Cambrian Explosion, is real (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, June 28, 2013, 12:16 (4166 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Environmental change, innovative responses from the "intelligent genome", natural selection. Can anyone come up with a more convincing explanation?-DAVID: No, except life is instilled with this inventiveness in a coded genome, and neither Darwin nor you can accept a prior intelligence put the whole show together. Did the coded complex genome put itself together by chance? I know your answer is not to accept chance, but a weird idea of intelligence building itself from scratch. And you have admitted to not believing that. What is left is logically a first cause intelligence. But you can't imagine a first cause eternal intelligence. So you are stuck on your picket fence, which I don't think is padded, because your lack of acceptable answers should make you very uncomfortable. But since you feel comfortable, there is no hope to change your mind.-Your "no" is music to my ears, but I had hoped to forestall the rest of your comment (which I will answer under "God and Reality"). I wrotehw: Of course, this doesn't answer the question of how the "intelligent genome" came into being in the first place. But Darwin's theory is not concerned with such origins ... it only focuses on common descent and how evolution might work.-My post is an attempt to grapple with the problems the Cambrian Explosion poses for Darwin's theory, and for everyone else who believes in evolution. You yourself constantly ... and justifiably ... refer to it, but have never offered an explanation. You only use it to attack Darwin. Like you, I'm highly sceptical about certain aspects of Darwin's theory (random mutations, gradualism, the imperfect fossil record as an explanation for missing links), but I remain convinced that its basis is true: common descent, and natural selection determining which forms of life survive. The fact that you cannot come up with a more convincing explanation than the one I have offered is all I ask. The chance v. design debate is a separate issue. If it was OK for Darwin to propose his theory without discussing the origin of life and its mechanisms (though in later editions he refers repeatedly to "the Creator" ... a fact which both theists and atheists prefer to ignore completely), I think I should be allowed to do the same!