Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 21, 2014, 01:18 (3655 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Do you believe that life began with 365 types of mammals?-I'm simply quoting Spetner's comment from the Talmud. With four eras mammals obviously came later, and 365 is the number of days in the year. Is this some type of numerology? I'll take what we know from the fossil record myself.
 
> dhw: Do you believe humans could have been created at the beginning? Do you take this claim seriously?-No.
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> dhw: Not much support for you so far!-Not looking for his support.-> 
> dhw: You have repeated the claims about adaptation, but I'm asking about innovation - relating both to organs and to lifestyles. It's seems that this whole aspect of the problem is dealt with so vaguely that it gets us nowhere (this is perhaps unfair on Spetner, as I'm relying on your interpretation of the book).-Spetner does not know any more than I do. He seems to accept Tony's view of starting pattern with his NREH doing later adaptations. He refers to epigenetics.
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> dhw; Our whole discussion centres on just how much autonomy the inventive mechanism might have.-Exactly, and no one at this juncture knows.
> DAVID: Life stays in balance. 
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> dhw: No it doesn't. It constantly shifts its balance - hence extinctions, innovations, dominance, decline...-Have it your way. It always returns to balance. Why is everyone trying to protect species at risk? 99% of all the past are gone now. Life's balance constantly changes but must return to balance each time.-
> dhw: I can't see the relevance of the date of our arrival, or Spetner's Jewish orthodoxy to your anthropocentrism. Of course life must come back to some sort of environmental equilibrium after it's been disrupted, or it will not continue - but the equilibrium will have CHANGED. Eventually, past changes somehow led to humans, but if changing environmental conditions were not planned, God's supposed plan to produce humans depended on luck.-Good point. You are channeling Gould. But you forget if, humans are programmed in from the beginning, the environmental changes don't matter.
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> dhw: I keep repeating that the beginning of life must have included not only the mechanisms (or the information to make the mechanisms work, since you don't like “mechanisms”) not only for life itself, but also for reproduction and for evolution. I do not recall ever minimizing the complexity of the earliest forms of life.-You are not minimizing. The issue of where the 'information' in the codes came from, leads to considering a conscious source. By using the word 'mechanism' you seem to avoid that consideration.
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> DAVID: Those critical of Darwin present the information argument. I'm briefly in Wagner's book now. He sides with Darwin, and information has no special mention so far, and is not mentioned in the index. This is a huge dichotomy in thought. Information cannot develop from rocks and water, and Darwinists chose to ignore the point, because they appear to have no answer.
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> dhw:Darwin's Origin does not deal with the beginning of life. Our own discussion is not about the beginning of life either, but about evolution. Nobody has an answer, but for the sake of argument, I keep offering you an inventive mechanism designed by your God. However, this does seem to be just about the only support Spetner can offer you, so I can understand your need to bring it in!-Yes. I know all that, but the origin of life entailed a beginning of a code. Origin and evolution are two items that are unfortunately intimately tied together. OOL brought the code that created evolution. "You can't have one without the other". Remember the song "Love and Marriage".