Evolution Predicts: Benedict Will Dig Catholic Church's Grave

The Roman Catholic Church is falling victim to one of the best-understood aspects of Darwin's evolution – sexual selection. They're becoming a self-perpetuating failure.

Sexual selection is one of the most interesting and weird aspects of evolution. I'll explain using an example. Suppose some women, due to random genetic variations, just happen to like men with unusually large noses. Who will they marry? Probably men with large noses. Now think about the children of these unions: They'll inherit the large noses from their fathers, and they'll inherit their mother's fondness for large-nosed men. So at the next generation, and on down through their descendants, men with small noses won't have very good luck, and men with larger and larger noses will be favored.

We see this all the time in nature. The tailfeathers of peacocks and birds of paradise, the huge antlers of moose and the elaborate dances of fruit flies are all excellent examples. We even find it in ourselves. For example, a woman's shapely figure is purely "for show." Other great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas have no trouble producing milk without large breasts. And we men have genitals that are something like four times the size, relative to our body mass, of the other great apes. It's purely for show, and has nothing to do with our ability to have sex. The other apes do it with much smaller "equipment."

What does this have to do with the Roman Catholic Church? Everything.

An Atheist Wishes He Was Catholic

I wish I could be Catholic for a while. Then maybe I could raise my voice and actually be heard.

Right now the Catholic Church has a monstrous problem: The laity seems to be a flock of sheep, willing to follow the shepherd when he's keeping the wolves at bay, but when some of them see that same shepherd doing naughty things to his flock, they're ... well, they're sheep. They're not standing up for what's right. They're not raising their voices, marching on their churches, and condemning the vile deeds they see.

I suppose that makes sense. After all, Catholicism has, at its core, the belief that the Pope is actually God's personal representative here on Earth. It's hard to criticize the Pope, because it means God Himself made a mistake.

If any one thing brings the Roman Catholic Church to the ground, it will be the complacency of the laity. Priests, bishops, archbishops and the Pope are just men, with the same virtues and flaws as the rest of us. They do good deeds and they make mistakes. The problem is that laity, the common folks with common virtues and common sense, have been brainwashed all of their lives to overlook these flaws.