Autonomy and balance (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, June 03, 2016, 13:00 (2877 days ago)

I am drawing various threads together so that we don't have to keep repeating arguments. (My thanks again to David for yet more fascinating and enlightening articles.)
	
Under “balance”: David's comment: A perfect reason for the bush of life. As I've stated everyone has to eat for evolution to exist and progress. Ecosystems must maintain balance. The higgildy-piggeldy has full-blown purpose behind it.-But the balance is constantly changing! The ecosystems do not maintain balance, they change their balance. That is why 99% of species have gone extinct. The only “full-blown purpose” (if there is/was one) would therefore have to be changing the balance - so you must choose: did your God manipulate every change in organisms and in the environment (and hence in the balance), or did he leave it to the organisms themselves as they interacted with the uncontrolled environment - apart from his occasional dabble?-Under “Shrimp”: dhw: After all, without the shrimp's crusher, nature would have been unbalanced, wouldn't it?
DAVID: You must be clairvoyant. You identified a top predator in an ecosystem before I published an essay on the subject: Balance of nature; ecologists view, Thursday, June 02, 2016, 15:45. I'm impressed!-See above. The literal meaning of “clairvoyant” is clear seeing, and I hope you will be able to see clearly that without the shrimp's crusher, nature would have had a DIFFERENT balance.
 
Under “snow”: dhw: Thank you for this clarification. It's good to hear that your God did not after all create every innovation and natural wonder, 99% of which are extinct, for the purpose of producing and feeding humans.... The balance of nature is whatever balance exists at any particular time, and it is not geared to any particular species but changes according to whatever species are flourishing at that time. "Nothing more."
DAVID: I'm glad we straightened out your contortionating.-You may not have realized that all the above contortions were contained in your earlier hypotheses - what I called your anthropocentric interpretation of evolutionary history. And the idea that the higgledy-piggledy bush has “full blown purpose” behind it is another contortion, especially in view of your twists and turns in relation to the “complexity” mechanism, as now stated on the Lamarck thread:
 
dhw: Your swift reversion to your God programming every complexity is not a variation on my theme at all. It is the exact opposite. All you are now saying is that the bush is higgledy-piggledy because God deliberately preprogrammed or dabbled every twig (just for the sake of complexity). I am saying it is higgledy-piggledy because (theistic version) God gave organisms the freedom to create their own complexities.
DAVID: I'm agreeing with you. I like the idea of complexity for complexity's sake, with God's dabbling after the complexity appears, as He sees necessary.-If you agree that your God gave organisms the freedom to create their own complexities, as opposed to his preprogramming or dabbling every change, you have a clear explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush, in which the balance of nature is constantly changing through the work of the organisms themselves, following no “full-blown purpose” other perhaps than your God's “let's see what happens next”. And disappearing into this deliberate free-for-all is the theory that he created life in order to produce humans - at best they are the result of a dabble.-I'm afraid I still can't take to the idea that the autonomous inventive mechanism creates complexities for their own sake without any particular function, bearing in mind the fact that all the different species extant and extinct, weird or not weird (by your standards), arose through innovations that must have worked. In the context of your God's “purpose”, diversity for its own sake sounds more feasible to me, as organisms explore the different possibilities of survival/improvement.
 
Finally, if your God designed an autonomous inventive mechanism which created all the complexities that resulted in all the diverse species, and if you believe in common descent, that mechanism can only be situated within the cell communities that go to make up each organism. More about this under “protozoa”.