Tree of life not real (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 16, 2014, 12:10 (3935 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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. -I'm afraid that is like saying that the authors' description of a higgledy-piggledy lack of direction can also be interpreted as planned directionality if you allow yourself to think of it as planned directionality.-dhw: 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. 
DAVID: If you look at the thousands of examples of convergence in Simon Conway Morris' book it really seems to fit your suggestion.-Thank you.-DAVID: 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.-It is evidence of nothing at all except the fact that evolution arrived at us folks. It also arrived at millions of other species, and has presumably not yet finished its course.
 
DAVID: 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.-For evolutionists there clearly has to be a mechanism that caused single celled life to evolve into multicellularity and eventually into us. That was the basis of our whole discussion on "the intelligent cell", which whether invented by God or not explains both convergence and higgledy-piggledy. Convergence (e.g. your six different types of eye) describes the versatility of the mechanism but, if anything, argues against your specific purpose. (Why six types, when humans only need one?)-DAVID: 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.-No-one would deny that life is tough and won't be killed off (although the article emphasizes that it appears to regress and to progress higgledy-piggledy). That is the whole basis of the evolutionary theory: organisms adapt and innovate in order to cope with their environment. However, I still can't find any passages in the article that support your anthropocentric teleology.