Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 17, 2017, 13:43 (2529 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] Organisms ARE cell communities, and I don’t know why you should find it so difficult to believe that they might want to survive and might possibly look for new ways of doing so.
DAVID: I agree that simple adaptations can occur from cellular input, epigenetic changes. It is when you want to jump the fossil gaps that I object logically. The gaps require foresight of the future design and planning. Logical.

Yet again: We know cells/cell communities can adapt, so maybe instead of your God personally designing every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder (in order to produce humans), he also enabled them to design their own. It’s a hypothesis. These designs may have been triggered by environmental changes, as opposed to being planned and designed in advance of environmental changes – a scenario which a couple of days ago you said you had never advocated (though your 3.8-billion-year computer programme CAN only precede the environmental changes and surely must at least allow for them) because you are “convinced speciation is separate from environment”. Your God’s eight-stage design of the whale therefore apparently had nothing to do with the pre-whale moving from the land environment to the water environment. Does this really make sense to you?

dhw: All you are telling us now is that the whale evolved in eight stages and is part of the bush of life. The answer to how this fits in with the rest of your theory is the above string of “don’t knows”!
DAVID: Have you looked at each stage? Can you explain the gaps? I can't, but what I can do is analyze the need for planning, design and the ability to imagine the changes required in the next form. That requires mental work, doesn't it. Cells logically can't do that, only minor adaptations. The whale plays a large role in the econiches of ocean life.

And yet again: we don’t know how much “mental work” cells are capable of. And yet again: yes, the changes are complex, and the whale is part of the bush of life, and because it is large, it is a large part of the bush of life. But you don’t know why God made the whale enter the water, why he designed it in eight separate phases, or above all why he wanted whales in the first place when all he really wanted was humans, so when you say that your explanation is an “overall view” which provides “an overall perspective that fits everything together”, you don’t actually know how your view fits everything together. That is why I question it and offer an alternative view (not dogma, not masquerading as fact, just a hypothesis) which even you agree does fit everything together.