Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 31, 2017, 12:21 (2521 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You have completely skipped over my examples (recently minor spine changes within a species) without demonstrable 'improvement'.
dhw: We discussed the spinal change in detail under “bacterial intelligence”, and I asked what you meant by no “real” improvement, which strangely you explained as meaning no “real speciation”. You have now changed “real improvement” to “demonstrable improvement”, which means even if there was an improvement, we can’t demonstrate it. Nothing proven either way.
DAVID: I have trouble finding the right descriptive terms. There was a small spinal change which did not change the species in any major way, but is interpreted as a preparatory alteration for later bipedalism. Better?

Much better, thank you. What remains open is whether the change may have resulted in a minor improvement, and if it didn’t, why on earth your God would make a totally useless change when according to you he was obviously perfectly capable of dabbling useful changes, as he proved over the next few million years.

dhw: You keep telling us how purposeful your God is, and yet you think he designs complexity only for the sake of complexity. The whale is your prime example, and you refuse to countenance the possibility that it entered and adapted to the water in order to survive or to improve its access to food. Of course there is not the same sense of purposefulness if you refuse to acknowledge the possibility that there may have been a purpose.
DAVID: Yes, my approach considers the possibility of complexity without purpose. Does each environmental change have purpose or improvement? The history tells us not necessarily.

Absolutely not. My personal view is that green forests turning into deserts are anything but an improvement, but we are talking about living organisms having purpose (survival and/or improvement or complexification) and changing their structure accordingly. I do not believe the environment has a drive for improvement. I would suggest that pre-whales did.

dhw: Although I agree that the phrasing is slightly elliptical, I take this to mean that tree-living primates left the trees when the trees began to disappear, and as they exploited the new environment, they developed bigger brains and became more human-like. I don’t think it means that God made them more human-like and gave them bigger brains while they were still sitting in the trees, and then he took the trees away.
DAVID: Of course, if you accepted my theory, you would be forced to accept God.

If I accepted any of your theories that God did this or God did that, I would be forced to accept God. The above example offers no support to your theory that your God made our ancestor primates into hominins while they were still enjoying life up in the trees. My own hypothesis allows full acceptance of God, but proposes a considerably more logical sequence of cause and effect.