Natures wonders: making spider silk (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:06 (3738 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: So let me ask you, as I have asked David, whether you think your God preplanned every single innovation and “wonder” right from the beginning, or created each one separately as he went along. .... Would you then grant the possibility that your God created this inventive mechanism, which would explain innovation, the Cambrian, and the vast variety of species that have come and gone?-TONY: The answer to your question was in my previous post:
Did God create them as adaptive creatures, I certainly think so, but I think that he did so with constraints to prevent them from straying too far beyond their pre-defined range.....-Just making sure: are you saying that God created each innovation and “wonder” separately as he went along?
 
TONY: Remember that a lot of what we call different species are actually varieties of the same "type" or "kind" of creatures. A dog is a dog is a dog, even though there are hundreds of "species" of dog.-Again, to make sure: does this mean God created “the dog”, but dogs created their own variations? Might this have been done through an inventive mechanism within doggy cell communities? Let me note in passing that every individual dog - like every individual human - has its own individual sets of cell communities resulting in different characteristics. Since every innovation, according to evolution, must have taken place in existing organisms, this may explain why some cell communities (organisms) remained as they were, while others experimented.-Dhw: Once an organism is successful, there is no need for it to change. However, in the course of evolution obviously some have changed, which is why it's important to include what the environment allows as well as what it demands. 
TONY: Yes, there have been some changes, but the extent of those changes is largely speculation considering that the vast majority of "species" remain largely UNCHANGED since the Cambrian.-I agree that we can only speculate, as we cannot observe the arrival of eyes, kidneys etc. However, adaptation is an observable fact, and it's not unreasonable to suppose that since cell communities can change themselves to cope with environmental threats, there is an internal mechanism for change. The question then becomes how inventive that mechanism might be. Perhaps there has been no major environmental change since the Cambrian that would allow for creative experiments, and so evolution has undergone a long period of comparative stasis as regards new “species” (in the broadest sense). -DHW: My point here is that an inventive mechanism can experiment. Single-celled organisms have always been successful, but at some time in the past, some of them must have combined to create multi-cellularity. 
TONY: Do you have evidence of experimentation? (i.e. Failed experiments? You know, the same ones missing from the fossil record that mainstream evolutionist say should exist.)-I don't know how a fossil could be identified as a failed experiment. Mainstream evolutionists look for missing links, but “punctuated equilibrium” allows for the jumps Darwin thought impossible, and my hypothesis can explain the jumps. -Dhw: Once more, we know that cell communities have formed all the organs, and for those of us who believe evolution happened, that means billions of generations of cell communities have built on the acquired knowledge of earlier generations to come up with increasingly complex combinations. Hence the variety.
TONY: If you assume a designer, then the jump to multi-celularity does not require some tricksy magic that we have never witnessed in repeated experiments. That is not to say the possibility is not worth examining and experimenting to determine if it happened, but rather, multi-cellular organisms from single celled organisms has never been observed. So you are assuming that it happened without evidence. Your own brand of faith.-Bacteria have been observed to combine, communicate, and act like a single organism. I am not assuming anything, however. It's a hypothesis, and I've offered you a theistic “designer” version: namely, that your God created the inventive mechanism within cells that enabled single cells to combine and form multicellular organisms. Why does this require “tricksy magic”, whereas God creating multi-cellular organisms separately from single celled organisms does not?