More Denton: Reply to Tony (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Thursday, July 30, 2015, 20:49 (3404 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: So you reject David's hypothesis on the grounds that innovation has never been observed. Nor of course has separate creation. So that, apparently, gets rid of that. -Ok, let's be straight and blunt here. We have never observed speciation. We have never observed innovation (in a morphological/genetic sense). What we HAVE observed are creatures being the way they are for the entire time that they have existed with only minor variation within vary tight constraints. Now, which is more sensible: -A ) To assume that something we have never observed must have happened in order to explain something else that we have never observed for the sole purpose of getting rid of God? (i.e. one of the stated primary purposes of naturalism)-B ) To assume that an intelligent design, one that defies all laws of probability, had an intelligent designer. -The first requires that we keep inventing more and more wildly imaginative stories to cover the holes in the theories. The second only requires that we acknowledge the designer and then try to understand what he has done. -
>DHW:As regards lifestyle (and habitats), no one would question that it arises from what organisms need and what they are capable of achieving, but I would like to know if you think God pre-programmed the plover's migration and the weaverbird's nest, or they worked it out for themselves. -I do not know. I speculate that it is actually a little bit of both. I.E. God programmed the abilities that make nest building possible, but did not directly dictate how each specific type of nest would be built.-
>DHW: Once more, I'm sorry but I don't understand computer language or formulae, but thank you for the above, which I do understand! I take it to mean that God preprogrammed the prototype cat to pass on all the possible variations.
> -The prototype would have passed on potential for all variations, but the actual value of each parameter would have also been passed, which would define the specific traits of a given offspring. I also think there was likely a tolerance built in that would make the variance for each offspring smaller, likely limiting it to the range expressed in the parents. I'm not sure that makes sense how I've stated it, so let me give a small example. -A parent (A) contains the potential for a range of values from -1 to 1. The value actualized in the parent is .2. The second parent (B) also contains all potential ranges, but the value actualized in the parent was .7. So when the parents (A & B) have an offspring, the actualized value in the child gets clamped to be between .2 & .7 (+/- some variance factor), even though the genetic code still contains the unrealized potential for all values between -1 & 1. This also explains why we would get things like gigantism and dwarfism. -Using gigantism and dwarfism to further this example, let's consider those two to be the two extremes. Dwarfism = -1, Gigantism = 1, and V= variance factor based on last few generations. All human DNA possesses the full potential range of size, from Dwarf to Giant. Mother(M) has an actual height of 5"5 (0.0), and father(F) has a actual height of 6"2 (0.6). The child would end up within a range of (M+/-V) & (F+/-V) with a small chance to fall anywhere within the range of -1 to 1. --> dhw: 3. Since classifications are not a “sound basis for rational judgement”, and we may not know the “prototype”, how can we know that what we now consider to be separate species have not branched off earlier from common ancestors? My point is that we do not know what was the prototype for each species, and there is enormous controversy for instance over how to classify the early hominids (were they more ape than human?)...how do we know that what we now define as species (e.g. humans) did not branch off from common ancestors?
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>DHW: If we do not know what was the prototype human, and if palaeontologists cannot agree among themselves whether the fossils of early hominids were more ape than human, how can you - bearing in mind your acceptance of common descent from the prototype and your distrust of classifications - be so sure that humans and apes did not have a common ancestor? I do not of course expect you to embrace such a hypothesis, but I hope you will understand why many of us find it perfectly feasible.-
The prototype human was human. The prototype ape was an ape. The prototype cat was a cat. Given that speciation has never been observed and innovation has never been observed, and given that random chance is clearly out of the questions, I see no reason to speculate that common descent (in the Darwinian sense of speciation and gradual mutation/innovation generating new features) has occurred. I have answered this question repeatedly, and I am not sure how I can make my answer any clearer.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.