Tree of life not real (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 15, 2014, 09:37 (3912 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: 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. -DAVID: All I can do is quote SCM: On page 128 of "Life's Solution: he describes examples of convergence. He notes that biologists seem surprised and uneasy about the similarities and " I strongly suspect that some of these biologists sense the ghost of teleology looking over their shoulders". The subtitle of his book is "Inevitable Humans in an Lonely Universe". I follow his thinking. Life is programmed to try out many solutions to the challenges of existence. Why God chose this approach I do not know, but I undrstand your interpretation which comes from not being willing to look at teleology as a possibility.-I think you have misunderstood my objections. You have drawn our attention to an article which explicitly argues that there is no direct line from simplicity to complexity, and that evolution behaves like a drunkard (i.e. it staggers all over the place = my "higgledy-piggledy"). For some reason you interpret this as supporting your thesis (and SCM's) that evolution has a divine purpose, and when I suggest that it does the exact opposite, "all you can do" is quote SCM, whose teleological convergence plays absolutely no part in the article. I have no quarrel with the argument that life (or rather living organisms) tries out many solutions to the challenges of existence. That is the point of the article, which says explicitly that there is no directionality. What the authors describe is only a higgledy-piggledy array of different solutions.
 
Whether living organisms have been "programmed" by your God is, of course, the great issue, but if they have, the utter randomness and unpredictability of the evolutionary process illustrated by the article you have referred us to scarcely supports your anthropocentric interpretation of his purpose. The fact that you cannot find a reasonable explanation for the approach you insist God chose might perhaps be grounds to look for a different purpose! How about evolution as one vast experiment, setting up the mechanisms to see where they would lead? At least that would explain the higgledy-piggledy nature of life's history. You could even surmise that after a few billion years, your God sort of hit on the idea of an organism with an extra degree of consciousness ... a wonderful new dimension for his experiment. At least that hypothesis would get you out of the impossible tasks of explaining 1) how six types of eye, trilobites and dinosaurs were all part of the divine plan to create human beings, and 2) how an article that expressly focuses on a lack of direction provides evidence of direction.