Different in degree or kind: EVOLUTION (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 09, 2015, 21:07 (3606 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I point to survival and improvement, but you can't see that these constitute purposes - even though you are confronted with them every day of your life.-DAVID: You want survival and improvement to constitute purpose, and I agree partially.-Thank you.-DAVID: However, I'm not sure you have read Gould closely. There is more than one way to look at the phenomenon of advancing complexity in evolution, which provides survival thru improvement. Gould looks at humans as a 'glorious accident'. To quote him "if the tape of evolution were to be run again, it is extremely unlikely humans would appear". (slightly paraphrased) Note he views evolution as a series of chance contingent events with complexity building on previous contingent events. So what he describes makes the alternatives as either chance or design. -We are not talking about Gould's theory but about your contention that humans must be special because they were not needed, and that there has to be an overall purpose, which is to create humans. You now agree that design (not chance) underlies the innovations as they occur, because they all serve the purpose of improvement or survival. Let's hold onto that.-DAVID: I see no third way. Therefore I see guided purpose in survival thru improvement. And your sentence: " humans can't be special just because they were not needed!" is exactly my point turned on its head. Because there was no special natural threat that required the advances which made humans, they were created despite lack of need, therefore they are a special creation. This has always been my line of thought. -Perhaps that is why you find it so difficult to think along another line. There was no special threat that required ANY advances beyond bacteria, and so according to your argument, ALL multicellular organisms are special!-DAVID: Exactly my point with the opposite conclusion. Why life, why advancement beyond bacteria? None of this was needed. Therefore there was a designed drive to complexity. Stated clearly in my first book.-We agree that there was a drive to complexity - evolution proves it. But that doesn't mean the drive was designed specially to create humans! The drive led to an enormous higgledy-piggledy bush!
 
dhw: Every organism tries to survive. That is one purpose. I'm suggesting that when the opportunity arises, organisms also try to improve.... But if you believe in common descent, every single innovation must have taken place within existing organisms, and whether your God started the whole process off or not, these innovations improved the organism's ability to cope with its environment. That is a purpose!-DAVID: I am trying to discuss with you an overriding purpose, not individual animal purpose. What you are presenting is all true, but lacks the proper conclusion as I view it. Evolution is driven by information supplied. DNA could not have made its own information.-You are shifting ground again. I have allowed for the possibility that God provided the mechanism that led to life and evolution. The issue here is your insistence that you know God's purpose. I pointed this out, together with its illogicality:
 
"What you are so desperately looking for is an overall purpose, and you insist that this is the production of humans. Organisms had to produce wings and fins and trunks and humps and rattles and compound eyes and strange migratory patterns and other weird and wonderful lifestyles, and go extinct by the billions, just so that we humans could walk the Earth..."-DAVID: ...Your 'purpose' is at the individual animal level and is correct. But that is small 'purpose'. My 'purpose' tries to answer why is there life and evolution at all. Same question as 'why is there anything?'.-We can only conjecture, but to say the purpose of life and evolution was to produce humans inevitably leads to the question what was the purpose of producing humans. I offered God's boredom as a motive, and you took it up but then hurriedly dropped it because that made God too human. If there is no God, or a deist God who doesn't care, there is no purpose beyond the “individual animal level”, which is all the more reason to treasure our moments here on Earth. If your cry of “purpose, purpose, purpose” denotes some grand plan, do please tell us what you think it is.