Aspects of Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, March 02, 2009, 11:58 (5543 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: I am not a biologist. For authoritative views on these issues I refer you to your bete noir, the greatest living evolutionist, Richard Dawkins. - Before I reply to this, let me clarify my overall position. The astonishing beauty and appalling cruelty of our world appear to me to occur randomly, and I have no personal feeling that there is some conscious power out there watching over us (apart from our ever more intrusive bureaucracy). This is not a problem for me. What is a problem is a string of unanswered questions, foremost among which are those relating to the almost unimaginable complexities of life, and the theory that they all came about originally by chance. - And so to George's post. I am not a biologist either, but that does not mean that I cannot ask questions, or that I cannot dispute the subjective and often glib conclusions that Dawkins draws from his scientific studies. (He is only a "bête noire" in so far as I am opposed to all those who are so sure of their beliefs that they deride other people's.) Calling him the greatest living evolutionist does not explain why random mutations create hitherto non-existent wonders such as sensitivity to light, sound, taste, touch, smell, thought, memory, emotion etc. etc.; or, to go back further, how a random combination can bring inanimate matter to life while at the same time endowing it with the ability to reproduce itself, to adapt itself to different environments, and potentially to produce all the above innovations. - You have asked if a light-sensitive spot (Darwin calls it a nerve) can be called an organ. I don't think it matters. There are two questions that are more important for me: 1) Darwin wrote: "How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated" (Difficulties on Theory). In the wider context, both are of the utmost concern to me. 2) Bearing in mind that the very concept of sight had never existed, why and how should a light-sensitive nerve in the course of time, through new generations of individual, unthinking, uninventive organisms that inherit it, fashion itself into this brand new complex faculty? And the same question applies to all the other faculties and organs. It happened. The faculties and organs are there. And we know that a few genetic twists and turns will produce these extraordinary changes. But don't ask me to accept on trust that the original genes and the creative twists and turns are simply a matter of chance plus "natural laws". That requires a faith every bit as blind as faith in "God". - As for the philosophers of epistemology telling us that "falsification" is more important than "confirmation", theists can use precisely the same argument and will be ridiculed for it.