There Is No Biological Imperative
Finches, Plinko, and Le Guin
As humans we’re predisposed to search for purpose, to define our place in the order of things. As popular ethics tend toward secularism, many people fill the purpose-defining niche in their souls with science, rather than religion. This is stupid.
The problem with “believing science,” as it goes, is that science does not function the way religion does; science itself is not something to be believed or disbelieved. Science is a process. It is a system of arriving at conclusions through evidence. Thus, when the headlines proclaim, “Science Says [X]!” or “According to Science, [Y],” it’s weird, because science “says” nothing. Science happens.
This is the same mistake creationists pretend to make. The theory of evolution is not something to be believed or disbelieved; it is a body of evidence from which, taking it to its logical conclusion, we can conclude that evolution occurs.
If science were something to be believed, it could also be disbelieved. I mean this in the sense that religious beliefs can, in some cases, be disproven. If a person believes that Earth is 6,000 years old because the Bible says so, but is then shown chemical, geological, and biological evidence that Earth is in fact over 4 billion years old, then they must either:
deny that evidence
admit that the Bible’s statement is not true, or
expand their definition of Biblical truth (ie, decide that the Bible’s truths are metaphorical, not physical).
Acceptance of the evidence for an older Earth requires the person to substantially change their own religious philosophy and, therefore, the way they form conclusions about the world.
However, if, by the scientific method, a person concludes that the Earth is 6,000 years old (by carbon-dating a 6000 year old bit of dirt, or something), but then is shown the evidence that Earth is in fact over 4 billion years old, that’s… just how science works. The conclusion changed, but the method by which they form conclusions does not have to change at all. The process of science is compatible with the change in belief.
That’s why shorthands like “Believe Science” do more harm than good. They push science into the niche of belief, making it seem as if disproving a scientific conclusion disproves science itself, when, in fact, disproof and doubt are natural features of science. Absolute certainty is indeed anathema to science. The whole point is to re-evaluate conclusions in the light of new evidence.
Because of this, science will never be able to give you certainty. Science is not a body of answers, but a method of asking questions. If you want something to tell you your purpose, pick up your book of choice, because science doesn’t have it for you. Science just might tell you how to figure it out for yourself.
But if you do not want to live your life by religion, or by existential philosophy, or by new-age hippyism — if you insist on filling the niche of purpose only with something evidence-based, something concrete, some facts to tell you what you’re supposed to do — then you’re lost. Sorry. You cannot have it. Reality will deny you certainty at every turn. And if you don’t want to be driven insane by the lack, you have no choice but to surrender.
You have got to give up the niche.
But, anyway, forget about all that… are you an alpha male or a beta cuck?
The Biological Imperative
Ask a devout person to describe life’s purpose, and they might say something about the will or design of God. Ask your average goes-to-Church-on-Christmas-and-Easter Darwin-believer and you may get something to the effect of eatin’ and fuggin’, or, to put it otherwise, “to survive and procreate.”
That’s the Wiktionary entry for “biological imperative,” anyway. I’ve heard the term thrown around. Biological — “in the reasoning of life” — imperative — “an essential thing.” So the hip GenXer jokes, we’re all just meat sacks dragging ourselves from pussy to grave, doing what evolution tells us to do. When someone acts selfishly, well, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. When one person attacks another because they have different-color skin, it’s because humans evolved to distrust anyone who doesn’t look like a member of the related in-group. When a parent leaves their disabled baby out in the cold to die, it’s simply survival of the fittest. When a man treats a woman as property, it’s because men evolved to protect and mate-guard, and women evolved to be a resource. It might not be nice, but it’s Darwin.
Wait — uh — huh?
So, the alpha male thing originated from studies of wolf behavior in captive environments. The conclusions were later found to be false for the species as a whole, and the guy who popularized the concept of the alpha wolf has since disavowed it. Often, the argument against the producers and consumers of “how to be an alpha male” and related manosphere content that relies upon the idea that there are certain biological social destinies for men — tied to reproductive success — is that the whole idea has no scientific merit. It’s bunk. Sure, okay, true. But, look out, because this argument concedes a very important point: it admits that if there were a scientific basis for these assertions, then it would be acceptable to use them as guidelines for our behavior. That if humans evolved to behave in a certain way, then we should behave in that way.
That evolution, as it were, is an ethical guidebook.
Now, this is a behemouth of an idea to refute, so I’m not even going to touch should right now1. Instead, I want to tackle the premise that anything evolved to do anything at all.
But, JM — you say — Don’t you believe Darwin? Survival of the fittest is a real thing. What about all those seeds and flowers, the finch for every niche?
No, no, put down the pitchfork. My issue is not with the idea itself, but how it tends to be framed temporally.
Bear with me a second. Let’s take the finches for an example. Here’s a simple question: what caused a particular finch, on a particular island, to have a beak that allows it to eat the particular seeds that grow on that island?
Saying “evolution caused the finch to have this beak” doesn’t really make sense. It’s like saying “evolution caused the finch to evolve.” The statement makes sense if I replace evolution with God — “God designed the finch to have this beak.” But does it make sense if I say natural selection? No, not really. Natural selection isn’t really a cause, just a process that defines the relationships between causes and effects; it didn’t topple any domino at the beginning of the chain that ended with our finch’s fashionable facewear. Did math cause 2+2 to equal 4?
So, excluding God — that’s a whole ‘nother essay — what did give the finch its particular beak? What caused it to fit the ecological niche created by the uneaten seeds on its island?
Well, personally… I think the thing that caused the finch to fit the niche was the existence of the niche.
See, evolution is not interchangeable with God. Evolution is not, by any understanding, a being, or a conscious thing. Ergo, unlike God, it is not a planning thing. It designed nothing2; it had no vision to realize.
Instead, evolution is a game of statistics. In fact, it’s Plinko.
Finch Plinko
Let’s break it down to the very basics. In the beginning, there is a thing. It doesn’t have to be an alive thing. It can be a rock, a planet, a language. There is an environment in which this thing exists. The thing interacts with the environment in various ways. Perhaps water runs over the rock and wears it away into sand; perhaps an asteroid crashes into the planet and shifts its orbit; perhaps the people who speak the language get conquered by another people and start to use their words. Material changes place, and our thing either continues to exist as itself in an altered form or, alternatively, ceases to exist.
Well, point of order: Does a rock cease to exist when it has been ground down into sand and spread all over the world? For the purposes of this article, yes. Is there a particular, markable moment where this process is fulfilled — where, in the moment before, the rock existed, and in the next, there is only sand? I don’t know. We’re dealing in words, and words are only a way to communicate the models humans make of the world, the inexact, zoomed-out patterns that we can comprehend3. If there is a point at which I can hold up this thing and you see a rock, then at that point it is a rock; and if there is a point at which I can hold up this thing and you see only a handful of sand, then it is not a rock (real JMRheads will recall here my point in a previous essay about the indistinct line between a new animal species and its most recent ancestor).
Merriam-Webster’s webpage containing the definitions of evolution is quite beautiful to me. It highlights the definition of evolution as a specifically biological process, but also has a few secondary definitions, including these:
Let’s take this further, though. Let’s say all rocks on the planet are either alpha or beta rocks, and no new rocks are ever formed. The alpha rocks do not get worn down over time. The beta rocks are brittle and will turn into sand if certain environmental conditions are met. If the world enters a new climate era in which all of the rocks are subjected to conditions sufficient to grind beta rocks down into sand, then those rocks will become sand and are therefore lost as rocks, and only alpha rocks remain in the world. The population of rocks in the world has evolved. Indeed, by this same mechanism, the whole world around you evolved to be in the state it’s in as you’re reading this.
The thing that sets life apart is not simply that it changes over time in response to interactions with the environment. Everything does that. Instead, it is a particular set of mechanisms which, in a way, counterbalance the natural formation and unformation of patterns in nature — which maintain sense against the tendency of wind and waves to turn things into sand. There is no process acting within the rock to keep it a rock; it is made and unmade by chance. Living things, meanwhile, use vast amounts of energy to sort molecules into particular patterns that get reproduced over and over again.
Life is unique, we might say, in its resistance to death.
How does this work? Well, life is made out of the same basic material as everything else — the dust of stars and other bullshit like that. That material gets put into a certain order, a pattern, through various series of chemical reactions. Those series are set off by the presence of strands of molecules that act as code, the way a bunch of ones and zeroes eventually caused these words to be projected on your computer or phone screen.
I feel the need to explain the very basics of this, because it’s in handwaving away the basics that some of the worst misconceptions crop up. So I want to make one point clear: due to the laws of physics and chemistry, if certain strands of molecules come together in a certain environment, they can start making particular patterns out of other molecules, and even replicating themselves (this is what people are on about when they say life started with amino acids in a puddle of primordial soup).
So I must also say, in the same breath as I spoke about life’s uniqueness, that there is not, in reality, a precise dividing line between what is alive and what is not.
The clearest example of this is viruses. The jury’s still out on whether viruses are actually alive4, which makes them a perfect step between rocks and finches in our journey through the mechanics of life. A virus is simply a little strand of molecular code, within a casing that allows it to get into a cell. A cell operates by reproducing and following its own strand of code, so once the virus is inside the cell, it can cause its code to be reproduced by the same mechanisms. Copies of that strand of code may then spread to other cells.
Notice that no step of this process requires intent or strategy. It simply requires a strand of molecules to exist that causes a set of chemical effects compatible with 1) getting in and 2) being replicated. There are a few ideas about how viruses came into being: maybe they were parasitic cells that eventually stripped down to the barest necessities, maybe they started out as the bits of RNA that bacteria pass back and forth between each other, or maybe they formed from complex molecules way back at the beginning of life on Earth.
Regardless, it’s easy to imagine other random strands of code being formed in the same way but not ending up able to hijack cells. And what happens to those other bits of code?
Well, they don’t become viruses.
We can say it this way, then: the viruses that exist are the strands of code that cause cells to replicate said strand of code. The code continues to exist because it causes itself to be reproduced.
Arguably, no organism benefits from this code being replicated, because a virus is arguably not an organism. It is simply a command in a package. And if the command “perpetuate this” ends up in a package that a cell picks up, the cell obeys. This requires no survival drive.
Fun fact: A significant chunk of the human genome is made up of viruses that integrated themselves into our genetic code and have been passed down from generation to generation for millions of years.
Now, when you hear “survival of the fittest,” you might picture some kind of tall, muscular ubermensch flexing and mewing as he dodges wild beasts in a hazardous landscape. But “fittest” doesn’t mean fitness in the sense of attractiveness or aura — I’ve yet to encounter a virus with washboard abs, but if you do, please get in contact. No, “fittest” just means that an organism is fit to its environment. It is able to continue to exist within the particular environmental parameters to which it is subject5.
Viruses exist in and are perpetuated through a biological environment, the host. Meanwhile, because copying a virus can do anything from wasting energy to causing death, the host puts certain pressures on the virus, such as developing an immune response. Similarly, the abiotic environment contributes its own pressures, such as an ambient temperature too low for viral particles to survive outside of the host.
Here’s where the virus is subjected to the same process as the rock. In the beta-rock destroying world, the population of rocks gets more alpha, because the beta rocks have all disappeared. If our virus is fit to reproduce itself in a host, it remains a virus; if it’s not, it becomes sand.
But how does something get fit?
If a rock gets destroyed, that’s it. No more rock6. But the virus’s whole thing is to be copied. Therefore, even if the original strand of code is destroyed, there are a bunch of little copies of it out in the world, persisting. Still, if all these copies were exactly the same as the original, and in the same environment that destroyed the original, they wouldn’t last long.
But that’s the other thing about life. It’s flexible over time.
There are two main components of this flexibility:
1) Generations
2) Change between generations
Part of the change between generations comes from organisms having survival advantages or disadvantages due to environmental factors acting on their traits, like with the rocks. But there are other mechanisms for change. There’s nonrandom mating, wherein a species slowly starts to think that huge horns or bright plumage are reeeeally sexy (or that seeming like a weak, edible prey item is the best way to get a female interested). Alternatively, there’s the diversification that happens when two separate populations get the chance to re-mingle.
How the changes actually happen, though, is the most crucial piece of this puzzle. What is the source of the forward momentum?
In fact, a species will change inherently between generations even in a void. This is due to the fundamental way that genetic code works.
Remember how I said DNA is just a set of molecules that causes other molecules to move around? Well, there are a lot of intermediate parts to that process. DNA itself doesn’t really do anything; it’s through interactions with proteins that DNA gets anything done, and a lot of what it does is cause other proteins to be synthesized.
We used to think that an absurd majority of the human genome was just “junk” DNA, because it didn’t seem to directly code for anything. However, more recently, we’ve realized that a lot of this so-called junk is actually essential, because it determines where and when the other bits of DNA get activated.
You may remember the general ideas of mitosis and meiosis from science class. Basically, a cell copies its DNA and then splits into more cells. Of course, DNA doesn’t just copy itself automatically — chemical changes happen within the cell, and certain proteins and enzymes get activated, and it’s those molecules that actually unzip the helix and start copying the code.
But this is not a perfect system! It’s complex work. None of these enzymes have degrees or anything. Stuff goes wrong all the time! Bits of code get deleted, or copied more than once, or even misread, so that the daughter cell gets a one where its mother had a zero (in our case, an A where it was supposed to get a C).
And this is the code that dictates the development of your entire body, so little errors can have huge consequences. Any trait you have — hair color, predisposition to diabetes, the location of your limbs — is determined, at least in part7, by a set of genes. Each “gene” is a particular stretch of code. New traits arise when that code changes.
Let’s take a really extreme example. There are a set of genes called homeobox genes. Among them is the memorably named sonic hedgehog gene (yes, that’s really what they called it). These genes code for proteins that determine whether other bits of the genetic code get expressed in a particular cell at a particular time. They’re especially important for development, determining when and where body structures are placed as an embryo grows.
Like, every cell in your body has within it your entire genome. Therefore, the code that says be a spleen, be an eye, be an arm is in every cell. The homeobox genes are the ones that determine which cells really are a spleen, an eye, or an arm. If you mess with them, you can get some pretty crazy results: for instance, one of the biggest experiments with these genes involved getting fruit flies to grow eyes on their legs.
The discovery of these genes is actually quite important to the case for evolution. One of the arguments against Darwin’s ideas was that lots of anatomical structures couldn’t be explained by gradual change over time. You can’t have half a wing! they said— meaning, an intermediate structure between a normal limb and a functioning wing (or gliding apparatus) would be useless, and therefore a waste of energy, so evolution would select against it. Nature keeps a very tight account of energy in, energy out, you see, so if a structure takes a lot of energy to develop and maintain, then, in an environment where energy is at a premium — which is most of them — that structure will recede over time. That’s what happened to the cave-dwelling fish and salamanders who lost their eyes.
However, with the discovery of homeobox genes… well, we don’t think it’s likely that a random marsupial will be born with fully-feathered angel wings, but it’s plausible that, say, a limb gets put in a new place, or skin stretches between the limbs in a new way, such that while you don’t get half a wing, you might get most of a flying squirrel.
A virus, to bring it back down, might get a different type of protein on its envelope that helps it evade a cell’s immune response.
Sometimes errors in the copying of DNA will cause horrible diseases, or catastrophic failures that mean the organism never even fully develops (more than 50% of first-trimester miscarriages are due to genetic anomalies in the fetus). Sometimes they result in a beneficial new trait. Most of the time, they do nothing at all.
Essentially, there is a low level of mutation that’s always going to happen within a species. This is called genetic drift. Even if the environment stays exactly the same and no pressures act on the species, it will still change over time, simply due to the aggregation of random mutations.
But we’re not in a vacuum. The environment is still here, or did you forget our friendly rocks? The traits arising from an organism’s genes interact with the world around it. Sometimes the world gets a little easier because of those traits, and sometimes it kills you immediately and badly. And sometimes it thinks, hot damn.
The latter is actually hugely important to evolution. It’s all well and good to mutate passively over time if you’re a virus, but us multicellular organisms are complicated, and it takes a long time to see any change in our lineage if we rely on the simple genetic randomizer. In fact, we get a lot farther if we work together. Variation is the key to adaptation; if a population has a large variety of traits, then some members are more likely to adapt to environmental change or survive an upheaval and continue the lineage. If daughters were exactly the same as their mothers, we wouldn’t be much better off than the rocks.
And so we stir up the genetic soup by using other people’s DNA to make our kids.
To give you an idea of how strong the survival advantage is: most multicellular eukaryotes (us) reproduce sexually. Sexual reproduction requires that an organism only passes on half of its genetic code. Half, instead of all of it! Think back to our viruses — the strand of code that endures is the one that propagates itself. And yet, it seems that the strands of code that result in an organism that reproduces sexually have edged out the ones that don’t in the multicellular arena. They’ve propagated themselves all over the place!
Even some asexual organisms have come around on the idea of partnership. Bacteria, for instance, shuffle their genetics around by exchanging little packets of genes with each other8.
Sure, sometimes sex results in weird traits, like burdensome horns or having to get eaten in order to reproduce. But it seems the variation is worth it. Plus, if organisms choose mates that are especially fit to their environment in some way — or, at the very least, if mating requires that an organism survive at least long enough to mate — then that barrier itself can put its finger on the scale in terms of population fitness.
Natural selection appears to have selected for sexual reproduction… which has then, itself, become a form of natural selection.
I do want to pour one out for the male praying mantises and the male black widows. There has been a lot of ink spilled over whether sexual cannibalism evolved because the male’s nutrients benefit the survival of his offspring, or whether it’s a rejection from the female, but — although I’m no expert — I think the simplest explanation is that, if a bug has survived by being an apex predator that kills and eats any other bug that moves in her immediate vicinity, it makes sense for her to kill her mate. This doesn’t seem to be an existential issue, a question of whether the male’s life has meaning, whether he evolved only to die, whether the female is evil. It’s simply that this line of code has been propagated by coding for a body pattern with maxxed out kill stats, and the advantage from that is not outweighed by whatever disadvantage may come from cannibalizing males when they happen to come calling.
Did the black widow evolve to eat her mate? No, she evolved to be a black widow.
What I mean to show with all of this discussion is that evolution is a numbers game. It’s statistics, it’s gambling. Mutation creates variation. Then, natural selection acts upon that variation. A change in the genetic code may result in a new trait, and if that trait means the virus is more likely to get into a host cell, or the finch can eat the seeds of a particular flower, or the marsupial can now glide from tree to tree, then the code is more likely to be propagated.
Therein lies the plinko: the disc (a genetic code) is dropped (progresses over successive generations); it bounces off the pegs (natural selection and mutation); and it ends up in a particular bucket (a current form). Most of the buckets are “dead.” But some of are “virus” and some are “flying marsupial” and one of them is “us.”
Because, though we’ve dressed it up a little, the same principles that act on the virus also act on us. The thing that continues to exist is the thing that causes itself to continue to exist.
The mechanism of continuation is change. So evolution, like gravity, is simply a direction of change. “Live,” said the code, and so we live. “Fall,” said gravity, and so we fall. The satellite falls to earth because the Earth exists; the finch changes to fit the island because the island exists.
So it makes no sense to look to evolution for our purpose, because evolution tells us to do nothing, causes nothing. It is simply the relationship between the present and the past. If the plinko disk falls into one bucket, evolution is the path it took to get there. There is no room in it for the future. Life as we know it, then, is only the output of a statistical machine.
Approaching the Innermost Cave
So… is that it? Is that the end? There’s no point to life, just a random effect of physics? Life is simply the endless iteration and propagation of little commands that say, “Iterate. Propagate.” — Is that what I’m saying?
I’ve even taken the meaning from the propagation and iteration; it no longer matters if you’re eatin’ and fuggin’. To say that the purpose of life is reproduction is to say that the purpose of a car is to put gas in it. It does not matter in the slightest to evolution whether you have children, whether you behave as a man or a woman “should,” whether you follow your impulses or listen to reason, whether you drink raw milk and eat paleo or live off hot cheeto ramen — because nothing matters to evolution. It expects nothing of you. It tells you nothing. It is simply the way you came to be what you are.
A string of molecules making another string of molecules. It’s what the molecules do; it’s not what they’re for.
Good God, am I a nihilist? Am I trying to make you a nihilist right now?
Practical Applications: My New Cat and Le Guin
I adopted a cat from the shelter last month. He’s a six-year-old tom named Buoy, and he has a rather endearing expression of permanent misery.
Getting a new pet is a gauntlet of borrowed grief. I loved Buoy the most out of all the cats I met at the shelter, and so, by committing to keep him for the rest of his life, I have signed myself up to deal with the death of a thing I love very much. Buoy’s life will be short, and over its course I will pay quite a bit of money to keep him fed and littered and healthy. He doesn’t serve any ecological function besides eating canned meat and being an environment for microscopic organisms like the rest of us; in fact, his species is highly invasive in North America, and in a conservation sense he really he ought not to be here. So I, an optimist only by reason and a pessimist by nature, have to wonder what the point of him is, and why I signed myself up to pay so much for him in money and tears.
Buoy’s neutered, so by the biological imperative line of thinking he’s a dead end. He’s not having any more kittens, and he’s not ensuring the survival of related kittens. I’m also pretty sure Buoy doesn’t know about God, and I don’t believe in one9, so that’s also off the table.
Buoy is very playful and thinks it’s fun to attack my feet, even though I don’t think it’s fun. When I asked the vet about this proclivity, she said he might have a “high predatory drive.” If we could ask Buoy to defend his acts of violence, he might say, “I evolved to hunt small moving things. Attacking your feet is my life’s purpose.”
Recently, I finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Malafrena, a beautiful book about revolutionaries in a fictional 19th-century European country. The book’s climax is a failed insurrection in the capital city, which is violently put down; after giving years of his life to the cause, three as a journalist and two in prison, our main character returns to his home in the countryside. And that’s it.
When I finished the book I was frantic; it felt vitally important; I felt like I’d had a momentous revelation, but simultaneously that there had been no revelation in it at all, that to frame it as revelatory would reduce it somehow. I messaged Zeke, who’d recommended the book to me, but I barely knew what to say. I had to make sense of it. I pulled out my journal and scribbled this:
I’ve finished Le Guin’s Malafrena. It was a more mature thought perhaps than I’ve ever had in my life: ‘Of course it is pointless. Of course it is not pointless.’ Futile, perhaps, but not pointless.
I am writing an essay for Dead Horse arguing against the use of evolution as moral evidence; that nothing evolved “to” be anything, that there is no prescription and no meaning inherent in the shape in which life has come to be. Yet there is a line to walk here; I am no nihilist.
I worry about my parents dying. I worry about the last words I say to them each time they leave. I worry that I failed Gram because I did not give her true company in the last year of her life. But it’s immaterial, whether an end is neat or noble. The end is not the crisis of meaning. Things matter because they happen.
We are alive because we continue to be alive. Things matter because they happen.
Organisms take certain shapes because those are the shapes that enable themselves to exist within a certain time and space. So do societies. So do people. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, typing on my laptop with my clever human fingers. The fingers enabled us to crack nuts and make tools; now we’ve invented a laptop to suit them. Buoy is biting my toes again. I understand why he does it, and still I pull my foot away and start waggling a shoelace at him instead, because I’m trying to teach him not to bite, so we can exist a little more easily together.
Nevertheless I’m quite happy that evolution has brought Buoy to his shape, and me to mine. I’m quite excited to see what we do with them.
In future articles, I’ll discuss the use of natural/unnatural as moral judgments, and also discuss how these ideas apply to gender specifically, citing examples from the science of animal behavior.
Except in the sense that the waves lapping at the land design the shoreline, which may be true in a poetic sense, but not a semantic one.
If I’m reading him right, then this is the logic Carlo Rovelli sets out about entropy in his lovely book The Order of Time. You can access that book on the Internet Archive here, and the section I’m referencing begins at the bottom of page 22. Here, he discusses how the zoomed-out nature of human perception influences our experience of reality. It includes the notable insight: “If we think about it carefully, every configuration is particular, every configuration is singular, if we look at all of its details, since every configuration always has something about it that characterizes it in a unique way. […] It follows that the notion of certain configurations being more particular than others makes sense only if I limit myself to noticing only certain aspects. […] Entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between. Heat, entropy, and the lower entropy of the past are notions that belong to an approximate, statistical description of nature.”
If a definitive line could be drawn between “life” and “unlife”, then viruses would be as close to it, on one side or the other, as anything can get.
If our muscleman lives in a place where tall muscular people are the favorite prey of giant carnivorous birds, then he is no longer the fittest.
:(
It’s not nature vs nurture; everything about you is caused by the interaction between your genetics (nature) and environment (nurture), with each having more or less weight depending on the trait.
An odd way to shake hands, but then again I’m not a bacterium.
Although, as I drove to the shelter to pick him up, I saw graffitied on a lightpole a nonsense phrase which has rattled around in my head ever since: GOD’S CRAZY ABOUT YOU!