EVOLUTION AND PURPOSE (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, November 28, 2015, 14:21 (3062 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Innovations are jumps, and I should have confined my parallel process to when organisms do need to adapt quickly, for instance in polluted waters. [...]
Once again, my point is that the adaptive mechanism does not plan in advance but responds to the environment, and I am suggesting that the same mechanism may be responsible for innovation: no planning involved, but responding inventively as opposed to adaptively. You clearly agree that this is what happens, but you insist that it had to be preprogrammed or personally organized by your God.-DAVID: My point is that these adaptations do not change the animals into different species, We don't now how new species happen, and I have concluded there must be an onboard 'drive to complexity' placed there by God with either full or partial control over final results. -You have repeated my own point about adaptations and innovations, and your ‘onboard drive to complexity' is no different from the ‘inventive mechanism' we have agreed must be present. I have also agreed that it may have been placed there by your God. If control is full, inventions can only have been preprogrammed or directly organized by your God. I have never understood what you mean by “partial” or “semi” other than as a reference to the restrictions imposed by the environment and the organism's own nature, which do not explain inventiveness. I have proposed an alternative to preprogramming and dabbling which would cover your “partial” - namely that your God has given organisms free rein, but intervenes if he doesn't like what is going on, or wants to guide evolution in a different direction. This would cover the anomaly of all the species, lifestyles and natural wonders that do not seem to fit in with your anthropocentrism. Since you are happy to offer the hypotheses of preprogramming and dabbling, why not at least pass a comment on this one?