DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 20, 2014, 20:35 (3654 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your thinking is becoming harder and harder for me to follow. Clearly the bush is created by variations. However, you have discounted the possibility that the monarch could be an IM variation: “Complex lifestyles like the Monarch butterfly must be planned and designed. This cannot have come from a generic butterfly pattern. It is beyond the concept of an IM.”-DAVID: Remember I'm still developing a coherent pattern of thought. In the Tony/ Spetner approach there are basic patterns produced initially. In the case of the monarch, one can suppose that basic pattern butterflies came first with migration as part of the pattern. Then the nuances of complicated migration added later by variation. That would fit the step-wise concept of evolution that Tony and Spetner endorse.
 
I don't have a problem with any of this. Step-wise evolution from basic patterns makes perfect sense, as do variations on basic patterns, but your scenario leaves out the environment. Migration, for instance, would not be necessary if the climate was stable. Our main question concerning the monarch, however, remains the extent to which it and every other “natural wonder” works out its own lifestyle. Until now you have been adamant that it was ALL planned or the result of a dabble. Are you now prepared to reconsider the statement quoted above, and accept the possibility that initially the creative mechanism of the monarch enabled it - unpreprogrammed and undabbled with - to create its own ”complex lifestyle”, to be passed on to succeeding generations?
 
DAVID: And it is interesting that both come from very fundamentalist religious backgrounds. And they solve my issue of how complex the IM might be. Again it revolves around how much information is implanted in the beginning of life, and perhaps in early stages. And I think probably most of the information is implanted early, since latter developments (mutations) reduce information, while causing adaptation.-I don't think they have solved the issue at all, though you can try to gloss it over by focusing on the word “information”. If evolution proceeds through the interaction between organisms and their changing environments, the inventive mechanism will need to work out ways of dealing with new information from outside itself. Unless it has been given ALL the information (preprogrammed) right at the very beginning to cope with or exploit (= adapt or innovate) every single conceivable environmental change, either it has to exercise its own inventiveness, or your God has to dabble. -dhw: I don't understand the relevance of “having life last for 3.8 billion years etc.” I'm sure this new theory must somehow make sense to you, so do forgive me if I am the one who is being obtuse, but perhaps you could formulate it a little more clearly?-DAVID: I discussed it in my previous entry. Life requires balance to provide the energy for everyone and everything. Note the production of CO2 by animals and the use of it by plants who produce O2 and food. Note the many species who fill different niches to contribute to the balance, and the wolf/deer balance I introduced from Spetner. Some type of balance is returned to or developed, each time it is disrupted, because it is very necessary. It all has to do with energy production and consumption which life requires.-I dealt with this in my earlier post on Spetner. I have noted all these factors, and have pointed out that the whole concept is a tautology, in that “the survival of every organism depends on Nature being balanced in such a way that the organism can survive.” Yes, some type of balance is returned to or developed, but it may be a DIFFERENT balance, according to the conditions offered by the new environment, and when these conditions change again, you will again have disruption followed by a new balance, and so on till the end of life. What does all this prove? That if you don't have conditions conducive to certain forms of life, you won't have those forms of life. I'm afraid that won't get us to Stockholm