A Nigerian-British Scientist Explains How Faith Faded and Curiosity Won

Host Clive Aruede sits down with microbiologist and former recording artist Tavian Oladapo for a wide-ranging conversation on faith, science, and deep time. Tavian traces his journey from devout Nigerian upbringing to godlessness, sparked by a teenage deep-dive into scripture, and explains why evolutionary biology deserves a bigger place in the classroom. The pair dig into ancient African humanist ethics, ghost populations in the human genome, the case against de-extinction, and why malaria remains the scientific breakthrough Tavian wants most in his lifetime.

Key Topics

• Tavian's path from music industry to microbiology, and away from religion
• Why schools underteach evolutionary biology
• Fossils that changed how Tavian sees prehistoric life
• The ethics of de-extinction
• The odds of life on other planets
• Humanist ethical traditions in pre-colonial Africa
• What ancient DNA reveals about human origins
• The evolutionary arms race between malaria and its hosts

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🎶 Music: Icy by Jeff Kaale

Transcript

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Welcome and Tavian's journey from Music to Microbiology

Clive Aruede 0:01

Hello everyone, my name is Clive, and welcome to Secular Sankhofa, the podcast of the Association of Black Humanists. It's a space where we speak boldly, think freely, and live consciously. Here we have honest and unapologetic conversations about race, belief, power, and liberation from a black and godless point of view. Our guest today is Tavian Oladopo, a Nigerian as well as, I would imagine, a British citizen, a dual nationality like me. Welcome, Tavian. Thank you, Clive. Thanks for talking to us today. Thank you for asking me. Very welcome. So please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got from where you are, because like most Nigerian families, I guess you were brought up and raised religious. And how you got from where you were to where you are today?

Tavian Oladapo 0:57

Well, professionally, I'm currently working in microbiology at uh Imperial College Healthcare. My professional history started in the music industry, where I was a singer-songwriter, and I was signed up to Polydor Records for a couple of years as the lead singer of a group called Hysteria. I then went on to do backing vocals for a few known names and stuff, and then doing some solo work. Gave that up, went into the mobile phone business for a little while, gave that up before I ended up working in science. So that my introduction to the scientific world came a bit late from a professional point of view, anyway. I am obviously a British citizen of Nigerian heritage. My parents took me to Nigeria when I was six, and I spent the next 13 years being educated and immersing myself in the culture of my country. Like I said, I then went to study in the United States before I ended up coming back to England. My

Losing faith through reading scripture

Tavian Oladapo 1:56

journey away from religion was quite a strange one in the sense that I decided to read the Bible in its entirety at the age of 15, because I had some questions of my own, because I was raised as a Christian. And so I wanted to understand, because my dad gave me a book about the crusades, and I wanted to understand the battle between the Christians and the Moors in Spain at the time. Because I was of the impression that they supposedly served the same God. So I was just curious. I wanted to know why these people fighting each other if they claim to worship the same God. I'm going to go and read the Bible because I'm sure they've just misunderstood God's message, and this is the work of humans. Well, that kind of opened a can of worms, really. Because once I began to read the Bible, there were just so many things that made no sense to me from a compassionate and logical point of view. And after nine months, I was confused. I was actually quite confused, quite upset, because I thought maybe I'm missing something. So I proceeded to read it again. And two years after that, I just concluded that based on what I understood at that time of the mythology of different regions in the world, that the Abrahamic religion is just a regional mythology that has somehow become a worldwide religion through the machinations of people. And obviously, one should begin to understand the story of the Roman Empire and the influences that Rome had on Western Europe. Well, Europe as a whole, to be honest, it begins to make sense.

Clive Aruede 3:25

Yeah. For me, these are just stories, you know, which uh specific to, well, it must have started off as being very specific to one set of people. Yes. And then it spread. It spreads like wildfire down the years. Um, so of course, it was promoted by, as you said, the the Romans, you know, who were the world superpower at the time.

Tavian Oladapo 3:46

And so here we are. I was just going to add that once you study religion in the ancient Near East, you begin to understand the environment in which these mythologies were birthed and promoted and how they evolved over time. We now have very good evidence that the ancient Israelites themselves originally subscribed to a pantheon of gods. And as a matter of fact, the god Yahweh is not the original god of the ancient Israelites. It is actually El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon. And so you you then begin to understand that they they kind of just they were making it up as they go along. And in fact, Yahweh was a later addition to their mythology, if you like. And so just like any other religion of the world, it is specific to a region, and then it just evolved.

Clive Aruede 4:35

And they borrowed a lot from the religions around them, from the myths and mythology.

Tavian Oladapo 4:40

Of course. I mean, on my channel, we're c we're currently working on an animated video about the Tower of Babel, which we call, we're gonna call the Tower of Babel, which kind of explains how the story doesn't really make sense and what we know about the evolution of language and its origins in in Africa. But anyway, that's a story for another day.

Clive Aruede 4:59

Absolutely. We'll we'll come round to all these other bits and pieces uh as time goes on. But for today, thanks for introducing yourself. And as you said, you are now doing science as your main uh occupation.

Why schools must teach evolutionary biology better

Clive Aruede 5:13

So, what science uh topic do you wish that schools would teach better?

Tavian Oladapo 5:19

Biology, yeah. Evolutionary biology, if I'm being even more specific, because I think that we need to understand that we are inextricably linked to the natural world. We are not separate from it. And because I work in microbiology, I understand the kind of the balance that we share with other organisms in the world. So, say for example, the human body, we are literally an ecosystem on legs. So there are bacteria, there are viruses, there are archaea and fungi that call our body home. And without some of these microorganisms, we could not exist. We just a little plug on my channel again. We did an episode called Walking with Microbes, which is kind of like a take on walking with dinosaurs, where we explain some of the microorganisms that live on the human hair and on the human face. We are part of the natural world, and I really do think that we really don't teach biology as well as we should. To to let people understand that we are part of the of the natural world, we are not separate from it, and we actually depend on a lot of organisms of the natural world in order to exist, and that we are just a latest arrival in the grand scheme of things of animals that once called our planet home.

Clive Aruede 6:34

Well, the the the thing with uh science as well is the way they teach it in schools is like it's all sorts of different blocks of knowledge, you know. You have chemistry over here and physics over there and you know, biology over in the other place. Whereas really and truly it's all about finding out how does the universe work, how does how does life work, how does the world work, you know, and it it there's there's so much scope for putting it all together and teaching it as a package rather than splitting everything up. I mean you take the evolution, like you said, evolution only really comes into play once life has got started. But some people seem to think that that explains the start of life. It doesn't do that.

Tavian Oladapo 7:14

Well, it doesn't, and I tend to think sometimes that is done deliberately in order to just muddy the water. Yeah, absolutely.

Clive Aruede 7:20

So thinking about your own personal interests, I know you're very, very much uh interested in the fossil record and back in the prehistoric times, Cambrian, Precambrian, and and so on and so forth. So, what

Impressive fossils & mass extinction survivors

Clive Aruede 7:35

what would you say is some of the coolest or best fossils you've ever seen, or a museum where you've seen a very good display where you you would recommend people to go and have a look?

Tavian Oladapo 7:45

Wow. Okay, so dinosaurs get most of the press because of pop culture and all that. But I actually find a lot of other prehistoric animals amazingly fascinating. Because we now understand where dinosaurs came from and we understand that there were other prehistoric animals that preceded dinosaurs, and in fact, the the fossil history of crocodilians, for example, who are cousins of dinosaurs. Just going to your question about what was the most amazing fossil that I saw. For years I'd read about the fossil of a prehistoric crocodilian called Sarcosuchus. I knew that it was in the Natural History Museum in Paris, and I knew that this thing was supposed to be monstrous. I mean, imagine a 40-foot-long crocodilian. And so I went in 2019 with a couple of my friends. One of my friends, he's Frenchie, he's a geologist, and we went to see this um this specimen. And Clive, I have to tell you, I was like a kid in a candy store. I was excited, I was sweating, and all I kept saying is, oh my god, which is kind of ironic considering I don't believe in God. Oh my god, it's effing huge. I was just so blown away with the size of the thing that apparently lived alongside dinosaurs. And so for me, that was one of the most exciting fossils that I'd ever seen. I mean, obviously, there are others that I've seen in the Natural History Museum in England, but that for me was the top. That for me was the most excited I'd been because you see modern crocodiles and you think, yeah, okay, they're big. And I wouldn't want to run into one in a dark alley. But I mean, Sarcosuchus was just immense. It literally made modern crocodiles look like, you know, little lizards or something. And so for me, that that was a top. I've obviously I've seen loads of dinosaurs in in through my time, but Sarcosuchus was the one that really kind of got my juices flowing, if you like.

Clive Aruede 9:44

It's it sounds like a monster. But I must say though, I'm uh always a little bit uh curious how some animals manage to survive, you know, Chicksube um incidents when you know the I'm wondering how crocodiles managed to survive because they're fairly big creatures. So a lot of the bigger creatures died out.

Tavian Oladapo 10:02

I think it had a lot to do with the ones that were semi-aquatic. So the because there were uh the crocodilian family is a lot bigger than people people realize. Um I mean, we now have a few. In antiquity, in prehistory, there were hundreds of different crocodiles. There were terrestrial crocodiles that never went in the water, there were vegetarian crocodiles that only fed on plants, there were bipedal crocodilians, there were all the hundreds of different crocodilians. Some of them didn't even look like the crocodilians that we excuse me, that we are, that we see today. So I I think a lot of it had to do with size, and a lot of it also had to do with the ones that were semi-aquatic. Because even dinosaurs, I mean, most of them perished, but some of them survived, which is why we now have birds. And so the same thing applied to crocodiles. Some of them, the some of the family survived and then gave birth to the modern crocodiles that we see today. And that's as as much as I understand the reasons why some of these animals survive. But what is it, 75% of land animals perish during the Cretaceous? It's it's extinction is a fascinating thing that I've always been really interested in because there's there's been more than one. But anyway, so that's that's the answer to that question, as far as

Should we bring back extinct speices?

Tavian Oladapo 11:15

I know.

Clive Aruede 11:15

Yeah, but if the scientists could clone one of these extinct species, should they do it? Is it uh ethical thing to do?

Tavian Oladapo 11:24

No, I don't think so because I think the environment that you are trying to introduce these animals to is most probably going to be alien, excuse me, to what they're used to. And more importantly, we've done a terrible job of looking after the fauna that we happen to live with. So, what would be the point of of bringing others into existence? No. I I think is it ethical? No, because I I don't think we've we've been the custodians of the natural world that we should be. And a lot of that has a lot to do with the fact that we think everything here has been put here for our purposes. And religion plays a massive role in that. Of course. So so no, I would love to see them, you know, I would love to see pterosaurs flying in the sky. I would love to see numerous different species of dinosaurs and pariahosaurs and ietosaurs. There are so many prehistoric animals uh though that I would like to see. There were rhinos, hornless rhinos, much, much bigger than elephants, uh called Paraseritherium. I would love to see those. I would love to see terror birds. But would I kind of sanction the idea of us being able to? I I don't even think such a thing is even doable, to be honest with you. They won't be quite what they were.

Clive Aruede 12:33

No.

Tavian Oladapo 12:33

No. Do you know what I mean? They won't, they they won't be quite what they were, that what they were. They would be a mishmash of us borrowing from the whatever we can extract from their DNA, if we can even get that, and then obviously merging them with a modern relative, and then it's not quite the same.

Clive Aruede 12:50

Yeah. So anyway, we went from dinosaurs, then you had the rock that fell on in Chicksalube and wiped it pretty much wiped everything out and well, almost almost everything, yes. Yeah, almost. So that but but for that, perhaps we'd never have got the rise of the mammals, which uh and we are one of you know, we've we eventually evolved.

Is there life on other planets?

Tavian Oladapo 13:12

Yeah.

Clive Aruede 13:12

So if we went to another world altogether, we got into our starship and we went to another what do you think intelligent alien life exists somewhere?

Tavian Oladapo 13:22

Well, why not? We're here, and if you if you play a numbers game and you look at the the amount of star systems with with planets, and we now know that the building blocks of life can be found all around us in the cosmos. They've been found on other planetary bodies. So what is and obviously there's the idea that maybe the building blocks of life were brought to this planet on a on an asteroid or a comet. Who knows what happens somewhere? I mean the numbers are astonishing. You know, hundreds of billions of stars with with with gargantuan amount of planets in in in these star systems. They would be surprised if there is not intelligent life on other planets. Or just life. You know, it may not even be intelligent, but just just life. So I think I think it's highly likely. I think it's highly likely. I think the numbers, the numbers would suggest that it is a strong possibility. Now, what kind of life it is, I don't know. You know, I I really wouldn't want to guess whether it's intelligent or not.

Clive Aruede 14:24

Yeah, um the the the numbers are incredible. Astonishing. And the distance between star systems, you know, is just it's insane.

Tavian Oladapo 14:36

What is it that the nearest our nearest stellar neighbor is uh Proxima Centauri? Yes. 4.2 light years, about I think it it works at about 26 trillion miles.

Understanding the universe keep ego in check

Tavian Oladapo 14:49

We can't get there, not with current technology, anyway. And so the distance is and that's just our nearest neighbour. It's just I mean Yeah. Anyway, so so the idea that you know it was all created for us especially and we were put on this planet by the divine genie because he loves us. Yeah, it's just nothing but just our ego, you know, waving to us in the mirror.

Clive Aruede 15:10

Yeah, it's a it's about time we put some of those ideas out of our heads, you know, and uh decide decide to be a little bit more grown up in our thinking, you know, because I think all those ideas were in the infancy of our species, as people like to say, and you know, it's about time we grew up and forgot about all this uh everything was made for us.

Tavian Oladapo 15:30

We're not quite there yet because um think of it like this dinosaurs were on this planet for 150 million years, you know, non-avian dinosaurs anyway. They're like what 300,000 years? We're we're still we're still pooping in our nappies So to speak, as a species. Yeah, we've done amazing stuff with technology and stuff, but when you think about the time frame of uh different, you know, animals having existed on this planet, still we haven't even begun to crawl. Which is fascinating and humbling in equal measure. And because we come from the fearful infancy of our species, as you said, where we needed to try and make sense of the world we live in, and therefore, because it's scary, it's unpredictable, and you never know what's round the corner, we needed a you know celestial nanny. And a lot of people still need this celestial nanny because life is scary quite a lot of the time. And I don't think our species is even close to getting anywhere near being able to say, okay, you know what, I'm lucky to be alive. It's not through any divine will, if you like, and I want to face life squarely on its own terms. I don't think we're ready for that yet. I mean, look at what's happening in in Africa, for example. We're we're still, you know, fundamentally a very, very, very religious people. And a religion that's not even our own. Yeah, I mean, what an irony.

Clive Aruede 16:53

Yes, it's it's unfortunately is holding us back. That's my thinking. I agree. Yeah, as long as we um as a people prioritize all that religious stuff, it really is holding us back. It kills our curiosity.

Tavian Oladapo 17:05

That's yes, that's the one thing that really bugs me is that it stops you from asking pertinent questions about our existence and even just to solve certain problems.

Ancient African humanism and morality myths

Tavian Oladapo 17:16

Just to kind of digress a little bit, people often talk about morality in the same sentence as the Abrahamic God. And I always say to them, the idea that we did not know what was right or wrong in Africa before we were introduced to Christianity or Islam is insulting. And if anything, if anyone who studies African ethics, just a little bit, just a cursory look at uh ethical philosophies in African societies, you will be amazed. We're talking about the humanist society right here. The fundamental principles that underpinned most African ethical philosophies was humanism. Yes, it was humanism, you know, the idea that what's good for the the collective good and and the golden rule, if you like. We have a saying where I come from in Nigeria, which is is kind of like uh iwariri le shohe niyo, which essentially means a good character is a man's treasure. Yes, you know, and it's a very, very old adage. We we we knew. We knew that how you how you interact with your fellow human beings and what's good for all is is the thing that holds a community together until somebody comes along with us. This other ideology says, Oh no, no, you have to believe these really ridiculous stories, and that's what tells us about your character and your virtue. And if you don't believe that Yahweh is the God of Israel and Jesus' son came and and got nailed to a piece of wood and died for your sins, therefore you're not a good it's it. I'm sorry, it's insane.

Clive Aruede 18:41

Yeah, totally, totally. No, we we had uh advanced ideas, you know. You you look at the concept of, and it's not only that concept, but concept of Ubuntu in, you know, South and Eastern Africa. I mean, this is uh a very fantastic uh concept and idea that is really we should be trying to spread throughout the world, you know. This this this is not something that somebody has to come and tell you.

Tavian Oladapo 19:04

Here's the interesting thing, Clive. Christopher Hitchens in his lifetime would always say that if the ancient Israelites did not know right or wrong, if you take the story to be truthful when they left allegedly Egypt and proceeded to go to the the the foot of Mount Sinai, they would have never got there. But I even go further back than that. If human beings didn't know what was right from wrong before they left Africa, they would have never been able to colonize the rest of the world. It wouldn't have happened. I'm not I'm not saying they were paragons of virtue by any stretch of the imagination, but they understood that we have to do this as a group. And so the the ones that originally left would have left as a group, and as they dispersed among, you know, amongst themselves, it would have been a cooperation, if you like. They had to cooperate. Do you know what I mean?

Clive Aruede 19:48

Yeah, absolutely. But you have to to make any progress because we as a species we don't have you know very sharp teeth or big teeth and we don't have claws and stuff like that. Our superpower is cooperating with other human beings to make progress in life. So the idea that you need somebody, some skyddy person to come and tell you is just ridiculous. I mean, uh are they suggesting that people used to wake up in the morning and say, Well, which of my neighbors am I gonna kill today?

Tavian Oladapo 20:18

Exactly. I mean, there there were probably people who thought like that, you know, the big your psychopaths and so on, you know. Yeah, there were probably a few. But admittedly, there were most people were were just decent people trying to survive in a harsh environment, and they realized that they needed the cooperation of their neighbors. Our body is a model of cooperation between us and organisms that live on us. We can't even digest all our food by ourselves. We need to cooperate with the bacteria in our gut, some of them to to give us some of some of the stuff that we need, you know. So it's it's all out there.

Clive Aruede 20:49

No, it's uh it's it's amazing what uh you learn or you pick up uh from science researchers,

Our origins are more complex than we thought

Clive Aruede 20:55

you know, that there's more foreign DNA in our bodies, for instance, than human DNA, that kind of thing, you know.

Tavian Oladapo 21:01

Well, not more foreign DNA. I mean, here's the thing. We used to think uh Homo sapiens, special species created by, you know, the celestial daddy, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we now know that actually we are a hodgepodge of different species of humans. So we now understand that at one time there were probably around six different species of humans living together at the same time. And our even our history in Africa now shows that even in Africa there were all these different hominins running around and we're digging up fossils. And we we used to think, okay, when we discovered that there were different hominins running around, we thought, oh, they were different to us, we couldn't have interbred. We now know that we did. We now know that virtually all humans retain snippets from archaic hominins, and that includes Africans. They there used to be the thing that they will say non Africans have Neanderthro DNA, Africans do not, but we do, we just have a smaller proportion of Neanderthro DNA. Because the humans that left Africa and went to Europe and parts of Asia who met Neanderthals and interbred with them, some of them came back to Africa and introduced the Neanderthal DNA into Africans. But what's even more interesting is even in Africa, there is evidence of all these different ghost populations, in some cases where we can see the DNA, but we don't actually know what species it belongs to because we haven't found a fossil to go along with the DNA. And I'm sure you're familiar with the Ihueliru skull in Nigeria. Not quite sure about that one. Could you elaborate a bit? It's an archaic fossil that was discovered in Undustit in Nigeria in 1965. And it is human but not like us human. It's an archaic human. And the date says that it was only about 13,000 years old. It looks much older, but the dating says that this hominin, this human, was 13,000 years old. So that would suggest that up until 13,000, 12,000 years, there was still some of these archaic humans roaming around. And it's fascinating with all the different fossils that we have in from parts of Africa, all the Australopithecens that we have, all the early human fossils, Homo rectus, Homo habilis. It's an incredible story that we are just what's left of a once diverse and and numerous family. And I I find that quite humbling.

Clive Aruede 23:22

Yeah, and even we didn't nearly make it because I think we were down to about 5,000 individuals at one time.

Tavian Oladapo 23:29

You were talking about the Toba eruption. Yeah. Yeah, the the idea that 70,000 years ago, I think it was, that there was a massive eruption and the human population would dwindle to, I think it was less than 10 or 5,000. I mean, I've heard that, but then why is that so surprising? Neanderthals are gone. Denisovans are gone. All the other members of our homogenus are gone. And who's to say we might not even still go that way?

Clive Aruede 23:54

Well, I think with a buffer of about 8 billion people, I think we might just survive, provided we keep making progress in science and

Curing Malaria and the evolutionary arms race

Clive Aruede 24:03

other things. And talking about science, what scientific breakthrough do you wish would happen in your lifetime?

Tavian Oladapo 24:09

That's interesting. Because I work in disease or with disease, it would probably have to be a permanent cure for malaria, because malaria kills more African children, well, specifically Nigerian children, than anywhere else in the world. And then when you understand that the malaria parasite is what we call an obligate parasite, which means that in order for it to go through its life cycle, it has to infect a human and a female mosquito. That's actually what it has to do naturally. It has no choice in the matter. That's how they go through their life cycle. And so if there was a way that they can stop these specific human parasites, they've evolved to live in humans, but unfortunately, they kill lots of children in the process. And so for me, I mean, I know there are antiparasitic drugs and so on. But if they could just stop malaria parasites from being able to infect humans, period. For me, I mean, yeah, there are other diseases that probably kill more people, cancer, for example. But I don't know. I just I've had a thing for malaria for a long time because I understand how many children it kills. I understand that when you look at it through a religious lens, it's insane that you think that somebody who you claim is benevolent will create an organism that has to infect humans and mosquitoes and in the process kills millions of children. And that's the one pathogen that I'm most passionate about. So, yeah, in answer to your question, it will be a way of not even having to cure malaria, but to just stop people getting it.

Clive Aruede 25:38

Period. Yeah, you'll you would think that uh that is something which is uh achievable, it's possible to do.

Tavian Oladapo 25:44

Well, it's difficult again, because the human malaria parasite is what I call a microscopic ninja. It has again, which kind of debunks the whole idea of a benevolent deity, it has many tools up its sleeve that it uses to fool and evade our immune system. So again, you want to ask the question if you want to talk about a benevolent God, did God give the parasite those tools? They can hide from our immune system, they can fool our immune system to make it think that it's a it's friendly rather than a foe. They have all these different tricks, and even when we've discover antiparasitic uh drugs, they evolve to uh resistance to the drugs. Do you see what I mean? It's not just one weapon kills them, it's just we kill them with one weapon and they say, Oh yeah, watch this. And they come up with something else. And that's evolution at work, Clive. That's evolution at work because it's it's it's an it's an arms race. It has nothing to do with God, it has nothing to do with sin, it has nothing to do with somebody eating a magic fruit in a garden because a talking snake told them to. These are just ridiculous stories that we made up because we didn't understand what was going on. And this is why I find malaria parasites fascinating because they actually are a perfect example of the evolutionary arms race between pathogen and host. You know, we find a drug that works, they go okay, they go into their locker, they they some of them will then evolve a countermeasure, and it just goes on and on and on and on. So this is why I would say I would like a way where if we could just, it's not gonna be easy to be able to stop human malaria parasites from infecting humans, because there are about 200 different malaria parasites and they are all specific to their hosts. But strangely enough, you know, they infect other mammals, they infect birds. But what's interesting is the malaria parasites that infect humans are most closely related to malaria parasites that infect other primates. Right. Because we're related. Yeah, that's what you would expect. Uh plasmodum falciparum kills is the most deadliest malaria parasites jumped from gorillas. And so I think there are about five of them, five or six of them that infect humans because they they've evolved to infect humans, but they're most closely related to the ones that infect other primates. So if they were already infecting other primates, and we are primates, it's a small jump, isn't it?

Clive Aruede 28:03

Absolutely.

Final thoughts and farewell

Clive Aruede 28:04

Listen, it's been a fascinating uh discussion. Oh, you know, I love chatting about this stuff. Yes, I do hope the human race wins that particular arms race with the Muslims. It's you know, it's it's really it's really important to save um all us from being ravaged, you know, to death by these uh little critters.

Tavian Oladapo 28:25

Absolutely.

Clive Aruede 28:26

Yeah, but uh it's been it's been great. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

Tavian Oladapo 28:30

Yeah, um you know I love to chat about this stuff, so yeah, anytime. Thank you. Thank you for asking me.