Darwin & Wallace (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, October 11, 2015, 12:09 (3329 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You admit that you don't know “why” the bush came out that way, but you say the “why” doesn't matter. Then you complain that I don't look at “why” we are here, i.e. why the bush produced us! -DAVID: The bush provided food to allow evolution to produce us through God's guidance. The bush did not produce us, but was a necessary part of the process. The bush is a side event to the drive to complexity built-in to the evolutionary process.
-Alternative version: the whole bush, including humans, is the event RESULTING from the drive to complexity built into the evolutionary process.-dhw: And even when I followed the theistic “why humans?” line and suggested it might be to entertain a bored God, you offered the alternative that he wanted someone to converse with, and when I pointed out that it was difficult to converse with someone who kept himself hidden, you remarked that it was silly to try and read God's mind!
DAVID: My offer of 'wanting to converse' was purposefully silly to make the point that you were obviously off on a silly tangent looking for God's superficial reasons. Frankly, as stated in the past, I have no idea why God did it, and like Adler I believe that the probability of God answering prayers is 50/50. We don't know.-We can't know the purpose of humans because of what you call "the silliness of trying to read God's mind", but we do know the purpose of every other form of life, extant and extinct, from bacteria to trilobites, dinosaurs, mosquitoes, the duck-billed platypus, the weaverbird, and the parasitic wasp: to produce or feed humans. May I ask how we know THEIR purpose without reading God's mind?-DAVID: There is plenty of evidence for pre-planning, which may be the IM we have been discussing. :
"From The Evolution Revolution by physicist Lee Spetner: [...]-dhw: Just like the video you recommended, this is an attack on the theory of random mutations, which you and I have long since rejected, and which has been under fire since I don't know when. Pre-planning and the IM as I understand them are not the same thing at all. The IM is what enables each organism to work out in its own way how to adapt or, in my hypothesis, improve in accordance with the demands or opportunities offered by a changing environment.-DAVID: We are back to 50/50 here in a sense as in bacterial reactions. Pre-planning is seen in the genes, no question. From the outside it well can look like an IM working.-Alternative version: an autonomous intelligence is seen in the genes, no question. From the outside it well can look like pre-planning.