"Solution" to puzzle 4
The case of the heretical teapot is hopeless. No amount of evidence - though it is all before them - would convince his peers that there was an external agent for the evolution of their kin upon Earth. To the teapots, the idea that unidentified non-teapot beings were in charge of teapot evolution and constantly meddled in the meaningful life of the teapots for their own selfish ends is as preposterous as the idea that continental crust or viruses are in charge of human evolution or that Life exists for controlling humidity of air. Even if you would show the teapots a movie in which a human is producing a teapot they would argue that the human is a passive accessory in the birthing of a teapot. The obvious truth might be obvious to us, but not to them. Similarly to our own “intelligent design” proponents, the heretical teapot would believe the “intelligence” that “designed” the terrestrial teapots to be vastly superior to his, but hard as he will try to imagine this “intelligence,” it would be unmistakably teapot intelligence. The teapots would be “designed” by the Great Teapot in Heavens or by a race of super-teapots. His thinking will be all in this dead-end direction, and his case would have as much relation to the truth as the parsimony of his opponents. I think that it would be something like this:
...The heretical teapot came to his heresy by reason rather than accident. He was contemplating the great puzzle of teapot evolution: the absence of aquatic forms. He finds it very strange that the planet that is mainly water has no saltwater or freshwater teapots, whereas they occupied nearly all of the land niches and occur on all continents, islands, etc. There is another mystery: their evolution seems to be too progressive. There are no parasitic forms, no obvious retrograde changes. Their origin is an enigma; there are all these gaps in the record, etc. He comes to the idea that the land teapots are not real teapots but robotic probes made in the shape of a teapot, perhaps by the missing marine teapots. He has to find the traces of this race of mighty intelligent teapots. After many years of digging he finds it: the lost great marine teapots. As soon as he looks at his discovery, he understands its significance: the aquatic form was vastly more intelligent than the land teapots: it had two handles instead of one! So that is how the teapots came to be: they were built by the amphorae for the goal of land exploration.
...The heretical teapot came to his heresy by reason rather than accident. He was contemplating the great puzzle of teapot evolution: the absence of aquatic forms. He finds it very strange that the planet that is mainly water has no saltwater or freshwater teapots, whereas they occupied nearly all of the land niches and occur on all continents, islands, etc. There is another mystery: their evolution seems to be too progressive. There are no parasitic forms, no obvious retrograde changes. Their origin is an enigma; there are all these gaps in the record, etc. He comes to the idea that the land teapots are not real teapots but robotic probes made in the shape of a teapot, perhaps by the missing marine teapots. He has to find the traces of this race of mighty intelligent teapots. After many years of digging he finds it: the lost great marine teapots. As soon as he looks at his discovery, he understands its significance: the aquatic form was vastly more intelligent than the land teapots: it had two handles instead of one! So that is how the teapots came to be: they were built by the amphorae for the goal of land exploration.