Climate change: sudden cooling (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 16, 2014, 11:55 (3846 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The only conclusion that is safe is that living forms are extremely resilient, based on a very complex biochemistry that current science continues to illustrate. 

dhw: The other obvious conclusion one has to draw ........... they must have developed out of existing organisms, presumably in response to changes in the environment. ...... What part of those existing organisms do you think would have been responsible for devising the new structures? Or do you think your God preprogrammed the Ediacaran tubes to appear and then disappear as they did?-DAVID: We have no way of knowing whether God stepped in and fiddled directly or as I think is more possible is that original life is so complex and and potentially inventive that the huge jump in complexity simply waited until the climate had enough oxygen to fuel the more complex organisms, and then proceeded to produce them.-[I have edited these quotes to streamline the argument.]-I'm very happy with your answer, except that I would like to reword it. A jump doesn't "wait" (though I suspect you like the word because it suggests preplanning). Not even the individual organisms in which this jump took place would have waited ... assuming that all changes must take place within existing organisms unless your god produced the new ones from scratch. As you say,the original forms of life must have been so complex and potentially inventive that when environmental changes took place, the inventive mechanisms that had been passed on by those first forms were able not only to adapt but also to experiment. Whatever those mechanisms are, they must be contained within the basic structural and functional unit of life, which is the cell. And whether or not this was designed by your god, the invention of new organs and the resultant origin of species therefore has to be the result of some form of inventive intelligence within the cell or, rather, following the principle of "emergence" (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts), the inventive intelligence of cell communities. -The various possible explanations for those who believe in evolution are therefore: 1) your god inventing the original "intelligent cell" but sometimes stepping in and fiddling, 2) your god preprogramming every single innovation, 3) your god leaving his invention to do its own innovating, 4) the original "intelligent cell" assembling itself by chance or 5) by some form of mental activity (panpsychist) within the chemicals themselves. For anti-evolutionists, the explanation can only be that God created each innovation separately.