Evolution: a different view (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 24, 2015, 17:35 (3470 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Please reread your post of 2 May, as above. Your point both there and in your first book was that the changes were NOT used, and that was your evidence of pre-planning. You now agree that they WERE used, and so you have lost your “evidence” that they were pre-planned and prearranged.-DAVID: Not at all. Your view and mine of that history totally differ. As human hands gained dexterity to the point that we do things like play a piano. violin, knit, etc, of course those hands were used in a prior less complex way by earlier hominids. It is the same with speech. I've admitted in retrospect that I should have been clearer in my first book. Of course used but not as used today in the requirements for modern speech as described by McCrone. Most of it started changing million of years before our quality of speech could be attained. Still preplanning to me, still an exaptation, because it was not used in the way we do now. Exaptation is still defined as used or unused as definitions from others I have provided in the past.-Our views of the history are exactly the same. The difference between us is that you insist that all the changes in that history were geared to the production of humans (even though you don't know why so many of the variations were jettisoned), whereas I am prepared to consider at least three alternative explanations. The whole of evolution entails changes that began millions of years ago, and there is no reason to assume that every single change was not used for a specific purpose at the time, and may even have come into being as a result of a particular need or opportunity that arose at the time. The fact that uses have changed does not seem to me to denote pre-planning. “Unused” may be part of the definition of exaptations that you prefer, but it is clearly impossible to prove that any organ was not used at the time when it came into existence.-I think the above also covers Tony's claim that “Humans were planned and designed to be able to communicate, and all the necessary morphological differences that were needed for that to happen were planned into our design.” If you begin with the premise that God planned humans, then the rest of your argument follows. It is your basic premise that I am challenging. David is grateful for your support, but unlike you has to face the insoluble problem that the anthropocentric theory does not fit in with the history of evolution.