Tree of life not real (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 14, 2014, 17:30 (3936 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: New DNA studies say evolution goes back and forth in complexity through time, eventually more complex from the more simple, but a tortuous route.:-http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/evolution-youre-drunk-As Simon Conway Morris noted convergence smells of teleology.-Dhw: I don't know where convergence comes into this research, let alone teleology [,,,] The utter randomness and unpredictability of the evolutionary process described here speaks of anything but an ultimate purpose, other than individual organisms constantly seeking ways of coping with an ever changing environment.-DAVID: You have to know Conway Morris' writings. He is not in this article but the findings fit his contentions. Convergence is what is being described, life inventing the same thing over and over and on many different branches of the bush, and C-M opines that this suggests teleology in evolution's advances because the same advances in complexity occur so often. Again, six types of eyes.-This article is not about convergence. It focuses explicitly on the idea that there is no direct line from simplicity to complexity, but evolution acts like a drunkard (see the wording of the link itself!). I'm surprised that you can extrapolate purpose from this, unless you think your God set out to stagger all over the place. -As for convergence, though, do please explain why a God whose purpose was to produce humans produced six types of eye. Not to mention trilobytes and dinosaurs. And would you not, with your anthropocentrically theistic mindset, have seen the same purpose if your God had produced only one type of eye? Or a thousand types of eye? Might it be possible that, as the article puts it so succinctly, your interpretation tells us "more about how the human mind organizes the world than about evolutionary processes"?