More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, October 29, 2016, 13:11 (2728 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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. Why not look at purpose? That is where we differ in interpretation.

dhw: I'll have to read the article later, but I have no problem accepting patterns and gene changes. You have spelled out your view of your God’s purpose time and time again, as already summarized above: he preprogrammed or dabbled every innovation and natural wonder in order to balance nature in order to provide food in order to keep life going in order to produce humans. As an explanation of the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, parasitic wasps etc. etc., I’m afraid I find it unconvincing, and I have offered an alternative purpose and modus operandi, both of which you reject.

DAVID: I repeat, do you see purpose in anything related to evolution? Possibly a purposeful God?

I didn’t think I would have to repeat what I have repeated so many times, but again perhaps it will provide a diversion from your explanation for the weaverbird’s nest etc. I will start with God. As an agnostic, I fully recognize the possibility that God exists, and if he does, then he would certainly have had a purpose in creating life. I look at the history of life, so far as we know it, and see a higgledy-piggledy story of comings and goings, and so I assume that this endlessly fascinating process of change is what God intended (= his purpose). I don’t think he would create something he didn’t want. His personal motivation, then, might be enjoyment of the spectacle, and curiosity as to what his invention might come up with next. He may well have dabbled, and in the case of humans either the dabble or the natural evolution of his invention has thrown up the most fascinating product of all. I can well imagine that he finds human activity as wonderful and as terrible as we do. To complete this picture, perhaps you could repeat for us your own view of God's purpose in creating humans.

If he does not exist, the purpose is whatever individuals make it, but I have said over and over again that the two purposes “related to evolution” that are clear to me are survival and improvement.