Innovation and Speciation: pre-planning (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, May 24, 2014, 20:18 (3618 days ago) @ David Turell

David drew our attention to the sea anemone's nervous system, which he claims "antedates need by a billion years", and is evidence of God's pre-planning.-Under "Convergence" we had the following discussionhw: Well, let me know when they prove that your God planned the adipose fin as a mere stepping stone to human arms and legs...-DAVID: Life is like a shotgun, spraying inventions in every direction. That is why the bush and not a tree.-Dhw: [...] You could hardly have made it clearer that evolution is a higgledy-piggledy process of random developments, innovations, extinctions, with no underlying plan and no fixed purpose.-And now, after the adipose fin, you are trying to use the sea anemone's nervous system as proof of God's pre-planning (see also under "Convergence").
 
DAVID: My thought is simple. Evolution builds from one cell to our trillion of cells and processes. Evolution simply builds from simple to complex, an obvious arrangement, but complexity was not required to appear. Bacteria have been successful ever since they arrived. The flip side of my conjecture about pre-planning is that it is an obvious answer to why complexity progressed at all if not needed.-We have long since agreed that the success of bacteria shows that complexity was not required. That does not mean that every innovation was geared to the production of humans! Once the intelligent, inventive mechanism (of unknown origin) was in place, wouldn't you say "spraying inventions in every direction" sounds less like pre-planning than an almighty free-for-all? A not unusual view of evolutionary history.