More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 27, 2016, 19:18 (2731 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Thursday, October 27, 2016, 19:30

dhw: AND YOU KNOW THAT MINE IS A DRIVE TO IMPROVEMENT IMPLEMENTED BY AN AUTONOMOUS, POSSIBLY GOD-GIVEN, INVENTIVE MECHANISM.[/b] Gaps, abhorred by Darwin, who said that unless they would disappear, his theory would fall part. AND YOU AND I HAVE AGREED, AS DID SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES, THAT HE WAS WRONG. FORTUNATELY THIS DOES NOT MAKE HIS THEORY FALL APART. WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH THE HYPOTHESIS THAT CHANGES IN THE ENVIRONMENT OFFER THE OPPORTUNITY FOR INNOVATION?

What it has to do is that innovation is speciation, or great gaps is phenotype. Darwin has never explained the gaps, thus his theory falls apart, other than he recognized that evolution occurred, but not how.

DAVID: Multicellularity is highly complex and raises all sorts of complex biochemical issues to be solved. Why not sticking with simplicity? Because only multicellularity leads to humans, which is the goal. Clear?
dhw: Stating that humans are the goal is certainly clear, but that doesn’t make it true.
DAVID: Agreed. But we did arrive with all the unnecessary baggage for survival we were given. Apes survive without calculus or true consciousness, or wonder about why we apes are here.

dhw: I don’t think anyone would disagree that our enhanced consciousness has given us abilities that are not necessary for survival. But as we keep repeating ad nauseam, if evolution was only driven by what was necessary for survival, it would not have gone beyond bacteria! Hence improvement through multicellularity, and the unanswerable question for you: if God’s goal was humans, why did he have to teach the weaverbird how to build its nest? I doubt if I am the only person who fails to follow the logic of the claim that the nest was essential to the balance of nature so that there would be enough food to enable life to continue until humans arrived. Hence my (theistic) alternative: God gave the weaverbird the intelligence to build its own nest. Multiply the weaverbird example by as many million as you like.

Back to Wagner and his patterns in RNA forms and in gene changes which allowed evolution to easily create the wonderfully diverse bush of life.

http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-rp

I won't repeat the massive amount of material in this long and very informative essay, but the author never questions the source of these patterns. They are simply a given and I think God set it all up to make evolution easy and perhaps to allow organisms to make changes, possibly at the species change level under restraints. Why not look at purpose? That is where we differ in interpretation. Purposeful changes clearly explain why evolution didn't stop at bacteria when, with no purpose it should have.