More about how evolution works; stasis (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, October 16, 2015, 12:03 (3107 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: There is no disagreement here. You are repeating my own arguments in your own words: "environmental changes cause modifications" = adapt; “how complexity advances”, “increasing complexity” = my “innovations”; “very specialized process” and “certain groups of organisms” = my “exceptional individuals”. The only difference between us is your insistence on “a designed evolutionary plan”, whereas I would argue that the whole process smells of organisms doing their own thing.-DAVID: Your smell concludes that some organisms are satisfied to stay the same and others are discontent with their life and therefore complexify. Sounds like a scattershot method of evolution to me. -Yes, I am challenging your attempt to read God's mind by assuming that he planned everything for the sake of humans - a hypothesis that simply doesn't fit in with the “scattershot” history of evolution. Instead I am suggesting that this history can be explained by the fact that some organisms adapt to changing conditions, others fail and so die out, and others find their own ways of exploiting new conditions and “complexifying", as dictated by their individual ability to master changing conditions, and not by some overriding anthropocentric purpose. -DAVID: Monkeys decided on their own, starting 22-24 million years ago to become human, so over time they did it, from no obvious reasonable challenges from the then existing environment as known to us.-They didn't say to themselves, “I'm gonna make myself human”. But they found new ways of exploiting conditions, just as every single innovation from bacteria onwards must in some way have proceeded from the drive to improvement, as opposed to the need for adaptation. The latter is a response to challenges from the environment, whereas improvement is a response to opportunities offered by the environment.
 
DAVID: Please see my entry on Koonin.-The basis of it all is endosymbiosis. Lynn Margulis was a pioneer in this field, and she believed in the intelligent cell.