Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 03, 2013, 15:40 (4223 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: So let's have a straight answer: do you still believe that your God planned and preprogrammed the human branch of the evolutionary bush from the very start? -DAVID: Simply, yes. But there was Cambrian dabbling along the way.-If humans were preprogrammed from the very start, then every single innovation from bacteria onwards had to be preprogrammed. Dabbling would not be required unless the programme went wrong (= incompetent programme design). Therefore Cambrian dabbling and any innovation triggered by random environmental changes must have been irrelevant to the human branch of the evolutionary bush. So during the Cambrian Explosion, for instance, your God deliberately created both extinct and surviving organisms on the non-human branches (= dabbling), while the human branch went through its preordained programme, though sharing almost all its organs with the unpreprogrammed species. Is this what you believe?-DAVID: Please review the human tree: Luci, Ardi, Sediba, etc. placed all over Africa developing in all the disparate climates. The apes stayed apes.-dhw: Ardi and Lucy were found in Ethiopia, Sediba in South Africa, and they range from about 4.4 to 2 million years old. How does this prove that each of them didn't evolve locally in an environment that became unsuitable for tree-dwelling apes? Or that they hadn't migrated from ex-ape to ape country?-DAVID: Climate change is slow, over generations. If the early humanoids wanted trees they could have stayed with trees.-Climate change is not the only cause of new environments. Catastrophes and diseases can change a habitat locally and with extreme rapidity.
 
DAVID: Common primate to human ancestry, yes. Darwin inferred the savages were inferior which led to support for Eugenics.-dhw:This is a complete non sequitur and a disgraceful distortion of Darwin's views, which I corrected in my post of 10 November 2012 at 13.31 under "Darwin and atheism". On the same day you wrote: "Thank you for this interpretation. I am educated." Not for long, it seems!-DAVID: Sorry, Just as you have not read books I refer to, I've not read Descent of Man, but keep running into references which infer Eugenics used Darwin for justification.-You don't need to read it. Just revise the two page November entry that "educated" you six months ago, and I'll test you on it again next November! 
 
DAVID: At least accept that there must be a First Cause, by necessity, in some form, in any chain or cause and effect, or don't you believe that either? Why is there anything? We are here. There must be a cause. Perhaps you would like to return to the 'eternal universe theory' of pre-Einstein days.-dhw: I've always accepted that there must be a First Cause, but the three I've listed, including your own, are equally nebulous. As regards an "eternal universe", all three First Causes ... big bang or no big bang ... are eternal including yours, so in that sense BBella's All That Is is eternal, whether you call it God, energy, or the universe.-DAVID: So we have a nebulous first cause, and yours must remain an amorphous blob of energy which 'luckily' figures its way to our current reality.-No, we have three nebulous first causes, one of which is yours and none of which are mine. The atheist one depends on luck, and yours and the panpsychist one do not.-DAVID: There is a current wacky paper which doesn't need natural selection for evolution. That should help you.:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130426115612.htm-It doesn't help me nearly so much as the concept of the "intelligent cell/genome/DNA", which does not innovate solely as a means of survival, but also as a means of experimentation when the environment becomes suitable. Natural selection, as both of us keep saying, only determines which innovations will survive.