Evolution: Bilaterians - AgnosticWeb.com

Before the Cambrian Explosion simple bilateral soft animals existed, simple sacks with an opening for a mouth. Now dated back to 585 million years ago:-http://phys.org/news/2012-06-resets-date-earliest-animal-life.html

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Before the Cambrian Explosion simple bilateral soft animals existed, simple sacks with an opening for a mouth. Now dated back to 585 million years ago:
> 
> http://phys.org/news/2012-06-resets-date-earliest-animal-life.html-This is the same time as the frond-like Ediacarans were developing. A new finding from that group:-http://phys.org/news/2012-06-ash-fall-nursery-earliest-animals.html

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Before the Cambrian Explosion simple bilateral soft animals existed, simple sacks with an opening for a mouth. Now dated back to 585 million years ago:
> > 
> > http://phys.org/news/2012-06-resets-date-earliest-animal-life.html
> 
> This is the same time as the frond-like Ediacarans were developing. A new finding from that group:
> 
> http://phys.org/news/2012-06-ash-fall-nursery-earliest-animals.html-Another report on the same finding. Original Edicaran fosils are in Australia. These are Newfoundland. Apparently developed in deep oceans, and no idea of what they are, but they all look similar with frond shapes. Nothing in the Cambrian is like them.

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Sometimes the oldest is the best. Advanced species die out and the oldest remains. Variation doesn't always work for change:-http://phys.org/news/2012-09-ancient-bottom-dwelling-critter-isnt.html-500 million years old

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Ediacarans preceeded the Cambrian explosion. What they are is again being debated, but they are very simple!-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2012/12/13/were-weirdo-ediacarans-really-lichens-fungi-and-slime-molds/?WT_mc_id=SA_DD_20121214

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Still simple, and some were probably land based:-http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7430/full/nature11777.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20130103-No threat to the problem of the Cambrian Explosion

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"When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1), the sudden appearance of animal fossils in the rock record was one of the more troubling facts he was compelled to address. He wrote: "There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks" (p. 306). Darwin argued that the incompleteness of the fossil record gives the illusion of an explosive event, but with the eventual discovery of older and better-preserved rocks, the ancestors of these Cambrian taxa would be found. Studies of Ediacaran and Cambrian fossils continue to expand the morphologic variety of clades, but the appearance of the remains and traces of bilaterian animals in the Cambrian remains abrupt "-http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6059/1091.full-This is a complex article which uses genetic information to show that the 'genetic toolkit" was in place before the Cambrian morphologic explosion. If ones believes in evolution this must be true. It is not clear from this article any evidence of an underlying driving reason, that is why these physical changes responded to an environmental 'need'. Evolution just appears to proceed from simple to complex, with nothing driving it. Perhaps the drive is hidden and is coded as a requirement?

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Funnel-shaped with stalks. Seem to have made reefs:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2014/07/02/funnel-shaped-animals-invented-reefs-prior-to-cambrian-explosion/

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More new living, possible Ediacarans, looking like a fungus. Two cell layers, very simple as ususal, and no precursor for Cambrian organisms:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2014/09/03/lone-survivor-weird-new-animal-may-be-long-sought-living-ediacaran/-Look at Nat. Geo. article to click on and see pictures

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The Ediacarans are still very simple and very confusing. This is a new theory as to how they might have prepared the way for the Cambrians:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151206165259.htm-"But what are these peculiar organisms? Their very strange morphology has made relating them to modern organisms very difficult, and they have been suggested to be related to anything from plants, fungi and lichens through to recognisable animals such as worms and arthropods.-"In a major review of the Ediacaran fossils recently published in Biological Reviews, Graham Budd, professor of palaeobiology in Uppsala University, Sweden, and Sören Jensen, researcher at Badajoz University, Spain, suggest that most of the Ediacarans are very basal representatives of animal lineages, and as such are likely to reveal the hitherto very obscure pathways taken by animal evolution. This goes some way to explain why they happen to appear just before clearly recognisable animals do in the fossil record, and raises the question of what the ecological relationship between the two biotas is.-"Traditionally, it has been thought that the more advanced animals, many of which are mobile and can burrow energetically through the sediment, were kept in ecological obscurity by the largely immobile Ediacarans, just as the mammals were by the dinosaurs; and it was not until the Ediacarans all went extinct that the mobile animals could diversify in the so-called "Cambrian explosion."-"Budd and Jensen propose a new view of this relationship however, inspired by the interaction between the vegetation and animals in the modern savannah environments of east Africa. In their new 'savannah' hypothesis, they propose that concentration of nutrients both above and below the sediment-water interface were enhanced around the stationary Ediacarans, and the creation of these resource "hot spots" created a very diverse environment, ideal for both diversification and for investment of energy into movement. Rather than the Ediacarans and later animals being direct competitors then, the Ediacarans themselves created a permissive environment that was ideal for higher animals to evolve in. This idea fits well into a modern view of evolution, called "ecosytem engineering" whereby key species (such as beavers) influence the environment in order to create new evolutionary and diversity opportunities for other species. Perhaps then, the Ediacaran taxa weren't impediments but the drivers of the evolution that was eventually to lead to all the rich animal diversity we see today."-Comment: This shows the huge gap with the sudden appearance of the very complex Cambrians

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A simpler animal than bilatarians is under study:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170517154731.htm

"Dickinsonia was a flat, oval-shaped creature that ranged in size from less than an inch to several feet, and is characterized by a series of raised bands -- known as modules -- on its surface. These animals are of interest to paleontologists because they are the first to become large and complex, to move around, and form communities, yet little is known about them. For years, scientists have been debating the taxonomic status of Dickinsonia -- placing it with fungi, marine worms and jellyfish, to name a few. It is now generally accepted that Dickinsonia was an animal, now extinct.

"'Part of this study was trying to put Dickinsonia in context in the development of early life. We wanted to know if these creatures were part of a group of animals that survived or a failed evolutionary experiment. This research adds to our knowledge about these animals and our understanding of life on Earth as an artifact of half a billion years of evolution," Droser said.

***

"The study showed that Dickinsonia's development, and particularly that of the modules, was complex and systematic to maintain the oval shape of the animal. The accumulation of new modules, by a process called terminal addition, suggests that Dickinsonia developed in a related way to bilaterians, a complex group that display bilateral symmetry, including animals ranging from flies and worms to humans. However, the researchers do not believe Dickinsonia was ancestrally related to bilaterians, since it lacked other features that most bilaterians share, most notably a mouth, gut and anus. (my bold)

"'Although we saw some of the hallmark characteristics of bilateral growth and development, we don't believe Dickinsonia was a precursor to today's bilaterians, rather that these are two distinct groups that shared a common set of ancestral genes that are present throughout the animal lineage," Evans said. "Dickinsonia most likely represents a separate group of animals that is now extinct, but can tell us a lot about the evolutionary history of animals.'"

Comment: Another early multicellular animal simpler than the bilatarians but illustrating the huge gap in complexity before the sudden explosion of the highly complex Cambrians. The Cambrians didn't evolve. They simply appeared,and remain a major problem for Darwin's theory of gradual descent by small alterations.

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A new fossil find in Australia:

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-ancestor-animals-australian-fossils.html

"The tiny, wormlike creature, named Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut.

***

"The development of bilateral symmetry was a critical step in the evolution of animal life, giving organisms the ability to move purposefully and a common, yet successful way to organize their bodies. A multitude of animals, from worms to insects to dinosaurs to humans, are organized around this same basic bilaterian body plan.

"Evolutionary biologists studying the genetics of modern animals predicted the oldest ancestor of all bilaterians would have been simple and small, with rudimentary sensory organs. Preserving and identifying the fossilized remains of such an animal was thought to be difficult, if not impossible.

***

"Scott Evans, a recent doctoral graduate from UC Riverside; and Mary Droser, a professor of geology, noticed miniscule, oval impressions near some of these burrows. With funding from a NASA exobiology grant, they used a three-dimensional laser scanner that revealed the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature. The animal ranged between 2-7 millimeters long and about 1-2.5 millimeters wide, with the largest the size and shape of a grain of rice—just the right size to have made the burrows.

***

"'Burrows of Ikaria occur lower than anything else. It's the oldest fossil we get with this type of complexity," Droser said. "Dickinsonia and other big things were probably evolutionary dead ends. We knew that we also had lots of little things and thought these might have been the early bilaterians that we were looking for."

"In spite of its relatively simple shape, Ikaria was complex compared to other fossils from this period. It burrowed in thin layers of well-oxygenated sand on the ocean floor in search of organic matter, indicating rudimentary sensory abilities. The depth and curvature of Ikaria represent clearly distinct front and rear ends, supporting the directed movement found in the burrows.

"The burrows also preserve crosswise, "V"-shaped ridges, suggesting Ikaria moved by contracting muscles across its body like a worm, known as peristaltic locomotion. Evidence of sediment displacement in the burrows and signs the organism fed on buried organic matter reveal Ikaria probably had a mouth, anus, and gut."

Comment: As usual the Darwinists try to diminish the Cambrian gap. No way. The Cambrians are still light years more complex than these guys. Of course this stage had to be there.

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QUOTE: Evolutionary biologists studying the genetics of modern animals predicted the oldest ancestor of all bilaterians would have been simple and small, with rudimentary sensory organs. Preserving and identifying the fossilized remains of such an animal was thought to be difficult, if not impossible.

DAVID: As usual the Darwinists try to diminish the Cambrian gap. No way. The Cambrians are still light years more complex than these guys. Of course this stage had to be there.

The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

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QUOTE: Evolutionary biologists studying the genetics of modern animals predicted the oldest ancestor of all bilaterians would have been simple and small, with rudimentary sensory organs. Preserving and identifying the fossilized remains of such an animal was thought to be difficult, if not impossible.

DAVID: As usual the Darwinists try to diminish the Cambrian gap. No way. The Cambrians are still light years more complex than these guys. Of course this stage had to be there.

dhw: The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

The bold is your pet theory, not mine. Oxygen usage is a very dangerous process, but currently is the major source of allowing life to create energy providing warm bodies with a maintained temperature. Our bodies contain antioxidants to protect us from oxygen damage. Oxidation is a forest fire, to remind all of how dangerous it is. Therefore the evolutionary development of oxygen use requires very complex design planning, far beyond pie-in-the-sky so-called cell committee intelligence. God didn't give the cells that ability. He designed new processes directly. What we see in cells that makes them seem intelligent, is the beautiful automaticity by which cells create their products and their responses to stimuli.

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dhw: The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

DAVID: The bold is your pet theory, not mine. Oxygen usage is a very dangerous process, but currently is the major source of allowing life to create energy providing warm bodies with a maintained temperature. Our bodies contain antioxidants to protect us from oxygen damage. Oxidation is a forest fire, to remind all of how dangerous it is. Therefore the evolutionary development of oxygen use requires very complex design planning, far beyond pie-in-the-sky so-called cell committee intelligence. God didn't give the cells that ability. He designed new processes directly. What we see in cells that makes them seem intelligent, is the beautiful automaticity by which cells create their products and their responses to stimuli.

I was quoting the pet theory concerning the environmental change that triggered the Cambrian Explosion. It may have been something else. Whatever it was, we know that there was a creative “explosion” in which the structures of the cell communities of which all organisms are composed underwent colossal changes. I’m surprised at the authority with which you state that your God did it directly and did not design an autonomous intelligence which you consider to be a 50/50 possibility. It’s also surprising that he should specially design every single one of these new species when according to you all he really wanted to design was H. sapiens. But I am not supposed to look for any logical link between your various beliefs, am I?

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dhw: The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

DAVID: The bold is your pet theory, not mine. Oxygen usage is a very dangerous process, but currently is the major source of allowing life to create energy providing warm bodies with a maintained temperature. Our bodies contain antioxidants to protect us from oxygen damage. Oxidation is a forest fire, to remind all of how dangerous it is. Therefore the evolutionary development of oxygen use requires very complex design planning, far beyond pie-in-the-sky so-called cell committee intelligence. God didn't give the cells that ability. He designed new processes directly. What we see in cells that makes them seem intelligent, is the beautiful automaticity by which cells create their products and their responses to stimuli.

dhw: I was quoting the pet theory concerning the environmental change that triggered the Cambrian Explosion. It may have been something else. Whatever it was, we know that there was a creative “explosion” in which the structures of the cell communities of which all organisms are composed underwent colossal changes. I’m surprised at the authority with which you state that your God did it directly and did not design an autonomous intelligence which you consider to be a 50/50 possibility.

Another mistake or misdirection about my beliefs. I do not think an autonomous intelligence from God exists to allow evolutionary changes or daily adaptive changes beyond the epigenetic changes which we know about. For new species, God speciates. The 50/50 possibility is my honest observation of the odds of truth. I believe 100% that so-called cellular intelligence is cells following God-provided instructions.

dhw: It’s also surprising that he should specially design every single one of these new species when according to you all he really wanted to design was H. sapiens. But I am not supposed to look for any logical link between your various beliefs, am I?

Your logical beliefs are obviously not mine. Your imagined God and my belief in God result in two very different images of God with different modes of action. Once again you are wondering why God waited to create us, a humanizing view of God. Since God created the times lines of history, we simply know He decided to take the time.

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A discovery of one specific bilaterian fossil:

https://evolutionnews.org/2020/09/was-kimberella-a-precambrian-mollusk/

"Kimberella indeed represents the strongest case for a bilaterian animal from the Ediacaran era. This is important because it would not only provide a minimum age for the earliest origin of Bilateria but would also predate the Cambrian explosion of bilaterian animal phyla as a kind of “advance guard”

***

"Because of the enormous importance of this crucial taxon for evolutionary biology, I reviewed for this article series every single paper that was ever published on it or even only discussed it, so that this synopsis and bibliography should even prove to be useful for experts, as nothing comparably comprehensive and up to date exists anywhere else.

"The hypothesis of a molluscan affinity of Kimberella is still prevailing in the technical and popular literature on Ediacaran biota.

"Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016), who wrote about Kimberella as the possible earliest mollusk in his bestselling book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, is quoted by McMenamin (2018) with the following remarkable statement: “One of my correspondents expressed concern that I was perpetuating a dubious interpretation of Kimberella as a mollusk; for another, Kimberella-as-mollusk is crucial to the interpretation of early bilaterian evolution.”

"In addition, eminent intelligent design theorist Stephen C. Meyer has acknowledged in his seminal book Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013) that Kimberella could be an Ediacaran bilaterian animal and maybe even a mollusk. This was considered by other ID proponents as maybe too generous (Evolution News 2016). Let’s see what the published evidence says and follow the evidence wherever it leads."

Comment: Edicarans are very simple organisms and the bilaterians are symmetrical simple sac-like forms found in this period. So far no evidence of complex organ systems as in the Cambrian and better definition is very important as we study the so-called Cambrian gap in complexity. So far nothing closes the gap. I will follow and present Bechly 's follow-up articles.

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These birds are more like hybrids than a new species, only differing in colors and song. Is it splitting or lumping?:

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-endangered-songbird-assumptions-evolution.html

"By comparing this bird to a closely related neighbor (the Tawny-Bellied Seedeater) in the same group (the southern capuchino seedeaters), the researchers determined that genetic shuffling of existing variations, rather than new random mutations, brought this species into existence—and their own behaviors are keeping them apart.

"This species is one of only two known examples across the globe to have traveled this path, challenging the typical assumptions of how new species form.

***

"The southern capuchino seedeaters are a group of recently evolved songbirds found throughout South America that is branching rapidly, with many of its species in the early stages of evolution. This family is best known for the dramatic variation with the males in terms of songs and plumage color, while the females are largely indistinguishable even to the most familiar researchers.

***

"What they found is that the two birds are closely related genetically, only distinguishable by the genes involved in plumage coloration. As well, they found that the males responded most aggressively to songs and plumage variations aligning with their own species.

"This all means that the species could very well reproduce and hybridize—they just choose not to, therefore reinforcing their own reproductive barriers.

"On a broader level, though, when comparing the Iberá Seedeater to other capuchino species, the researchers found that the Iberá Seedeater shares genomic variants with other capuchinos in these regions, but the variants have been shuffled to form a unique combination, which, the researchers argue, could be an evolutionary shortcut that most likely underlies much of the diversity among the different subspecies of this family.

"'This is a really beautiful story about a process that we have never seen in quite this way before," says co-author Irby Lovette, director of the Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

"'The classic and most common evolutionary model for new species is the accumulation of genetic mutations when those species are separated by a geographic barrier over perhaps millions of years. But here we found that genetic shuffling can happen quickly and without geographical isolation. It's almost like 'instant speciation.'"

***

"'This is the clearest example in birds of how reshuffling of genetic variation can generate a brand-new species."

"The only other organism where this type of evolution has been seen, according to Turbek, is a group of fish found in Africa called the Lake Victoria cichlids.

"'It's interesting to see this mechanism operating in something as different as birds," Turbek commented."

Comment: A beautiful example of stretching/splitting the concept of species to make individual variation in color and song entirely separate species, when it is obvious they can breed if interested. True species cannot interbreed!! All the wildly different shapes, fur types and coloring don't split dogs into different species. Wild Darwinism on a rampage. I'm sure Darwin, himself, would find the same fault I do.

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DAVID: A beautiful example of stretching/splitting the concept of species to make individual variation in color and song entirely separate species, when it is obvious they can breed if interested. True species cannot interbreed!! All the wildly different shapes, fur types and coloring don't split dogs into different species. Wild Darwinism on a rampage. I'm sure Darwin, himself, would find the same fault I do.

I also agree, and indeed Darwin himself emphasized the problem of defining speciation. However, I'm not happy with your heading, which does not describe the article but merely advertises your belief. That is why I have not put it under “Miscellany” and have given my response a different heading. Otherwise, it's always nice to record when we agree about something!

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DAVID: A beautiful example of stretching/splitting the concept of species to make individual variation in color and song entirely separate species, when it is obvious they can breed if interested. True species cannot interbreed!! All the wildly different shapes, fur types and coloring don't split dogs into different species. Wild Darwinism on a rampage. I'm sure Darwin, himself, would find the same fault I do.

dhw: I also agree, and indeed Darwin himself emphasized the problem of defining speciation. However, I'm not happy with your heading, which does not describe the article but merely advertises your belief. That is why I have not put it under “Miscellany” and have given my response a different heading. Otherwise, it's always nice to record when we agree about something!

Thank you. I appreciate that you haven 't succumbed to stretching Darin's theory beyond all belief as Darwinists always do.

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These are weird arrangements of goo in one sack membrane with multiple nuclei acting through chemical reactions. They can make stalks and spores and solve mazes to find food. They are unicellular but act like multicellular to some degree: - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/slime-molds-are-smarter-than-you-think... - "Even more amazing, when they sexually reproduce they break into individual amoeba-like cells and organize themselves into beautiful stalks and knobby spore-containing tops; the spores live but stalk cells altruistically sacrifice themselves." - Comment: The videos are truly amazing. Brief, please watch. Is this the beginning of multicellularity? Probably.

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No one knows. The oxygen producing type appear suddenly in the evolutionary record:

https://www.insidescience.org/news/mystery-microorganism-may-have-been-first-produce-ox...

"One of the most pivotal moments in Earth's history was the evolution of the photosynthetic life that suffused air with the oxygen on which virtually all complex life on the planet now depends. Now the mystery of how that moment happened is deepening: Scientists have found that the genes for such photosynthesis apparently came from a now-extinct mystery source.

"Although oxygen currently makes up about one-fifth of Earth's air, early in the planet's history, there was at least 100,000 times less atmospheric oxygen. Oxygen easily reacts with other molecules, and as such readily gets pulled from the atmosphere.

"It was only with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, that the element began accumulating in the Earth's primordial atmosphere to any major extent. This rise in oxygen stimulated the evolution of oxygen-breathing life, which in turn spurred the origins of the complex multicellular organisms that dominate the world now.

"Prior research suggested this rise in oxygen levels was likely due to cyanobacteria -- so-called "blue-green algae" that generally are photosynthetic like plants, harvesting energy from the sun. Whereas simpler, more primitive "anoxygenic" forms of photosynthesis do not generate oxygen, cyanobacteria are unique among known bacteria for practicing the more complex process of oxygenic photosynthesis, which does generate the gas.

***

"However, much remains unknown about when and how cyanobacteria evolved oxygenic photosynthesis. "The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any apparent forebears,"

***

"in 2013, researchers discovered a nonphotosynthetic class of cyanobacteria known as Melainabacteria. Now Fischer and his colleagues have discovered a second class of nonphotosynthetic cyanobacteria, the Sericytochromatia. The researchers suggest that both groups are clearly closely related to photosynthetic cyanobacteria, based on their genomes, but the two groups do not perform photosynthesis themselves.

"One possible explanation for the lack of photosynthesis in these two classes of cyanobacteria was that they could once photosynthesize but then lost the ability. To find out more about this critical question, Fischer and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of 41 different kinds of nonphotosynthetic cyanobacteria. The team's analysis of 38 Melainabacteria genomes and three Sericytochromatia genomes found no trace of photosynthetic machinery.

"'This pretty strongly suggests that the ancestor of all three lineages of cyanobacteria was not photosynthetic," said Blankenship, who did not take part in this research.

"The fact that Oxyphotobacteria possess the complex apparatus for oxygenic photosynthesis while their closest relatives do not suggests that Oxyphotobacteria may have imported the genes for photosynthesis from another organism via a process known as lateral gene transfer.

***
"Current cyanobacteria also "consume" oxygen, and the researchers found that the three classes of cyanobacteria use very different proteins to respire the gas, suggesting they likely acquired this cellular machinery independently from each other. The new finding suggests that today's groups evolved such respiration after the development of oxygenic photosynthesis.

"Recent estimates suggest that Oxyphotobacteria diverged from their nonphotosynthetic brethren about 2.5 billion to 2.6 billion years ago. This strengthens the idea that the Great Oxidation Event about 2.3 billion years ago was caused directly by the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.

"'It took a substantial unfolding of evolutionary time before oxygenic photosynthesis developed, perhaps because, as we know, it was a very challenging biochemistry to develop," Fischer said. (my bold)

Comment: Note my bold. It is a highly complex mechanism using quantum mechanics. The authors had to drag in horizontal transfer to fit Darwin. What is wrong with God's pre-planning for the Cambrian explosion and all of today's animals.

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DAVID: No one knows. The oxygen producing type appear suddenly in the evolutionary record:
https://www.insidescience.org/news/mystery-microorganism-may-have-been-first-produce-ox...

QUOTE: "'It took a substantial unfolding of evolutionary time before oxygenic photosynthesis developed, perhaps because, as we know, it was a very challenging biochemistry to develop," Fischer said. (David’s bold)

David’s comment: Note my bold. It is a highly complex mechanism using quantum mechanics. The authors had to drag in horizontal transfer to fit Darwin. What is wrong with God's pre-planning for the Cambrian explosion and all of today's animals.

I do wish you wouldn’t keep dragging Darwin into it. If the authors are right, horizontal transfer could have been the method your God used. If he exists, I have no doubt his methods would have been scientific and not magical. But your bold provides powerful support for design, and this is the sort of complexity that makes it impossible for me to embrace atheism. (I have already explained many times why I also find it impossible to embrace theism.)

I’d just like to draw attention to another paragraph in this important article:

You could hardly have a clearer statement that environmental change initiated/stimulated/triggered evolutionary change.

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David’s comment: Note my bold. It is a highly complex mechanism using quantum mechanics. The authors had to drag in horizontal transfer to fit Darwin. What is wrong with God's pre-planning for the Cambrian explosion and all of today's animals.

dhw: I do wish you wouldn’t keep dragging Darwin into it. If the authors are right, horizontal transfer could have been the method your God used. If he exists, I have no doubt his methods would have been scientific and not magical.

I nag on Darwin because I want lurkers and others to be reminded Darwin does not have any reliable answers to how evolution works.

I’d just like to draw attention to another paragraph in this important article:

"It was only with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, that the element began accumulating in the Earth's primordial atmosphere to any major extent. This rise in oxygen stimulated the evolution of oxygen-breathing life, which in turn spurred the origins of the complex multicellular organisms that dominate the world now.”

dhw: You could hardly have a clearer statement that environmental change initiated/stimulated/triggered evolutionary change.

The is no word of yours that fits the Cambrian ( as the chief example of the explosion). The appearance of oxygen only allowed the explosion to happen. Your words imply causation, and we do not know the cause.

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dhw: I’d just like to draw attention to another paragraph in this important article:
"It was only with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, that the element began accumulating in the Earth's primordial atmosphere to any major extent. This rise in oxygen stimulated the evolution of oxygen-breathing life, which in turn spurred the origins of the complex multicellular organisms that dominate the world now.”

You could hardly have a clearer statement that environmental change initiated/stimulated/triggered evolutionary change.

DAVID: The is no word of yours that fits the Cambrian ( as the chief example of the explosion). The appearance of oxygen only allowed the explosion to happen. Your words imply causation, and we do not know the cause.

Of course it was not the cause. We have been over this a hundred times, and had a long discussion over your misunderstanding of the word initiate, which means to set in motion, trigger, start something off, cause something to begin, but not to BE the cause of something. The appearance of oxygen presented the opportunity for speciation, and without it the explosion would never have happened. The disagreement between us is over your theory that your God restructured organisms before environmental change, whereas I argue that the restructuring would have been in response to environmental change. The innovative changes take place because environmental change triggers a (perhaps God-given) drive for what I see as improvement or what you see as complexity. The drive is the “cause”, and environmental change is the event that sets it in motion, as explicitly proposed in the article.

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DAVID: The is no word of yours that fits the Cambrian ( as the chief example of the explosion). The appearance of oxygen only allowed the explosion to happen. Your words imply causation, and we do not know the cause.

dhw: Of course it was not the cause. We have been over this a hundred times, and had a long discussion over your misunderstanding of the word initiate, which means to set in motion, trigger, start something off, cause something to begin, but not to BE the cause of something.

We can agree on this if you specify 'initiate' does not imply cause.

dhw: The disagreement between us is over your theory that your God restructured organisms before environmental change, whereas I argue that the restructuring would have been in response to environmental change.

Totally wrong. The Cambrian animals were created after oxygen appeared. Not before. Only the whales appear to fit your comment.

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DAVID: The is no word of yours that fits the Cambrian ( as the chief example of the explosion). The appearance of oxygen only allowed the explosion to happen. Your words imply causation, and we do not know the cause.

dhw: Of course it was not the cause. We have been over this a hundred times, and had a long discussion over your misunderstanding of the word initiate, which means to set in motion, trigger, start something off, cause something to begin, but not to BE the cause of something.

We can agree on this if you specify 'initiate' does not imply cause.

dhw: The disagreement between us is over your theory that your God restructured organisms before environmental change, whereas I argue that the restructuring would have been in response to environmental change.

Partially wrong. The Cambrian animals were created after oxygen appeared. Not before. Only the whales appear to fit your comment.

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dhw: Of course it was not the cause. We have been over this a hundred times, and had a long discussion over your misunderstanding of the word initiate, which means to set in motion, trigger, start something off, cause something to begin, but not to BE the cause of something.

DAVID: We can agree on this if you specify 'initiate' does not imply cause.

I have always done so.

dhw: The disagreement between us is over your theory that your God restructured organisms before environmental change, whereas I argue that the restructuring would have been in response to environmental change.

DAVID: Partially wrong. The Cambrian animals were created after oxygen appeared. Not before. Only the whales appear to fit your comment.

I sometimes find it difficult to keep up with your different opinions. You told us your God also restructured hominins before they descended from the trees to the plains (“bacterial intelligence”, 24 May: “Speciation first, environment second”) and actually I thought the whales were meant to be a prime example of your God’s advance planning. However, so long as we agree that environmental change can trigger the process of speciation, we can move on.

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DAVID: Partially wrong. The Cambrian animals were created after oxygen appeared. Not before. Only the whales appear to fit your comment.

dhw: I sometimes find it difficult to keep up with your different opinions. You told us your God also restructured hominins before they descended from the trees to the plains (“bacterial intelligence”, 24 May: “Speciation first, environment second”) and actually I thought the whales were meant to be a prime example of your God’s advance planning. However, so long as we agree that environmental change can trigger the process of speciation, we can move on.

You are correct. I had forgotten that bipedalism skeletal changes appear before Lucy's decedents fully left the trees. But in these examples the changes are in areas of living as environmental change, not Earth's environmental change as in oxygen concentrations. Area change requires pre-planning. As for your word 'trigger' I don't like any more than 'initiate' both of which imply causation, but I now know you have a different view of he meaning of those words. I prefer that changes 'allow'.

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DAVID: Partially wrong. The Cambrian animals were created after oxygen appeared. Not before. Only the whales appear to fit your comment.

dhw: I sometimes find it difficult to keep up with your different opinions. You told us your God also restructured hominins before they descended from the trees to the plains (“bacterial intelligence”, 24 May: “Speciation first, environment second”) and actually I thought the whales were meant to be a prime example of your God’s advance planning. However, so long as we agree that environmental change can trigger the process of speciation, we can move on.

DAVID: You are correct. I had forgotten that bipedalism skeletal changes appear before Lucy's decedents fully left the trees. But in these examples the changes are in areas of living as environmental change, not Earth's environmental change as in oxygen concentrations. Area change requires pre-planning. As for your word 'trigger' I don't like any more than 'initiate' both of which imply causation, but I now know you have a different view of he meaning of those words. I prefer that changes 'allow'.

If you believe in common descent, clearly all innovations must occur in individual organisms, and so speciation will take place in individual locations (though there could be several locations at the same time). Are you now saying that, for example, if there was an environmental change that was confined to parts of Africa, God would have anticipated the change and restructured beforehand all the organisms he wanted to speciate? In any case I don’t see why, in your scenario, area change requires pre-planning and global change doesn’t.

I accept “allow”, but for me it doesn’t have the dynamic immediacy of “initiate” and “trigger”, which here = this marks the beginning of the process, which would not have taken place without it. Not the cause, but the indispensable event that sets the process in motion. The cause, we have agreed, is the drive to improvement (for me) or complexity (for you.)

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DAVID: You are correct. I had forgotten that bipedalism skeletal changes appear before Lucy's decedents fully left the trees. But in these examples the changes are in areas of living as environmental change, not Earth's environmental change as in oxygen concentrations. Area change requires pre-planning. As for your word 'trigger' I don't like any more than 'initiate' both of which imply causation, but I now know you have a different view of he meaning of those words. I prefer that changes 'allow'.

dhw: If you believe in common descent, clearly all innovations must occur in individual organisms, and so speciation will take place in individual locations (though there could be several locations at the same time). Are you now saying that, for example, if there was an environmental change that was confined to parts of Africa, God would have anticipated the change and restructured beforehand all the organisms he wanted to speciate? In any case I don’t see why, in your scenario, area change requires pre-planning and global change doesn’t.

You are correct that innovations occur in species individuals but only current humans are all over the Earth. I was noting again whales from land to water (area) and Cambrians (same place, more oxygen) as a different kind of initiating due to change in environment, but in the same area. God speciates either way.

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A detailed new analysis of a fossil headed to land from water shows a huge jump in form:

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-fossil-insights-fish-evolved.html

"'It's like a snake on the outside, but a fish on the inside."

"The fossil of an early snake-like animal - called Lethiscus stocki - has kept its evolutionary secrets for the last 340-million years.

"Now, an international team of researchers, led by the University of Calgary, has revealed new insights into the ancient Scottish fossil that dramatically challenge our understanding of the early evolution of tetrapods, or four-limbed animals with backbones.

"Before this study, ancient tetrapods—the ancestors of humans and other modern-day vertebrates - were thought to have evolved very slowly from fish to animals with limbs.

"'We used to think that the fin-to-limb transition was a slow evolution to becoming gradually less fish like," he said. "But Lethiscus shows immediate, and dramatic, evolutionary experimentation. The lineage shrunk in size, and lost limbs almost immediately after they first evolved. It's like a snake on the outside but a fish on the inside."

"Using micro-computer tomography (CT) scanners and advanced computing software, Anderson and study lead author Jason Pardo, a doctoral student supervised by Anderson, got a close look at the internal anatomy of the fossilized Lethiscus. After reconstructing CT scans its entire skull was revealed, with extraordinary results.

"'The anatomy didn't fit with our expectations," explains Pardo. "Many body structures didn't make sense in the context of amphibian or reptile anatomy." But the anatomy did make sense when it was compared to early fish.

"'We could see the entirety of the skull. We could see where the brain was, the inner ear cavities. It was all extremely fish-like," explains Pardo, outlining anatomy that's common in fish but unknown in tetrapods except in the very first. The anatomy of the paddlefish, a modern fish with many primitive features, became a model for certain aspects of Lethiscus' anatomy.

"When they included this new anatomical information into an analysis of its relationship to other animals, Lethiscus moved its position on the 'family tree', dropping into the earliest stages of the fin-to-limb transition. "It's a very satisfying result, having them among other animals that lived at the same time," says Anderson.

"The results match better with the sequence of evolution implied by the geologic record. "Lethiscus also has broad impacts on evolutionary biology and people doing molecular clock reproductions of modern animals," says Anderson. "They use fossils to calibrate the molecular clock. By removing Lethiscus from the immediate ancestry of modern tetrapods, it changes the calibration date used in those analyses.'"

Comment: More support for the size of gaps in the fossil record. The contamination of the Darwin theory of tiny steps has caused scientists to misinterpret fossils. With newer methods of analysis and open minds, the truth appears. Gould is getting more support. Changes of this type require multiple coordinated mutations, not likely by chance. Advanced design planning is required, obviously. This is not epigenetic adaptation but major body form change all at once.

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The ID take on this gap:

https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/another-bad-day-for-darwinism/

"One mutation at a time. No need for simultaneous mutations (since the mathematics verges on impossibility). But, maybe, by gosh, we do need those “simultaneous mutations.”

"Here’s the abstract from Nature of an article where MCT (micro-computed tomography) reveals the ‘innards’ of a primary fossil. Just read it, and you’ll get the notion of how modern science is simply eviscerating Darwinism.

"Phylogenetic analysis of early tetrapod evolution has resulted in a consensus across diverse data sets in which the tetrapod stem group is a relatively homogenous collection of medium- to large-sized animals showing a progressive loss of ‘fish’ characters as they become increasingly terrestrial, whereas the crown group demonstrates marked morphological diversity and disparity. The oldest fossil attributed to the tetrapod crown group [that is, the very beginnings of this supposed evolutionary divergence] is the highly specialized aïstopod Lethiscus stocki, which shows a small size, extreme axial elongation, loss of limbs, spool-shaped vertebral centra, and a skull with reduced centres of ossification, in common with an otherwise disparate group of small animals known as lepospondyls. Here we use micro-computed tomography of the only known specimen of Lethiscus to provide new information that strongly challenges this consensus. Digital dissection reveals extremely primitive cranial morphology, including a spiracular notch, a large remnant of the notochord within the braincase, an open ventral cranial fissure, an anteriorly restricted parasphenoid element, and Meckelian ossifications. The braincase is elongate and lies atop a dorsally projecting septum of the parasphenoid bone, similar to stem tetrapods such as embolomeres. This morphology is consistent in a second aïstopod, Coloraderpeton, although the details differ. Phylogenetic analysis, including critical new braincase data, places aïstopods deep on the tetrapod stem, whereas another major lepospondyl lineage is displaced into the amniotes. These results show that stem group tetrapods were much more diverse in their body plans than previously thought. Our study requires a change in commonly used calibration dates for molecular analyses, and emphasizes the importance of character sampling for early tetrapod evolutionary relationships.

"IOW, we see a kind of “explosion” of body plans, a top-down radiation of species instead of the bottom-up (think of Darwin’s ‘tree’) radiation expected by Darwinism."

Comment: I have n o argument with the conclusion. An evolutionary pattern of gaps in form and function requires mental planning, i.e., design. The next easy step is to recognize God.

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DAVID’s comment: More support for the size of gaps in the fossil record. The contamination of the Darwin theory of tiny steps has caused scientists to misinterpret fossils. With newer methods of analysis and open minds, the truth appears. Gould is getting more support. Changes of this type require multiple coordinated mutations, not likely by chance. Advanced design planning is required, obviously. This is not epigenetic adaptation but major body form change all at once.
DAVID’s comment (under “vicious venoms”): Think about it. The wasps have a very complex lifestyle which involves turning prey into zombies for their larvae to feast on. And just the right single mutation changes gene expression to make just the right brain venom to get just the right zombie control. All by chance? Never!

I agree with most of these comments, but as usual I would like to balance them against your own theories. Do you, then, believe that 3.8 billion years ago your God provided the first cells with programmes for Lethiscus’s transition from water to land and for the wasp’s venomous lifestyle (along with programmes for the few billion other species, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct)? And all these programmes were passed down through countless generations of cells and cell communities (organisms) and all the different environments until the right time and place arrived – also preprogrammed, or left to chance? - for pre-Lethy and pre-Waspy to switch on their own particular programme? And do you believe that your God specially designed all these individual programmes (or personally dabbled the changes) in order to keep life going (= balance of nature) until he could fulfil his one and only purpose of producing Homo sapiens? Or is it just possible that he gave them and the rest the means of working out their own ways of life and of adjusting their bodies accordingly?

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DAVID’s comment: More support for the size of gaps in the fossil record. The contamination of the Darwin theory of tiny steps has caused scientists to misinterpret fossils. With newer methods of analysis and open minds, the truth appears. Gould is getting more support. Changes of this type require multiple coordinated mutations, not likely by chance. Advanced design planning is required, obviously. This is not epigenetic adaptation but major body form change all at once.
DAVID’s comment (under “vicious venoms”): Think about it. The wasps have a very complex lifestyle which involves turning prey into zombies for their larvae to feast on. And just the right single mutation changes gene expression to make just the right brain venom to get just the right zombie control. All by chance? Never!

dhw: I agree with most of these comments, but as usual I would like to balance them against your own theories. Do you, then, believe that 3.8 billion years ago your God provided the first cells with programmes for Lethiscus’s transition from water to land and for the wasp’s venomous lifestyle (along with programmes for the few billion other species, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct)? And all these programmes were passed down through countless generations of cells and cell communities (organisms) and all the different environments until the right time and place arrived – also preprogrammed, or left to chance? - for pre-Lethy and pre-Waspy to switch on their own particular programme? And do you believe that your God specially designed all these individual programmes (or personally dabbled the changes) in order to keep life going (= balance of nature) until he could fulfil his one and only purpose of producing Homo sapiens? Or is it just possible that he gave them and the rest the means of working out their own ways of life and of adjusting their bodies accordingly?

I seems you agree that design is required, based on the beginning sentence of your comment. then you skirt the main issue by asking me again about my theories. My theories say design is required. That demands a planning mind, a mind you don't accept, so you skirt the issue by attacking my theories. I don't know how God did it, but He managed evolution and produced humans, the complex pinnacle of evolution. The universe appears created in the Big Bang. It evolved to produce an ideal Earth for life. Life's appearance is against all odds and according to Paul Davies looks like a miracle. Then humans appear with consciousness as the only organisms to have it. All of this requires planning by a mind at work. You deny this, but admit it might be. This is where we are in our discussion and where we will remain, unless you realize my view is logical.

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dhw: I agree with most of these comments, but as usual I would like to balance them against your own theories. Do you, then, believe that 3.8 billion years ago your God provided the first cells with programmes for Lethiscus’s transition from water to land and for the wasp’s venomous lifestyle (along with programmes for the few billion other species, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct)? And all these programmes were passed down through countless generations of cells and cell communities (organisms) and all the different environments until the right time and place arrived – also preprogrammed, or left to chance? - for pre-Lethy and pre-Waspy to switch on their own particular programme? And do you believe that your God specially designed all these individual programmes (or personally dabbled the changes) in order to keep life going (= balance of nature) until he could fulfil his one and only purpose of producing Homo sapiens? Or is it just possible that he gave them and the rest the means of working out their own ways of life and of adjusting their bodies accordingly?

DAVID: I seems you agree that design is required, based on the beginning sentence of your comment. then you skirt the main issue by asking me again about my theories. My theories say design is required. […] All of this requires planning by a mind at work. You deny this, but admit it might be. This is where we are in our discussion and where we will remain, unless you realize my view is logical.

I have, from the very beginning of our discussions, accepted the logicality of your theory that “design is required”. It is one of two main reasons why I cannot embrace atheism. However, your theories do not stop there, and there is no “skirting” of that main issue when I question the credibility of your guesses concerning your God’s motives for and methods of designing life. (I assume, from the lack of any objection, that you accept the accuracy of the above summary.) I ended with a straightforward question which summarizes an alternative theory, but which you have repeatedly rejected although you have admitted that it fits in perfectly with the history of life as we know it, and does not in any way exclude your theory of design or the existence of your God. I think this is important in order to bring out some of the the implications and indeed the problems arising from your understandable emphasis on design.

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dhw: I agree with most of these comments, but as usual I would like to balance them against your own theories. Do you, then, believe that 3.8 billion years ago your God provided the first cells with programmes for Lethiscus’s transition from water to land and for the wasp’s venomous lifestyle (along with programmes for the few billion other species, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct)? And all these programmes were passed down through countless generations of cells and cell communities (organisms) and all the different environments until the right time and place arrived – also preprogrammed, or left to chance? - for pre-Lethy and pre-Waspy to switch on their own particular programme? And do you believe that your God specially designed all these individual programmes (or personally dabbled the changes) in order to keep life going (= balance of nature) until he could fulfil his one and only purpose of producing Homo sapiens? Or is it just possible that he gave them and the rest the means of working out their own ways of life and of adjusting their bodies accordingly?

DAVID: I seems you agree that design is required, based on the beginning sentence of your comment. then you skirt the main issue by asking me again about my theories. My theories say design is required. […] All of this requires planning by a mind at work. You deny this, but admit it might be. This is where we are in our discussion and where we will remain, unless you realize my view is logical.

dhw: I have, from the very beginning of our discussions, accepted the logicality of your theory that “design is required”. It is one of two main reasons why I cannot embrace atheism. However, your theories do not stop there, and there is no “skirting” of that main issue when I question the credibility of your guesses concerning your God’s motives for and methods of designing life. (I assume, from the lack of any objection, that you accept the accuracy of the above summary.) I ended with a straightforward question which summarizes an alternative theory, but which you have repeatedly rejected although you have admitted that it fits in perfectly with the history of life as we know it, and does not in any way exclude your theory of design or the existence of your God. I think this is important in order to bring out some of the the implications and indeed the problems arising from your understandable emphasis on design.

OK, I've studied your question again of organisms in full control of all advances in evolution. I've admitted it possibly is true, but it has enormous problems for the agnostic. 1) If God gave a complete mechanism for evolution to all organisms, then God is really in control and exists. 2) From a practical standpoint it implies an enormous software available from the beginning of life to accomplish eh complex planning for the gaps in evolution and its necessary responses to environmental challenges. 3) It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness. 4) It ignores the obvious teleology presented by the history (Nagel). There is no need for humans to appear. The historical tiny preparations for bipedalism go back 37 million years and offer no survival advantage to explain them, but teleology does.

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DAVID: OK, I've studied your question again of organisms in full control of all advances in evolution. I've admitted it possibly is true, but it has enormous problems for the agnostic.

Thank you for this reasoned approach. I will begin my reply by acknowledging as always that it is a hypothesis for which there is no more evidence than there is for your own.

1)If God gave a complete mechanism for evolution to all organisms, then God is really in control and exists.

I am not proposing a “complete mechanism” for evolution, but an autonomous, inventive intelligence potentially enabling individual cell communities (organisms) to restructure themselves in accordance with environmental demands or opportunities. The mechanism is not preprogrammed for any particular changes, or to fail or succeed (99% of species have died out). If God gave cell communities organisms this autonomous mechanism, yes, he exists, but no he has left “control” to the organisms themselves and the ever changing environment.

This criticism is applicable to your own hypothesis, but not to mine! Yours is the unbelievably enormous software for all species, lifestyles, saltations, environmental changes for the last 3.8 billion years. In mine there is no complex advance planning, but an endless sequence and variety of individual responses (successful or unsuccessful) to environmental conditions.

3)It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness.

No, consciousness is an essential component of the mechanism which in my theistic version has been supplied by God, but this must not be equated with human self-awareness. We KNOW that other cell communities (organisms) are sentient, react to the environment, take decisions, communicate etc. These are all attributes of consciousness, and the big unanswered question is to what extent the cell communities are capable of using their consciousness to create something new. I accept your scepticism, but not your outright dismissal.

I do not accept your “obvious” anthropocentric teleology. There was no “need” for ANY multicellular organism to appear, since bacteria have done very nicely. There is no evidence that early “tiny preparations” for bipedalism offered no advantages. Malassé conjectures that even early hominins “may have been capable of conceptual and creative innovations”. The history shows hominins – just like pre-whales – developing stage by stage towards an optimum form. The “teleology” is survival and/or improvement. However, the theistic form of my hypothesis also leaves room for God to dabble. I do not deny that our extraordinary degree of consciousness sets us apart from our fellow animals, and I could imagine your God deciding to tweak a bit here and a bit there to get something really special. But I can’t imagine him preprogramming the first cells with the whole of evolution, including itsy-bitsy “preparations” for the one species he wanted all along.

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DAVID: OK, I've studied your question again of organisms in full control of all advances in evolution. I've admitted it possibly is true, but it has enormous problems for the agnostic.

dhw: Thank you for this reasoned approach. I will begin my reply by acknowledging as always that it is a hypothesis for which there is no more evidence than there is for your own.

1)If God gave a complete mechanism for evolution to all organisms, then God is really in control and exists.

I am not proposing a “complete mechanism” for evolution, but an autonomous, inventive intelligence potentially enabling individual cell communities (organisms) to restructure themselves in accordance with environmental demands or opportunities.

You have avoided again the complex planning to explain the gaps in evolution. All existing evidence does not find the capacity to plan to that degree.

dhw: 2)From a practical standpoint it implies an enormous software available from the beginning of life to accomplish eh complex planning for the gaps in evolution and its necessary responses to environmental challenges.

dhw: This criticism is applicable to your own hypothesis, but not to mine! Yours is the unbelievably enormous software for all species, lifestyles, saltations, environmental changes for the last 3.8 billion years. In mine there is no complex advance planning, but an endless sequence and variety of individual responses (successful or unsuccessful) to environmental conditions.

Back to itty-bitty steps, no evidence just gaps. Unbelievably enormous software, from God, why not?

dhw: 3)It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness.

No, consciousness is an essential component of the mechanism which in my theistic version has been supplied by God, but this must not be equated with human self-awareness. We KNOW that other cell communities (organisms) are sentient, react to the environment, take decisions, communicate etc. These are all attributes of consciousness, and the big unanswered question is to what extent the cell communities are capable of using their consciousness to create something new. I accept your scepticism, but not your outright dismissal.

My outright dismissal continues. Shapiro's bacteria make simple responses in their DNA modifications, and remain bacteria.

dhw: 4) It ignores the obvious teleology presented by the history (Nagel). There is no need for humans to appear. The historical tiny preparations for bipedalism go back 37 million years and offer no survival advantage to explain them, but teleology does.

I do not accept your “obvious” anthropocentric teleology. There was no “need” for ANY multicellular organism to appear, since bacteria have done very nicely. There is no evidence that early “tiny preparations” for bipedalism offered no advantages.

Did you carefully look at the tiny alterations? It is the same animal living the same lifestyle!

dhw: Malassé conjectures that even early hominins “may have been capable of conceptual and creative innovations”. The history shows hominins – just like pre-whales – developing stage by stage towards an optimum form.

The 'stages' are huge gaps in brain size and bipedal alterations of the skeleton. Of course early hominins had concepts and innovations. You are again tying mind to the physical. The hominins did not will themselves into something better. They did not know what they did not know!

dhw: However, the theistic form of my hypothesis also leaves room for God to dabble. I do not deny that our extraordinary degree of consciousness sets us apart from our fellow animals, and I could imagine your God deciding to tweak a bit here and a bit there to get something really special. But I can’t imagine him preprogramming the first cells with the whole of evolution, including itsy-bitsy “preparations” for the one species he wanted all along.

As a non-believer, thank you for the concession to dabbling. It must be pre-program or dabble.

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dhw: Thank you for this reasoned approach. I will begin my reply by acknowledging as always that it is a hypothesis for which there is no more evidence than there is for your own.

1)If God gave a complete mechanism for evolution to all organisms, then God is really in control and exists.
Dhw: I am not proposing a “complete mechanism” for evolution, but an autonomous, inventive intelligence potentially enabling individual cell communities (organisms) to restructure themselves in accordance with environmental demands or opportunities.
DAVID: You have avoided again the complex planning to explain the gaps in evolution. All existing evidence does not find the capacity to plan to that degree.

I keep repeating that the mechanism is responsive – no complex planning involved. At one point you agreed that your God may have worked through responsive dabbling – again, no advanced planning involved. But you hurriedly withdrew your agreement the next day by claiming that responsive dabbling also meant advanced planning! (See the “whale” thread for your latest variation on the subject.) As regards evidence, I have repeatedly acknowledged that there is no more evidence for my hypothesis than there is for yours, as at the top of this post.

2)From a practical standpoint it implies an enormous software available from the beginning of life to accomplish eh complex planning for the gaps in evolution and its necessary responses to environmental challenges.
dhw: This criticism is applicable to your own hypothesis, but not to mine! Yours is the unbelievably enormous software for all species, lifestyles, saltations, environmental changes for the last 3.8 billion years. In mine there is no complex advance planning, but an endless sequence and variety of individual responses (successful or unsuccessful) to environmental conditions.
DAVID: Back to itty-bitty steps, no evidence just gaps. Unbelievably enormous software, from God, why not?

My hypothesis says nothing about itty-bitty steps. I accept the concept of saltations. If you say “why not?” to an unbelievable hypothesis, I can say “why not?” to a hypothesis which at least is an extension of scientific fact (there IS a mechanism whereby organisms rapidly change themselves in order to adapt to new conditions), and which draws on the conclusions – albeit controversial – of certain eminent experts in the field, who claim that cells/cell communities are sentient, intelligent, decision-making, cognitive beings.

3)It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness.
Dhw: No, consciousness is an essential component of the mechanism which in my theistic version has been supplied by God, but this must not be equated with human self-awareness. […] I accept your scepticism, but not your outright dismissal.
DAVID: My outright dismissal continues. Shapiro's bacteria make simple responses in their DNA modifications, and remain bacteria.

And he calls this “large organisms chauvinism”. In any case, your objection was wrong. My hypothesis does not require the mechanism to create consciousness. In my theistic version, your God has already supplied the consciousness.

4) It ignores the obvious teleology presented by the history (Nagel). There is no need for humans to appear. The historical tiny preparations for bipedalism go back 37 million years and offer no survival advantage to explain them, but teleology does.
dhw: I do not accept your “obvious” anthropocentric teleology. There was no “need” for ANY multicellular organism to appear, since bacteria have done very nicely. There is no evidence that early “tiny preparations” for bipedalism offered no advantages.
DAVID: Did you carefully look at the tiny alterations? It is the same animal living the same lifestyle!

Then the tiny alterations are all the more incomprehensible. I thought you believed in saltations, not the itty-bitty steps you ridicule in your first response. My comment was based on Malassé’s conjectures, as below.

dhw: Malassé conjectures that even early hominins “may have been capable of conceptual and creative innovations”. The history shows hominins – just like pre-whales – developing stage by stage towards an optimum form.
DAVID: The 'stages' are huge gaps in brain size and bipedal alterations of the skeleton. Of course early hominins had concepts and innovations. You are again tying mind to the physical. The hominins did not will themselves into something better. They did not know what they did not know!

It is you who are tying mind to the physical by insisting that the physical gives rise to mental concepts. Every invention is the result of a mind producing a concept that had not been known before. You are arguing that every new concept resulted from an expansion of the brain. You may be right. But if you believe the mind lives on independently of the brain, the process has to be the other way round.

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DAVID: You have avoided again the complex planning to explain the gaps in evolution. All existing evidence does not find the capacity to plan to that degree.

dhw: I keep repeating that the mechanism is responsive – no complex planning involved. At one point you agreed that your God may have worked through responsive dabbling – again, no advanced planning involved.

I have idea what your concept is, but it makes no sense. You have declared that you accept design as a requirement and it stops you from being an atheist, but you deny the need for planning. What is design but advanced planning?

> DAVID: Back to itty-bitty steps, no evidence just gaps. Unbelievably enormous software, from God, why not?

dhw: My hypothesis says nothing about itty-bitty steps. I accept the concept of saltations.

Saltations are full-blown actuated designs, from plans! As I interpret it, the only way your concept might work is by tentative tries, some success and some failures until it is gotten right and working.

DAVID: The 'stages' are huge gaps in brain size and bipedal alterations of the skeleton. Of course early hominins had concepts and innovations. You are again tying mind to the physical. The hominins did not will themselves into something better. They did not know what they did not know!

dhw: It is you who are tying mind to the physical by insisting that the physical gives rise to mental concepts. Every invention is the result of a mind producing a concept that had not been known before. You are arguing that every new concept resulted from an expansion of the brain. You may be right. But if you believe the mind lives on independently of the brain, the process has to be the other way round.

You are again equating life/brain/ consciousness and afterlife/consciousness. That is two different circumstances. I view them as separate circumstances, with different conditions.

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DAVID: You have avoided again the complex planning to explain the gaps in evolution. All existing evidence does not find the capacity to plan to that degree.
dhw: I keep repeating that the mechanism is responsive – no complex planning involved. At one point you agreed that your God may have worked through responsive dabbling – again, no advanced planning involved.
DAVID: I have idea what your concept is, but it makes no sense. You have declared that you accept design as a requirement and it stops you from being an atheist, but you deny the need for planning. What is design but advanced planning?

The alternatives that you rightly present are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. If an organism adapts to a changed environment (response) it does so by design and not by chance and not by advanced planning. I am proposing that innovation proceeds in the same way as adaptation, by responding to the needs or opportunities presented by the environment, and not by planning before the environment changes. I agree that there is no evidence they are capable of producing innovations, and that is why it is a hypothesis, like your divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme and dabbling.

DAVID: Back to itty-bitty steps, no evidence just gaps. Unbelievably enormous software, from God, why not?
dhw: My hypothesis says nothing about itty-bitty steps. I accept the concept of saltations.
DAVID: Saltations are full-blown actuated designs, from plans! As I interpret it, the only way your concept might work is by tentative tries, some success and some failures until it is gotten right and working.

Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?

DAVID: The 'stages' are huge gaps in brain size and bipedal alterations of the skeleton. Of course early hominins had concepts and innovations. You are again tying mind to the physical. The hominins did not will themselves into something better. They did not know what they did not know!
dhw: It is you who are tying mind to the physical by insisting that the physical gives rise to mental concepts. Every invention is the result of a mind producing a concept that had not been known before. You are arguing that every new concept resulted from an expansion of the brain. You may be right. But if you believe the mind lives on independently of the brain, the process has to be the other way round.
DAVID: You are again equating life/brain/ consciousness and afterlife/consciousness. That is two different circumstances. I view them as separate circumstances, with different conditions.

They are different circumstances, because when you are dead you no longer have a brain. That does not mean the brain does the thinking during life and the mind only starts thinking when you are dead! (See the “big brain” thread.)

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DAVID: I have idea what your concept is, but it makes no sense. You have declared that you accept design as a requirement and it stops you from being an atheist, but you deny the need for planning. What is design but advanced planning?

dhw: The alternatives that you rightly present are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. If an organism adapts to a changed environment (response) it does so by design and not by chance and not by advanced planning. I am proposing that innovation proceeds in the same way as adaptation, by responding to the needs or opportunities presented by the environment, and not by planning before the environment changes.

Adaptation is not speciation, which is the core issue about gaps, and I'm not discussing environment, since speciation can occur with or without it changing. The giant phenotypic changes seen in speciation require advanced planning to coordinate all the new different parts. That is design!

DAVID: Saltations are full-blown actuated designs, from plans! As I interpret it, the only way your concept might work is by tentative tries, some success and some failures until it is gotten right and working.

dhw: Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?

It is my God, not your non-existent God, who produces new species with or without environmental change. Yes, it an be on autopilot.

DAVID: You are again equating life/brain/ consciousness and afterlife/consciousness. That is two different circumstances. I view them as separate circumstances, with different conditions.

dhw: They are different circumstances, because when you are dead you no longer have a brain. That does not mean the brain does the thinking during life and the mind only starts thinking when you are dead!

Twisting my concept again! The brain operates using my consciousness during life, releases it at death where consciousness continues to operate on its own. Example: In NDE's when the brain revives it learns what the NDE contained as experiences from the returning consciousness.

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I am juxtaposing various posts here and elsewhere in order to fit them under more appropriate headings:

DAVID: Adaptation is not speciation, which is the core issue about gaps, and I'm not discussing environment, since speciation can occur with or without it changing. The giant phenotypic changes seen in speciation require advanced planning to coordinate all the new different parts. That is design!

Once more, the alternatives are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. An action can be purposeful (by design) without being planned in advance, as is the case with adaptation. I am not saying that speciation is the same as adaptation. My hypothesis is that the same mechanism may be able to innovate. NOBODY knows how speciation took place, and so any explanation – including your divine 3.8-billion-year computer programme for every innovation - can only be hypothetical.

DAVID: Saltations are full-blown actuated designs, from plans! As I interpret it, the only way your concept might work is by tentative tries, some success and some failures until it is gotten right and working.
dhw: Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?
DAVID: It is my God, not your non-existent God, who produces new species with or without environmental change. Yes, it can be on autopilot.

I don’t know what you mean by “it can be on autopilot”. You gave me a slightly different answer on the “whale” thread:
DAVID: God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation, and it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to environmental change. Saltations are planned design.

I’m happy to accept that saltations don’t have to be tied to environmental change. But I’m focusing on when they are – e.g. in response to an increase in oxygen. You presumably agree, then, that your God is capable of producing a species change in response to environmental change (though it doesn’t have to be). My point, which I made in a previous post, is that the matter in dispute is therefore not whether saltations must be planned in advance of environmental change. If God can do it in response, the question is whether cell communities have the know-how to do it too. You say they haven’t, but that is not the same as saying the changes have to be planned in advance. I suspect that very few naturalists would insist that the movement of pre-whales from land to water with its eight stages of saltations had to be preprogrammed by God 3.8 billion years ago.

DAVID (under “big brain size”): But you don't want to accept God. If you accepted what I present as 'evidence' you would have to accept God. So be it. We'll continue the debate.[
dhw: Irrelevant when our discussion is not over the existence of God but over his motives and methods. You constantly try to divert attention away from the self-confessed senselessness of your anthropocentric evolutionary hypothesis. (“If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense.”)
DAVID: It doesn't have to make sense if one is blindly faithful. I'm trying to make some sense of it with you, but you are blinded to the faith side of the issue.

Of course blind faith dispenses with sense. I am trying to make sense of it, but now you are telling me that it doesn’t have to make sense if one is blind, and somehow this makes ME blind!

DAVID: Creation of consciousness in the pinnacle of evolution (H. sapiens) is an obvious purpose. Its development is not explained otherwise. And you deny chance! God might want to be able to communicate with His creations.

Nice to see you humanizing your God again as you search for a motive, and I don’t have a problem with that, or with human consciousness being some kind of pinnacle, or with the denial of chance. I have even allowed for all this in my own hypothesis of cellular intelligence, with the possibility of a divine dabble. What bothers me is your blind faith in your theory that 3.8 billion years ago your God planned in advance every single species in the history of evolution, all for the sake of just one species, and he stuffed all these programmes into the very first cells. Now you’ve even dispensed with the alternative of dabbling!

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dhw: Once more, the alternatives are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. An action can be purposeful (by design) without being planned in advance, as is the case with adaptation. I am not saying that speciation is the same as adaptation.

Planning means to design for an advance. My point is the gaps in fossils require advanced design (planning) to be viable and work in the newly advanced form. I think you are playing with words. Speciation is a gap. Adaptation is the same species, slightly changed.

dhw: Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?

DAVID: It is my God, not your non-existent God, who produces new species with or without environmental change. Yes, it can be on autopilot.

dhw: I don’t know what you mean by “it can be on autopilot”.

"Autopilot": fully planned from the beginning, the 3.8 billion year old blueprint.

dhw: I suspect that very few naturalists would insist that the movement of pre-whales from land to water with its eight stages of saltations had to be preprogrammed by God 3.8 billion years ago.

Most naturalists probably avoid God in their scientific pronouncements.

DAVID: Creation of consciousness in the pinnacle of evolution (H. sapiens) is an obvious purpose. Its development is not explained otherwise. And you deny chance! God might want to be able to communicate with His creations.

dhw: Nice to see you humanizing your God again as you search for a motive, and I don’t have a problem with that, or with human consciousness being some kind of pinnacle, or with the denial of chance. I have even allowed for all this in my own hypothesis of cellular intelligence, with the possibility of a divine dabble. What bothers me is your blind faith in your theory that 3.8 billion years ago your God planned in advance every single species in the history of evolution, all for the sake of just one species, and he stuffed all these programmes into the very first cells. Now you’ve even dispensed with the alternative of dabbling!

it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith! I haven't done away with dabbling. I'm reconsidering its role and importance.

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dhw: Once more, the alternatives are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. An action can be purposeful (by design) without being planned in advance, as is the case with adaptation. I am not saying that speciation is the same as adaptation.
DAVID: Planning means to design for an advance. My point is the gaps in fossils require advanced design (planning) to be viable and work in the newly advanced form. I think you are playing with words. Speciation is a gap. Adaptation is the same species, slightly changed.

I am fully aware of the difference between adaptation and speciation, and keep emphasizing that my proposal is that the same mechanism is responsible for both: namely, that the intelligent cell communities are able to change themselves. Adaptation (which often has to be rapid) is proven, but saltatory innovation is not, which is why it remains a hypothesis.

dhw: Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?
DAVID: It is my God, not your non-existent God, who produces new species with or without environmental change. Yes, it can be on autopilot.
dhw: I don’t know what you mean by “it can be on autopilot”.
DAVID: "Autopilot": fully planned from the beginning, the 3.8 billion year old blueprint.

Thank you. In that case, you did not answer my question, and now you have left out all the comments that followed. You wrote that “God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation”, in which case he is perfectly capable of organizing speciation in response to environmental change and without advanced planning. If he can do it, I suggest he is capable of creating a mechanism that can also do it.

dhw: I suspect that very few naturalists would insist that the movement of pre-whales from land to water with its eight stages of saltations had to be preprogrammed by God 3.8 billion years ago.
DAVID: Most naturalists probably avoid God in their scientific pronouncements.

And I suspect they also avoid insisting that every single species was preprogammed 3.8 billion years ago in order to keep life going until humans appeared.

dhw: What bothers me is your blind faith in your theory that 3.8 billion years ago your God planned in advance every single species in the history of evolution, all for the sake of just one species, and he stuffed all these programmes into the very first cells. […]
DAVID: ...it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith!

I can hardly forbid you to have blind faith in a theory you consider senseless, but by the same token you will have to allow atheists to have blind faith in their theory too, and yet you’ve written two excellent books in an attempt to tell them why they’re wrong. Are you now saying that we should not question anyone who has blind faith in a theory? Or is it only someone with blind faith in YOUR theory that shouldn’t be questioned?

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DAVID: Planning means to design for an advance. My point is the gaps in fossils require advanced design (planning) to be viable and work in the newly advanced form. I think you are playing with words. Speciation is a gap. Adaptation is the same species, slightly changed.

dhw: I am fully aware of the difference between adaptation and speciation, and keep emphasizing that my proposal is that the same mechanism is responsible for both: namely, that the intelligent cell communities are able to change themselves. Adaptation (which often has to be rapid) is proven, but saltatory innovation is not, which is why it remains a hypothesis.

You are again avoiding the issue of advanced planning for major changes, which the gaps represent. Your committees must be able to envision the future form to make the plans. That requires a mind which does not exist in clumps of cells. Your hypothesis has no basis.

DAVID: "Autopilot": fully planned from the beginning, the 3.8 billion year old blueprint.

dhw: Thank you. In that case, you did not answer my question, and now you have left out all the comments that followed. You wrote that “God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation”, in which case he is perfectly capable of organizing speciation in response to environmental change and without advanced planning. If he can do it, I suggest he is capable of creating a mechanism that can also do it.

We've agreed on this except, with the one difference that He provides the guidelines for the planning. Imagination of the future requires a mind who provides guidelines.

dhw: What bothers me is your blind faith in your theory that 3.8 billion years ago your God planned in advance every single species in the history of evolution, all for the sake of just one species, and he stuffed all these programmes into the very first cells. […]

DAVID: ...it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith!

dhw: I can hardly forbid you to have blind faith in a theory you consider senseless, but by the same token you will have to allow atheists to have blind faith in their theory too, and yet you’ve written two excellent books in an attempt to tell them why they’re wrong. Are you now saying that we should not question anyone who has blind faith in a theory? Or is it only someone with blind faith in YOUR theory that shouldn’t be questioned?

I'm not going to change my conclusions. You have a perfect right to object to them, even though you cannot accept that God exists and has managed evolution to produce humans.

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DAVID: You are again avoiding the issue of advanced planning for major changes, which the gaps represent. Your committees must be able to envision the future form to make the plans. That requires a mind which does not exist in clumps of cells. Your hypothesis has no basis.

You keep repeating the same mantra about “advanced planning”, and I keep repeating that I do not accept it. That is why I go on about the organismal changes which seem so obviously to RESULT from environmental change: pre-whales enter the water, fish come onto dry land, pre-humans descend from the trees to the plains, and all of their bodies undergo major changes enabling them to live in their new environment. I suggest that these major changes follow the same sequence as adaptations, in that they are RESPONSES to the environment and not divine preparations for it. Responses to new situations do not entail advance planning, but I agree that they require intelligence, which is why - unlike you - I am so unwilling to dismiss the findings of those experts in the field who inform us that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings.

dhw:. You wrote that “God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation”, in which case he is perfectly capable of organizing speciation in response to environmental change and without advanced planning. If he can do it, I suggest he is capable of creating a mechanism that can also do it.
DAVID: We've agreed on this except, with the one difference that He provides the guidelines for the planning. Imagination of the future requires a mind who provides guidelines.

Same again. Now you agree that God can produce saltations without advanced planning, but saltations require advanced planning! In my hypothesis there is no imagining of the future. There is response to a new present. If you think God can’t do it, then fair enough. If you think he can, then why do you think he can’t create a mechanism that will do the same, without his interference?

DAVID: ...it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith!
dhw: I can hardly forbid you to have blind faith in a theory you consider senseless, but by the same token you will have to allow atheists to have blind faith in their theory too, and yet you’ve written two excellent books in an attempt to tell them why they’re wrong. Are you now saying that we should not question anyone who has blind faith in a theory? Or is it only someone with blind faith in YOUR theory that shouldn’t be questioned?
DAVID: I'm not going to change my conclusions. You have a perfect right to object to them, even though you cannot accept that God exists and has managed evolution to produce humans.

I accept the possibility that God exists, but I cannot see – any more than you can – why he should design eight different stages of whale (plus a few million other anomalies) solely in order to keep life going until he can fulfil what you think is his one and only purpose of producing homo sapiens. The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.

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dhw: You keep repeating the same mantra about “advanced planning”, and I keep repeating that I do not accept it. That is why I go on about the organismal changes which seem so obviously to RESULT from environmental change: pre-whales enter the water, fish come onto dry land, pre-humans descend from the trees to the plains, and all of their bodies undergo major changes enabling them to live in their new environment. I suggest that these major changes follow the same sequence as adaptations, in that they are RESPONSES to the environment and not divine preparations for it. Responses to new situations do not entail advance planning, but I agree that they require intelligence, which is why - unlike you - I am so unwilling to dismiss the findings of those experts in the field who inform us that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings.

There is no way to cross the gulf between our theories. The scientific ID folks agree with me and even quote your favorite Shapiro. He is my favorite also.

DAVID: We've agreed on this except, with the one difference that He provides the guidelines for the planning. Imagination of the future requires a mind who provides guidelines.

dhw: Same again. Now you agree that God can produce saltations without advanced planning, but saltations require advanced planning! In my hypothesis there is no imagining of the future. There is response to a new present. If you think God can’t do it, then fair enough. If you think he can, then why do you think he can’t create a mechanism that will do the same, without his interference?

Saltations are large changes in form and function. There is no way to create them with coordination of function without advanced planning. You may imagine it, but I view it as impossible.
i]

DAVID: I'm not going to change my conclusions. You have a perfect right to object to them, even though you cannot accept that God exists and has managed evolution to produce humans.

dhw: I accept the possibility that God exists, but I cannot see – any more than you can – why he should design eight different stages of whale (plus a few million other anomalies) solely in order to keep life going until he can fulfil what you think is his one and only purpose of producing homo sapiens. The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.

So be it. I view my conclusions as logical.

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dhw: […] Responses to new situations do not entail advance planning, but I agree that they require intelligence, which is why - unlike you - I am so unwilling to dismiss the findings of those experts in the field who inform us that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings.
DAVID: There is no way to cross the gulf between our theories. The scientific ID folks agree with me and even quote your favorite Shapiro. He is my favorite also.

I don't know why ID scientists should be regarded as having a monopoly on the truth. In any case, do they really agree with your 3.8 billion-year-old divine computer programme for the whole of evolution? And if Shapiro is their favourite as well as yours, why would they and you resolutely dismiss his belief that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings?

dhw: You wrote that “God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation”, in which case he is perfectly capable of organizing speciation in response to environmental change and without advanced planning. If he can do it, I suggest he is capable of creating a mechanism that can also do it.

DAVID: We've agreed on this except, with the one difference that He provides the guidelines for the planning. Imagination of the future requires a mind who provides guidelines.

dhw: Now you agree that God can produce saltations without advanced planning, but saltations require advanced planning! In my hypothesis there is no imagining of the future. There is response to a new present. If you think God can’t do it, then fair enough. If you think he can, then why do you think he can’t create a mechanism that will do the same, without his interference?

DAVID: Saltations are large changes in form and function. There is no way to create them with coordination of function without advanced planning. You may imagine it, but I view it as impossible.

You agreed on June 30, as above, that your God could produce saltations at any time without advanced planning, but by July 1 it is impossible, even for God.

Earlier quotes: “If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense” and “It doesn’t have to make sense if one is blindly faithful.” But despite the fact that your theory doesn’t make sense and you must rely on blind faith, you regard it as logical.

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dhw: I don't know why ID scientists should be regarded as having a monopoly on the truth. In any case, do they really agree with your 3.8 billion-year-old divine computer programme for the whole of evolution? And if Shapiro is their favourite as well as yours, why would they and you resolutely dismiss his belief that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings?

I think they have the right approach to biological truth. they can make some DNA changes, hat is all which appear sentient, but are not.

DAVID: Saltations are large changes in form and function. There is no way to create them with coordination of function without advanced planning. You may imagine it, but I view it as impossible.

dhw: You agreed on June 30, as above, that your God could produce saltations at any time without advanced planning, but by July 1 it is impossible, even for God.

I just expanded on my concept of saltations for your edification. Pre-planning is always required and I assumed you would understand that from my previous explanations of understanding the implications of the future forms and functions.

dhw: The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.
DAVID: So be it. I view my conclusions as logical.

dhw: Earlier quotes: “If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense” and “It doesn’t have to make sense if one is blindly faithful.” But despite the fact that your theory doesn’t make sense and you must rely on blind faith, you regard it as logical.

That's faith for you!

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dhw: I don't know why ID scientists should be regarded as having a monopoly on the truth. In any case, do they really agree with your 3.8 billion-year-old divine computer programme for the whole of evolution? And if Shapiro is their favourite as well as yours, why would they and you resolutely dismiss his belief that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings?
DAVID: I think they have the right approach to biological truth. they can make some DNA changes, hat is all which appear sentient, but are not.

Of course you think that anyone who agrees with you has the right approach. You have no way of knowing if something that appears sentient is or is not sentient (plus cognitive, plus decision-making), and therefore at the very least you should respect Shapiro’s conclusions.

DAVID: Saltations are large changes in form and function. There is no way to create them with coordination of function without advanced planning. You may imagine it, but I view it as impossible.
dhw: You agreed on June 30...that your God could produce saltations at any time without advanced planning, but by July 1 it is impossible, even for God.
DAVID: I just expanded on my concept of saltations for your edification. Pre-planning is always required and I assumed you would understand that from my previous explanations of understanding the implications of the future forms and functions.

I am aware that your concept of saltations requires future planning, and am also aware that after much vacillation you decided that your God’s powers were not limited. Now apparently he is incapable of intervening (“dabbling”) in order to restructure organisms in response to environmental changes (i.e. without advanced planning). There is no consistency in your arguments.

dhw: The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.
DAVID: So be it. I view my conclusions as logical.
dhw: Earlier quotes: “If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense” and “It doesn’t have to make sense if one is blindly faithful.” But despite the fact that your theory doesn’t make sense and you must rely on blind faith, you regard it as logical.
DAVID: That's faith for you!

I have no problem with faith, but I do have a problem if someone claims that blind faith in a senseless theory is logical.

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dhw: Of course you think that anyone who agrees with you has the right approach. You have no way of knowing if something that appears sentient is or is not sentient (plus cognitive, plus decision-making), and therefore at the very least you should respect Shapiro’s conclusions.

I have reviewed Shapiro's findings and am allowed to reach my own conclusions as to what they mean. I've done this all throughout scientific findings.

I am aware that your concept of saltations requires future planning, and am also aware that after much vacillation you decided that your God’s powers were not limited. Now apparently he is incapable of intervening (“dabbling”) in order to restructure organisms in response to environmental changes (i.e. without advanced planning). There is no consistency in your arguments.

Another misinterpretation. A mind can look at the future, conceive of what is desired, and plan for it with time or in some cases rather instantaneously if the change is simple. God's mind can do it all. Coming down from trees requires structural changes to the skeleton. Must be planned. Entering an aquatic lifestyle has the same requirements. All saltations are large gaps in the fossil record, and must be planned.

dhw: I have no problem with faith, but I do have a problem if someone claims that blind faith in a senseless theory is logical.

Senseless to you.

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Tiny unicellular organisms mineralizing:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/new-fossils-push-back-earliest-single-celle...

"According to research published last week, life has been making its own hard parts for at least 810 million years, about 200 million years longer than previously thought. It’s the first occurrence of what scientists call biomineralization, and it could give us deeper insight into both the evolution of living things and Earth’s early climate.

***

"Cohen was in the Yukon studying microfossils from a 200-foot-thick section of lime, mudstone, and slate, and she suspected that they could have been formed by biological processes. These microfossils were originally discovered in the 1980s, when they were dated to the Neoproterozoic Era, about 250 million years prior to the Cambrian explosion. But scientists at the time were unable to determine the exact age of the fossils, nor were they able to discern whether they were crafted by geology or life itself.

***

"The minerals possibly served as an armor-like casing constructed by now-extinct organisms, though Cohen and her team did not find conclusive evidence of their function, nor did they find remnants of the cells themselves, which rarely preserve for so long. Cohen said these parts could have been a defense against a predation, since some single-celled organisms today use hard parts for protection. Plus, evidence in the fossil record suggests that predatory single-celled organisms would have existed at the same time as Cohen’s fossils.

"Shuhai Xiao, a paleobiologist at Virginia Tech who did not contribute to the paper, said it’s a reasonable hypothesis. “Organisms don’t make something just because there is material available,” Xiao said. “There must also be an ecological need.”

***

"The analysis also revealed that the minerals were composed of a particular flavor of phosphorus called hydroxylapatite, which is rarely found in oceanic single-celled organisms today. Cohen and her team found evidence in the rocks suggesting that the oceans at the time contained less oxygen than today. This provided a suitable environment for elevated phosphorus concentrations, which may have helped spur its use in biomineralization.

“'Hydroxylapatite is not very stable, so the preservation of the mineral in rocks of this age is remarkable,” Xiao said.

"The team was able to constrain the age of the fossils to an unusually narrow time-frame – 810 million years ago, give or take about 6 million years. As a result, Cohen thinks she’ll be able to find more fossils because she will only have to search a much narrower slice of the fossil record than before. “I was looking through a hundred million years of time before, and now I’m looking through ten million years,” she said.

***

"The new study leaves a few questions unanswered, and poses a few new ones of its own. For one, biomineralization has evolved several different times. This study illustrates how one branch of life gained the ability to make skeletal parts, but there are still several others to puzzle out. And then it blasts open a period of more than 200 million years in which scientists so far have found no evidence of biomineralization, a range of time that Cohen points out is as wide as that between the present day and the dawn of the dinosaurs.

“'We’re seeing a little bit of a mystery there,” Cohen said of the gap. They will now try to pinpoint when the shift from using phosphorus to using carbon occurred and find out what, if anything, organisms were making during that time. “That’s the big open question,” Cohen said."

Comment: Biomineralization certainly occurred in the Cambrian era starting 540 million years ago. What is found 810 million years ago is a very simple precursor, simpler than the Ediacarans which preceded the Cambrians.

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This long essay notes that purposeful activity by organisms and by their cells is not explained by DNA. Natural selection is passive, but all of this is ignored by materialists who try to explain evolution. Shades of Nagel in Mind and Cosmos.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-purposes-of-life

"Being “endowed with a purpose or project,” wrote biochemist Jacques Monod, is “essential to the very definition of living beings.” And according to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist and leading architect of the past century’s dominant evolutionary theory, “It would make no sense to talk of the purpose of adaptation of stars, mountains, or the laws of physics,” but “adaptedness of living beings is too obvious to be overlooked.... Living beings have an internal, or natural, teleology.”

***

"The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to what they call “materialism” or “naturalism.” The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of the goal-directed behavior described above — behavior that depends upon the apprehension of a meaningful world and that is easily associated with our own conscious and apparently immaterial perceptions, reasonings, and motivations to act.

***

"All biological activity, even at the molecular level, can be characterized as purposive and goal-directed. As a cell grows and divides, it marshals its molecular and structural resources with a remarkably skillful “wisdom.” It also demonstrates a well-directed, “willful” persistence in adjusting to disturbances. Everything leads toward fulfillment of the organism’s evident “purposes.”

***

"As the Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of biology Francisco Varela wrote: “The answer to the question of what status teleology should have in biology decides about the character of our whole theory of animate nature.”

"My own sense of the matter is that the question has yet to be fairly taken up within the core disciplines of biology. What appears certain is that as yet we have no secure answer to it. Even more important is what seems least recognized: to the degree that we lack understanding of the organism’s purposive life we also lack a respectable foundation for evolutionary theory.

***

"While DNA and its genes have been advertised as containing a program that explains the directive life of the organism, they appear to be not so much an explanation as an expression of that life. This emerges more clearly when we take a closer look at the performances in which DNA is caught up.

***

" The last decade, they say, has taught us that “gene expression is not merely controlled by the information contained in the DNA sequence,” but also by “higher-order” interactions and the features of nuclear organization and context.

"What this shows is that the idea of a DNA code with “controlling information” is a one-sided caricature. We are looking not at a code but at a play of animated cellular substance caught up in meaningful form. The moment-by-moment outcomes look more like balletic expression than like the results of a digital logic.

***

"The mechanistic, programmed organism is a deception. It turns out that nothing is controlled in the required way. The relevant processes — generally involving trillions of diffusible molecules making their way in a watery medium — remain “on track” only because the organism, as a unified center of agency, is being-at-work-staying-itself. It is wisely coordinating, redirecting, revising, and sustaining the overall form and coherence of countless interactions, including all those interactions involving what once was thought to be the explanatory program.

***

" Darwin’s biology does not deny — rather, it reaffirms — the immanent teleology displayed in the striving of each living being to fulfill its specific ends.... Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young — these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed.”

***

"Whatever role we imagine natural selection to play in generating functional adaptations such as hands and eyes, it does not account for the fact of end-directed behavior, which is inseparable from the fact of life itself. It relies on all the fundamental living activities that must already have been displayed in the very first organisms available for selection.

***

"All this usefully underscores a still more general problem — and source of perennial abuse — in evolutionary theory. At least part of the reason so many can easily imagine natural selection doing things to transform our understanding of teleology is that they can so easily imagine natural selection as an agent capable of doing things.

***

"The frequent references, in the literature, to the “mechanism of selection” bear witness to the beguiling influence of the term “natural selection,” which seems to refer to an act, or at least a function, of some specific power. “Natural selection” is a historical pattern, not a mechanism; (continued)

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Excerpts from the essay continued:

"Nothing could be more evident than that whatever happens under the name of natural selection must arise within the “natural history of life.” The phrase “natural selection” adds nothing at all to this reality. What it does do, with its connotations of agency, is make it easy to project certain philosophical prejudices upon the pattern — for example, the belief that we are looking at a blind evolutionary mechanism acting upon machine-organisms and capable, with remarkable facility, of creating the observed diversity of life.

***

" natural selection represents nothing other than the pattern of living activities within shifting environments. As an abstraction, it cannot even work with this pattern; it is just another name for it.

"We can now understand why the “two” problems of teleology — evolutionary origins and present functioning — are so readily conflated. Evolution is not a separate force or mechanism accounting for the origin of this or that feature of the pattern of life. It is that pattern, and the pattern alone bears the story of how organisms evolve new features. We understand life by studying life, not by picturing a vague mechanism capable of directing its course. There is no separate or second story. This is why the invocation of natural selection to explain the presence or functioning of teleological features ends up assuming, rather than explaining, the features under consideration. The attempt at a second story simply dissolves back into the only story there is.

***

"Having inherited mind and matter as the incommensurable products of Descartes’s cleaving stroke, the scientist today rightly concludes that something is badly awry. But, rather than going back and undoing that fateful stroke in order to find a different way forward, he meekly accepts both mind and matter from Descartes’s hand, and then decides he can be rid of the contradiction between them only by throwing away one of them.

"And so not only is the world badly riven, but essential aspects of its nature are discarded. Form as a causal principle disappears from view, and any attempt at acknowledging it is likely to be condemned as an appeal to vital forces or to discredited ancient philosophy. At the same time, attempts to explain form mechanistically end up being circular, since the form one is trying to explain also appears in the explanation.

***

"The attempt to sustain the materialistic view based on a single half of the crudely dichotomized Cartesian world is a sickness from which contemporary thought cannot seem to free itself. Yet biologists, like all scientists, inevitably acknowledge an undivided world in one way or another. This is why the organism’s well-directed forming and organizing activities provide the very principles by which biologists themselves define relevant fields of inquiry. Cells must divide, proteins must be synthesized, signals must be sent, received, and interpreted — all depending on local contexts and the needs of the organism as a whole. If the researcher does not have a well-formed narrative — an end-directed achievement — to investigate, he does not have a biological project, as opposed to a chemical or physical one.

***

"According to the late William Provine, a distinguished historian of biology and contributor to theoretical population genetics, “naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.” In particular: “No gods worth having exist; no life after death exists; no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; no ultimate meaning in life exists.” These conclusions, Provine claimed, “are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists” that they require little defense.

"Provine’s remark testifies to a science that has slipped its empirical moorings, unaware of its own biologically unsecured pretensions. Such unawareness is probably a prerequisite for his grandiose metaphysical pronouncements upon gods, death, ethics, and meaning. A similar unawareness seems to accompany the explanations of teleology we have heard.

"Evolution-based pronouncements have somehow become far too easy. When theorists can lightly pretend to have risen above the most enduring mysteries of life, making claims supposedly too obvious to require defense, then even questions central to evolution itself tend to disappear in favor of reigning prejudices. What is life? How can we understand the striving of organisms to sustain their own lives — a striving that seems altogether hidden to conventional modes of understanding? What makes for the integral unity and compelling “personality” of the living creature, and how can this personified unity be understood if we’re thinking in purely material and machine-like terms? Does it make sense to dismiss as illusory the compelling appearance of intelligent and intentional agency in organisms?

"It is evident enough that the answers to such questions could crucially alter even our most basic assumptions about evolution. But we have no answers. In the current theoretical milieu, we don’t even have the questions. What we do have is the seemingly miraculous agency of natural selection, substituting for the only agency we ever actually witness in nature, which is the agency of living beings."

Comment: Living organisms are more than DNA as a simple protein-producing code. Evolution and consciousness are not explained by materialistic science. Read the whole essay

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In the Ediacaran period these forms are found. How their lifestyle operated is not known, even whether they are plants or animals. They look nothing like the next Cambrian group:

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-big-shape-shifting-animals-dawn.html

"Why did life on Earth change from small to large when it did? Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have determined how some of the first large organisms, known as rangeomorphs, were able to grow up to two metres in height, by changing their body size and shape as they extracted nutrients from their surrounding environment.

"The results, reported in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, could also help explain how life on Earth, which once consisted only of microscopic organisms, changed so that huge organisms like dinosaurs and blue whales could ultimately evolve.

"Rangeomorphs were some of the earliest large organisms on Earth, existing during a time when most other forms of life were microscopic in size. Some rangeomorphs were only a few centimetres in height, while others were up to two metres tall.

"These organisms were ocean dwellers that lived during the Ediacaran period, between 635 and 541 million years ago. Their soft bodies were made up of branches, each with many smaller side branches, forming a geometric shape known as a fractal, which can be seen today in things like lungs, ferns and snowflakes.

"Since rangeomorphs don't resemble any modern organism, it's difficult to understand how they fed, grew or reproduced, let alone how they might link with any modern group. However, although they look somewhat like plants, scientists believe that they may have been some of the earliest animals to live on Earth.

***

"Their analysis shows the earliest evidence for nutrient-dependent growth in the fossil record. All organisms need nutrients to survive and grow, but nutrients can also dictate body size and shape. This is known as 'ecophenotypic plasticity.' Hoyal Cuthill and her co-author Professor Simon Conway Morris suggest that rangeomorphs not only show a strong degree of ecophenotypic plasticity, but that this provided a crucial advantage in a dramatically changing world. For example, rangeomorphs could rapidly "shape-shift", growing into a long, tapered shape if the seawater above them happened to have elevated levels of oxygen.

"During the Ediacaran, there seem to have been major changes in the Earth's oceans, which may have triggered growth, so that life on Earth suddenly starts getting much bigger," said Hoyal Cuthill. "It's probably too early to conclude exactly which geochemical changes in the Ediacaran oceans were responsible for the shift to large body sizes, but there are strong contenders, especially increased oxygen, which animals need for respiration."

"This change in ocean chemistry followed a large-scale ice age known as the Gaskiers glaciation. When nutrient levels in the ocean were low, they appear to have kept body sizes small. But with a geologically sudden increase in oxygen or other nutrients, much larger body sizes become possible, even in organisms with the same genetic makeup. This means that the sudden appearance of rangeomorphs at large size could have been a direct result of major changes in climate and ocean chemistry.

"However, while rangeomorphs were highly suited to their Ediacaran environment, conditions in the oceans continued to change and from about 541 million years ago the 'Cambrian Explosion' began - a period of rapid evolutionary development when most major animal groups first appeared in the fossil record. When the conditions changed, the rangeomorphs were doomed and nothing quite like them has been seen since.

Comment: They look like a dead end branch of evolution. The Cambrian gap continues and damages Darwin's theory.

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Another study of their internal parts using special techniques. Still not known if animal or vegetable:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141777-see-inside-the-580-million-year-old-creatu...

"Now, CT scans of a pair of unusual three-dimensional fossils found in Namibia are telling us more about the mysterious organisms. The two fossils are from a single 10-centimetre-tall Ediacaran species called Rangea. It is a member of an Ediacaran group called the rangeomorphs that looked a bit like large petals.

***

"From an initial examination of the same fossil in 2013, Sharp’s colleagues concluded that its six fern-like fronds looked like flat fins protruding out at equal distances from a central axis, like a starfruit with six segments.

"The new analysis updates that description. The scans shows that one of the three fronds had a three-dimensional shape, more like an inflated balloon than a flat fin. The other two fronds are flatter, but probably only because they were squashed during fossilisation.

"Sharp and her colleagues think all six fronds may have been inflated like long balloons. They may even have touched one another – meaning that a horizontal section through Rangea would have looked more like a slice through an orange rather than one through a starfruit.
“Our work supports a lifestyle of absorption of nutrients through membranes inflated to the maximum, increasing the surface area across which these organisms seemed to feed,” says Sharp.

"The CT scans also confirm that Rangea had a cone-shaped channel running up its central trunk. The lower part of this channel seems to be filled with sediment of a different composition from the sediment filling the rest of the fossil. Sharp says it was probably present in Rangea even when the organism was alive, helping to support the creature like a primitive skeleton.

“'These beautiful, three-dimensional Ediacaran fossils are comparatively rare,” says Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill at the University of Cambridge. “There’s still so much to discover about what these creatures were and how they lived, and detailed information on their anatomy is very valuable.”

"However, even with these new insights, it is still unclear what the Ediacarans were. “They may or may not be animals – we can’t say from this study,” says Sharp. “But they are the first of the truly large, multicellular organisms that radiated broadly before the first true animals evolved.'”

Comment: These very simple organisms lived At the bottom of seas just prior to the appearance of the earliest complex Cambrian organisms. A huge gap in form and function still exists at this point in the past. Darwin hoped it would be explained as it was exactly opposite to his theory of a gradualism type of evolution. Gradualism at any point in evolution has never been found.

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A strange form of plasmid life in Antarctica suggests the origin of viruses when life appeared:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2144518-antarctic-mystery-microbe-could-tell-us-wh...

"Biologists have puzzled for decades about where viruses come from. Are they an older, simpler form of life – or are they parasites that arose only once cells had evolved?

"Ricardo Cavicchioli of the University of New South Wales in Australia and his colleagues have found a microorganism in the lakes of the Rauer Islands off the coast of Antarctica that might shed some light on the question. The organism, which they named Halorubrum lacusprofundi R1S1, is an archaean: a kind of single-celled organism that looks like a bacterium, but actually belongs to a separate domain of life.

"The group knew that viruses often play an important role in Antarctic ecosystems, so team member Susanne Erdmann searched for viruses inside the organism’s cells. She found something unexpected: a plasmid.

"Plasmids are small fragments of DNA, often circular, that reside in living cells. They are not part of the cell’s main genome, and can replicate themselves independently. Often, a plasmid will carry a gene that is somehow useful to the cell: for instance, antibiotic resistance genes are sometimes found on plasmids.

"The plasmid Erdmann found, which the team calls “pR1SE”, is unusual. The genes it carries allow it to make vesicles – essentially bubbles made of lipids – that enclose it in a protective layer. Encased in its protective bubble, pR1SE can leave its host cell to seek out new hosts.

"In other words, pR1SE looks and acts a lot like a virus. But it carries genes that are found only on plasmids, and lacks any telltale virus genes. It is a plasmid with the attributes of a virus. “There really are no major distinctions left between plasmids and viruses,” says Cavicchioli.

"He suggests that viruses could have evolved from plasmids like pR1SE, by acquiring genes from their host that allowed them to make a hard capsid shell rather than a soft vesicle.
This lines up with existing evidence on the origin of viruses.

"There have been three leading ideas: either viruses originated before cells, or some cells evolved simpler forms and became viruses, or genes “escaped” from cells and became viruses. This third escape hypothesis has gathered support in recent years: in March 2017, a study suggested that many capsid proteins can be traced back to proteins found in cells.

"The evidence implies that such escapes began early in the history of life, says Patrick Forterre of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “Traditionally the escape hypothesis has been associated with the idea that viruses are recent,” he says. “Now the escape hypothesis should be viewed in a broader context.” The first viruses may have escaped from some of the first cells on Earth."

Comment: Interesting. An other domain of early life. Doesn't help explain the origin of life but does point to an origin for viruses.

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A new article on how to explain why they exist. I don't think it does but it proposes the problems with the issue::

https://phys.org/news/2020-02-mathematical-reveals-major-groups-evolution.html

"The origins of many major groups of organisms in the fossil record seem to lie shrouded in obscurity. Indeed, one of the most famous examples, the flowering plants, was called "an abominable mystery" by Darwin. Many modern groups appear abruptly, and their predecessors—if there are any—tend to be few in number and vanish quickly from the fossil record shortly afterwards. Conversely, once groups are established, they tend to be dominant for long periods of time until interrupted by the so-called "mass extinctions" such as the one at the end of the Cretaceous period some 66 million years ago.

"Such patterns appear surprising, and often seem to be contradicted by the results from "molecular clocks"—using calibrated rates of change of molecules found in living organisms to estimate when they started to diverge from each other. How can this conflict be resolved, and what can we learn from it?

"In a paper, Graham Budd, Uppsala University, and Richard Mann, University of Leeds, present a novel mathematical model for how the origin of modern groups based on a so-called "birth-death" process of speciation and extinction. Birth-death models show how random extinction and speciation events give rise to large-scale patterns of diversity through time. Budd and Mann show that the ancestral forms of modern groups are typically rather few in number, and once they give rise to the modern group, they can be expected to quickly go extinct. The modern group, conversely, tends to diversify very quickly and thus swamp out the ancestral forms. Thus, rather surprisingly, living organisms capture a great percentage of all the diversity there has ever been.

"The only exceptions to these patterns are caused by the "mass extinctions," of which there have been at least five throughout history, which can massively delay the origin of the modern group, and thus extend the longevity and the diversity of the ancestral forms, called "stem groups." A good example of this is the enormous diversity of the dinosaurs, which properly considered are stem-group birds. The meteorite impact at the end of the Cretaceous some 66 million years ago killed off nearly all of them, apart from a tiny group that survived and flourished to give rise to the more than 10,000 species of living birds.

"The new model explains many puzzling features about the fossil record and suggests that it often records a relatively accurate picture of the origin of major groups. This in turn suggests that increased scrutiny should be paid to molecular clock models when they significantly disagree with what the fossil record might be telling us."

Comment: All this article does is expose the problems about gaps and remind us the fossil record is to be trusted! Note my bold. Early types of hominin and early homo groups were few in number, and only sapiens grew in number and diversified quickly. Why? The very superior brain we were given solved problems quickly as new concepts were rapidly developed, once we learned to use it. It did not come with the advanced concepts builtin and early use was obviously quite simple. For example, modern Calculus is less than 350 years old, but there is much evidence of early approaches from 1,300 BC.

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Evolution: Bilaterians (Introduction)

Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

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Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

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Evolution: New Ediacarans

Evolution: New Ediacarans

Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

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Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

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Evolution: Bilaterians & Ediacarans

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Correction: David believes God speciates major changes

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Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from?

Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from?

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Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from?

Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from?

Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from?

Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from?

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real; second look

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: gaps are very real

Evolution: biomineralization 810 million years ago

Evolution: purpose not explained

Evolution: purpose not explained; Part 2

Evolution: pre-Cambrian rangeomorphs

Evolution: pre-Cambrian rangeomorphs

Evolution: posible origin of viruses

Evolution: gaps are very real