It is a charming narrative, and I was taken by it for most of my life. But when scientists carefully measure observable nature at scale, that gentle slope turns out to be a fairy tale.

AI reveals explosive bursts in bird evolution (ScienceDaily, 29 July 2026). In a 2026 study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, a research team led by Jacob Berv deployed artificial intelligence to analyze over 170,000 skeletal measurements across 2,057 species of Passeriformes (songbirds), reconstructing roughly 50 million years of proposed body plan history.

If Dawkins’ smooth slope were real, the data should have revealed a steady, continuous drift of skeletal proportions over tens of millions of years. Instead, the authors found that passerine history is:

“dominated by rare, hierarchically nested bursts of phenotypic innovation near the origins of major taxonomic groups…”

Never attempt evolutionary science without completing the required meditation exercises.

Translating academic prose into plain English: songbird body plans did not climb a slow, steady ramp. They sat on flat plateaus of stasis for vast periods, interrupted by sudden, rapid explosions of structural change that occurred precisely during “intervals of increased climatic instability.” [Abstract]

This is where Professor Dawkins’ Neo-Darwinian “plausibility engine” breaks down.

The mathematical justification for unguided evolution relies on deep time acting as a buffer for slow continuity. If you have millions of years, the story goes, rare beneficial point mutations can slowly accumulate without disrupting the organism’s integrated anatomy. But if major structural changes occur in rapid, compressed bursts triggered by sudden environmental crises, that deep-time buffer disappears.

Under sudden climate upheaval, a population does not have millions of years to passively wait for cosmic rays to randomly construct complementary leg bones, wing ratios, and muscle attachments. If the internal capacity to adapt is not already present, if the developmental architecture does not already possess what the paper calls “modular trait covariation,”[2] the species simply goes extinct. Berv et al.’s documentation of passerine evolution consisting almost exclusively of sudden bursts followed by stasis, does not confirm Darwinian gradualism.

It forces evolutionary theory back to the face of Mount Improbable.

The gentle slope on the backside of the mountain is completely absent from the empirical record, leaving behind only the sheer vertical cliffs that unguided evolution is powerless to scale.

Cartoon by Brett Miller. Used by permission.

The Great Retcon

When an empirical study (or any collection of them) directly undermines the foundational mechanism of a paradigm, one of two things must happen: either the theory is revised to match the data, or the narrative is retrofitted to pretend the data was expected all along.

The evolutionary community routinely chooses option two. Name it and claim it. Never allow reality to get in the way of a good story.

In the press summary for the bird paper, lead author Dr. Jake Berv stated:

“This is really important for evolutionary theory because there’s a long history, going back 100 years, that predicts [that] the emergence of new groups… is often associated with an explosive burst of diversification… That’s what theory predicts, and that seems to be what we see in the data as well.”

It takes a breathtaking level of historical amnesia to claim that evolutionary theory has ‘predicted for 100 years’ that life diversifies in explosive bursts. For much of that century, strict Darwinian orthodoxy fought tooth and nail against sudden, abrupt jumps. When Eldredge and Gould introduced punctuated equilibrium in 1972, they ignited decades of fierce debate. Strict Neo-Darwinians like Richard Dawkins spent years fighting the implications of ‘saltationism,’ recognizing a fatal truth: if you strip away smooth, imperceptible continuity, unguided probability – Dawkins’ infinite gradualism – collapses.

Here, Berv casually rewrites a century of fierce debate. The very phenomenon that traditional Neo-Darwinism struggled to explain, abrupt structural jumps separated by stasis, is smoothly retconned into a “100-year-old prediction.”

Notice, too, the category error in their Nature Ecology & Evolution Abstract, which claims that “climatic variability may act as a recurring driver of phenotypic diversification.”

Environmental stress is an external condition, not a generative mechanism. A harsh climate can act as a sieve to eliminate non-adapted organisms, but it cannot write a single line of new genetic code, nor can it engineer an integrated skeletal body plan.

Whether operating over one million years in Galápagos daisies or an algorithmically simulated fifty million years in passerines, the evidence is clear:

Variation is real, but bounded. Organisms possess remarkable, pre-wired capacity for rapid adaptation via modular traits, pre-existing polyploid genetic reserves, and developmental network tuning.

But …

Macro-evolutionary novelty is absent. Neither 1 million years of Galapagos separation, nor 50 million years of passerine “evolution” transitioned out of established taxonomic groups.

Scalesia remained Scalesia; passerines remained passerines.

Physicist Richard Feynman famously warned: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

It is time to abandon secular theourgia and acknowledge the obvious: the exquisite, pre-wired flexibility of life points not to the unguided magic of deep time, but to the intentional design of the Creator.

Footnotes

[1] Hence the third commandment: “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.”

[2] This is the front-loaded genetic diversity so evident in the Scalesia study with which we opened this article.

John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.