Tree of life not real (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 15, 2014, 19:01 (3935 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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"). ..... 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. -I understand your point of view and objections. However the findings described in the article are open to other interpretations if you let the "whiff of teleology" enter your thinking. 
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> dhw: 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. ....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. -Your own objective thinking has led to a description of God's purpose that might have a ring of truth. I don't propose to know God's thinking, but what you have suggested may be right on. The point is we have to explain how single celled oganisms complexified through some sort of evolutionary process and ended up as sentient humans which a consciousness that we can describe but cannot explain. If you look at the thousands of examples of convergence in Simon Conway Morris' book it really seems to fit your suggestion. Life keeps adding complexity and seems to go off in every direction at once, but it did arrive at us folks, and that is stong evidence that that end is what was intended. Bacteria are the most successful set of organisms around, lasting 3.5 billion years and with the greatest biomass on Earth. there was no urgent reason for them to attempt complexity, but it was successfully attempted. And this is where I ask the 'why' question, and answer, life had a built-in mechanism to do this as evidenced by convergence. This is SCM's point of view. It is evidence from inference.-By the way, there are other articles coming out now indicating a back and forth in evolutionary history. It appears evolution is a very bumpy road. For example the Permian extinction killed 95% of everything over a sixty thousand year period. And life quickly recovered full blast, but at that point without the poor trilobites who had lasted a quarter billion years from the Cambrian, and we got horseshoe crabs out ot it! Life is tough and won't be killed off, and keeps progressing.-So I reject your opinion. The article does support my point of view and scm's.