Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 22, 2014, 01:27 (3654 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Yes, it must return to some kind of balance if it is to go on. Pure tautology. The disappearance of 99% of species proves the point.-Exactly. David Raup's book about lost species blames bad luck, loss of balance, not poor design of a life form. We must have the bush.
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> dhw: 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.
> DAVID: 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: Sorry, but there would be no point in planning humans if the environment never produced the right atmosphere, or if the Earth got smashed to pieces by a comet. Imagine planning fish and then leaving it to Lady Luck to conjure up the water. I find it interesting that you believe your God can manipulate matter in such a way that the universe is fine tuned to support life on Earth, and yet you think he left that life at the mercy of chance. Well, if he could leave the environment to luck, to see what might happen, maybe he left the inventive mechanism to its own devices as well.-Or enough information is implanted from the beginning in the IM so it can handle the adaptations.
 
> dhw: How can I possibly be avoiding that consideration when time and again I have conceded for argument's sake that the mechanism may have been created by your God?-And the mechanism contains the information to run it properly?
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> DAVID: 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".
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> dhw: I do remember the song. “Both go together like a horse and carriage.” But of course you can have love without marriage, and all too often there is marriage without love (you and I have been very lucky). And you can discuss evolution without discussing OOL. Darwin did it, and so can we.-Darwin did it because he had to. He had no knowledge of inheritance. We currently have the background of research that allows us to consider a continuum of development from OOL to now. OOL had to contain a major portion of the information used today by the cells' genomes. OOL had a genome!