DILEMMAS (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, October 27, 2014, 19:56 (3678 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Spider silk, then, was as special to God as humans.. This is just one of billions of preprogrammed patterns, all of which had to be passed down for billions of years etc. -DAVID: We are at a impass. [...] We have agreed to throw out chance. What remains to consider is the information needed to design systems. And I believe that is implanted in the original genomes or God put it in later as the process of evolution proceded. -We are not at an impasse at all. “The information to design systems” is a million miles away from preprogramming the first cells with every innovation there ever was. If you expand the expression slightly and call it “the information that gives an organism the ability to design systems”, you have another expression for an inventive mechanism. This will use its in-built (or if you like, God-given) information to process the information that comes from outside and produce its inventions accordingly. In humans the mechanism is called the brain. Add some dabbles for the really tricky bits, and you have my proposal for theistic evolution. -dhw: As usual, you switch to attacking Darwinism. 
DAVID: And I do that because I think your reasoning is grounded in Darwin. And I have rejected his theory totally. All I accept is the progression from OOL to now looks evolutionary to me. I think it is theisticially designed evolution. Darwin is totally out of the picture for me. I think current findings have totally refuted his notion.-Which notion? If you accept common descent, you are accepting the basis of his theory. The question of how life evolved from OOL to now is what we are investigating, and we both reject random mutations and gradualism. What else do you reject? Natural selection creates nothing but explains why certain organisms survive and others don't. It is self-evident, but in Darwin's day it wasn't, so do you reject that? Theistic evolution is not a refutation of Darwin. -dhw: I'm offering a way out of that dilemma as an alternative to your inadequate preprogramming hypothesis which - like a chance origin of life and evolution - seems to me incredible.
DAVID: My pre-programming hypothesis is not inadequate for the patterns of life in general. And I think part of the bush is set up for a balance of nature since life depends upon the constant injestion of energy.-I wrote that one of your dilemmas was: “If humans were the purpose, why the vast variety and the comings and goings...” You replied: “That is exactly the point. I have to reconcile the bush faced with the obvious purpose to produce humans.” And you know you can't explain why trilobites, triceratops, silk-spinning spiders and myrmecophilous beetles were/are essential for the production of humans.-dhw: We are talking about mechanisms within the genome that may be capable of more than mere adaptation. ... instead of preprogramming every innovation you can think of, God created a mechanism within the cell..... creating most of the variations we see in the evolutionary bush...-DAVID: Certainly possible. Not found yet and what we adaptive ability we have found so far looks too weak to do that.-Phew! So after all that vehement opposition, you agree that it's certainly possible. That is all I keep asking you to accept.
 
dhw: Evolution is going through a period of stasis, and so currently we see only adaptation.
DAVID: We may be at the end of evolution with humans fully arrived.-You and I will never know. But adaptation in itself is hugely complex, and denotes awareness and great technical skill to be employed by the “brain” in the genome. So maybe that brain is capable of more than adaptation.-dhw:... but he dabbled in order to create the basic structures (such as heart, kidneys, eyes etc.) and maybe even some variations, like the human brain. 
DAVID: Yes. Those basic structures are designed from the beginning in the patterns we have discussed, or God stepped in at the Cambrian and inserted them. We don't know which. My dilemma is simply I don't know which way God did it.-Another yes - so you are agreeing that instead of preprogramming, God may have dabbled. If so, we can dispense with his preprogramming the first cells with every single innovation: major structures may have been inserted as evolution proceeded, but other innovations were created by the IM. Hence the bush.-dhw: "There is a whole layer of gene function we know nothing about”, and yet you know that the genome is incapable of innovation.
DAVID: If we find a missing layer then it may be capable of complex innovation. Again from what we know now, the genome is not capable of it.-Thank you. Personally, I'd say a missing layer capable of innovation as well as adaptation (for which a mechanism must exist) is more likely than a missing 3.7-billion-year-old programme for all life's innovations. Anyway, this is a big advance on yesterday's post, in which you wrote: “You certainly don't think as I do. The IM is adaptation and nothing more. The Basic Patterns are all in the pre-programming.” How often have you told me to “think outside the box”? Yep, we're trying.