More about how evolution works: look at the video (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, October 30, 2015, 16:13 (3310 days ago) @ David Turell

This thread on the subject of “how evolution works” has been hi-jacked by a red herring called Information, which I am going to chase away onto another thread. Here is a summary of the hypotheses covered so far, plus the latest relevant exchanges from other threads:-1) 3.8 billion years ago an unknown, sourceless, individual mind devised a programme to be passed on by the first living cells to all subsequent organisms which would automatically switch on the correct part of the programme at the correct time to implement every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder of the past, present and future, although the mind's purpose was to produce humans and it may not have had control over the environment.(David)
2)The same unknown sourceless individual mind sometimes dabbled, which would seem to suggest that the 3.8-billion-year programme needed adjustments, though we shouldn't ask why because we can't read the mind. (David)
3) Evolution never happened, except with certain minor variations. All species (broad sense) were individually created by the above mind. (Tony)
4) Evolution works through a combination of random mutations and natural selection. (Darwin and faithful disciples)
5) Evolution is driven by cooperation between intelligent cells that exploit changing environmental conditions in order to improve their way of life. (dhw)-DAVID: They would have to understand design for the future organism to work at first try. No intermediate forms means no chance for trial and error. got to be right the first time.-Nobody knows how new species are formed, nobody understands how ANY minds - divine, human or cellular - work, and nobody knows how your God ”did it” or even whether he exists. It's all speculation. However, we need to differentiate here. Different strategies, lifestyles, natural wonders could be the result of trial and error, so long as the threat to the whole species is not immediate. Lots of coral reef fish could have died before this particular strategy was worked out. It's really structural innovations that are the problem, and once again we must face the fact that all the above hypotheses raise more questions than they answer, though for some reason you never seem to question your own.
 
However, unlike adaptation, innovation is not a matter of survival but of exploiting new conditions in order to make improvements, which would not necessarily mean succeeding “at first try”. I'm really not sure how we would be able to identify an intermediate form. We won't find many soft tissues anyway, and a few bones won't carry a label saying: "I was a flonk on its way to becoming a flink." Actually, some folk might say the various hominins were intermediate forms on the way to humans, though each was of course an organism in its own right, and that's the problem. Any fossil will be of an organism that existed in its own right. However, if we take Darwin's “light sensitive nerve” as an innovation, it is quite conceivable that over a period of time other intelligent cell communities were able to improve on the invention, leading to the variety of seeing eyes that we know now. No intermediate forms - just different organisms improving on an existing invention. But I agree that individual innovations would have had to work quickly if they were to survive, since organisms would hardly persist in pursuing lost causes. If I had the answer, the Nobel Prize would be mine. And you could say the same.