Innovation and Speciation: pre-planning (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, May 22, 2014, 10:47 (3837 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: More evidence of living processes antidating need by a billion years:

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-human-heart-billion-year-old-molecular-mechanism.html-dhw: Fascinating stuff, but pre-planning is surely going a bit far, as is your "antedating need". The starlet sea anemone, which is still in existence, needs these fundamental mechanisms just as much as we do. May I suggest an alternative to the idea that your god planned the unnecessary sea anemone just so that later on the mechanisms could be used for us all-important humans between 700 million and a billion years later? Could it be that the starlet sea anemone's nervous system is just one of many innovations used and adapted by subsequent organisms to survive or exploit changing environmental conditions? And that all organs go back in the same way to earlier organs, just as all organisms go back to earlier organisms, whether they survived or not in the history of the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush? Or do you insist that every innovation leading to speciation (including those that have not survived) was part of your god's plan to produce humans?-DAVID: Either way you interpret it, evolution, as we discover it, created many processes in advance of the need for them. If God used evolution and perhaps guided it, then pre-planning is not unreasonable. What is unreasonable is to conclude that a chance process could do what was done and created. The complexity of a single cell, I believe, could not be the result of chance.-Aw shucks, David, the issue here is not chance but the idea that the sea anemone's nervous system was "in advance of the need" and was part of God's "pre-planning". Pre-planning for what? Needed by what? The only answer I can think of is that you're suggesting God said: "I'm gonna give this unnecessary sea anemone an unnecessary nervous system so that in a billion years' time a necessary humanemone can have a necessary nervous system." By the same token, you may as well argue that he gave other organisms such innovations as hearts, legs, livers, brains, blood, kidneys, eyes, noses, ears, penises, etc. "in advance of the need for them". Don't you think this anthropocentric view of evolution is going just a bit too far?