More about how evolution works; stasis (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 18:53 (3320 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I interpret the higgledy-piggledy comings and goings as evidence that there is no overriding purpose: only individual purposes, as organisms seek to survive and/or improve. This is mirrored by the evolution of human society, in which each individual also seeks to survive and/or improve, and innovations for improvement lead to colossal transformations: new species, ways of life, natural wonders in the animal world; new ways of life and technological wonders in the human world.-DAVID: So you seem to have solved the mystery of speciation by speculation. Using humans, who can think deeply as an example. Poor choice. Even we cannot explain for species, only modify by selective breeding.-I do not claim to have solved it. NOBODY knows how speciation came about. I offer a hypothesis, and it is no more speculative than your own (see below). The fact that humans think “deeply” does not invalidate the analogy. My hypothesis concerns the drive for improvement by the intelligent cell, which is not exemplified by the human drive for improvement but is “mirrored” by it. I am not saying cells think “deeply” in the way humans do. -dhw: I am trying to distinguish between adaptation, which leaves the species intact, and innovation (new structures) which leads to new species. I am suggesting that the same autonomous “brain” of the cell community is responsible for both processes.-DAVID: Fabulous speculation, with no evidence for the ability to plan for the new complexity of new species.-Agreed, but it is no more fabulously speculative than an inexplicable, invisible, indefinable, sourceless, all-knowing, all-creating, all-encompassing superbeing with no evidence for its existence. -dhw: The whale series is a wonderful example of how my hypothesis works. Each step takes place in existing organisms that innovate in accordance with what the environment allows. And of course the cell communities must adjust so that the new parts are coordinated.
DAVID: And I view the jumps as impossible leaps without planning. You are forgetting there are no intermediate testing steps to steer the right transformations. de nova leaps. Sure!-We have agreed that evolution jumps, but as usual, you gloss over the implications of your “planning”. This can only mean that God personally intervened (= special creation), or preprogrammed the very first cells with each of the 8-9 “jumps” for the making of the whale (= evolution), although his aim was apparently to produce humans! My evolutionary alternative is that these pre-whales worked out each change for themselves, using the ever evolving intelligence your God may have given to cells in the first place. Of course they would not have seen themselves as stages on the way to whaledom, but were organisms in their own right.