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

by dhw, Monday, November 02, 2015, 08:29 (3308 days ago) @ David Turell

Apologies for the delay in this and other replies.
 
dhw: 5) Evolution is driven by cooperation between intelligent cells that exploit changing environmental conditions in order to improve their way of life. (dhw)-DAVID: Problem is how did first life develop this so-called intelligence, which requires a mind? Your postulate is equal to my God-postulate, except I have a first cause as part of my theory, and you don't.-You seem yet again to have forgotten that your first cause is inexplicably intelligent energy, and my alternative is energy that inexplicably evolved its intelligence(s).
 
dhw: Nobody knows how new species are formed, ...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.
DAVID: But we do not see any fossil evidence of trail and error. Look at the Cambrian.-I don't know why failed strategies or lifestyles would leave fossil evidence. A dead coral reef fish would be a dead coral reef fish, no matter what strategies etc, it adopted to avoid being eaten. It is the next point that you are referring to. -dhw: It's really structural innovations that are the problem.
DAVID: Fossils will show structural innovations, and they do as full-blown new species, no itty-bitty attempts. Cambrian explosion is why I don't question my conclusions.-Nobody has solved the mystery of the Cambrian, and you have said that not even your fellow ID-ers accept your conclusions (see below).
 
dhw: 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”.
DAVID: Same answer as always: the same bacteria, in three classes, are still here
unchanged after 3.6 billion years of change on Earth. Humans arrived and apes and monkeys didn't evolve during the same period.-The fact that bacteria have survived but not evolved proves my point that innovation need not be a matter of survival, and would therefore not demand success “at first try”.
 
dhw: 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."
DAVID: Paleontologists would be insulted by your comment. Lots of soft tissue stuff is turning up now. [...]-It makes no difference: the soft tissue they do find will still be fully formed. And the fossils still won't carry that label because - next point:-dhw: 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.
DAVID: Pipe dream. Cambrian eyes arrive fully formed, no intermediates. Darwin had no idea of what really happened. 'Origins' is not a Bible. He knew about the problem of the Cambrian, but he presumed the intermediates would appear. 150 years and they haven't, and the obvious gap is gappier than ever. -Of course they were fully formed. My point above is that functioning inventions can be continually improved on by intelligent “minds”, and each improvement will be an organ in itself, not an intermediate form. You are quick to dismiss this as a pipe dream, so what are your alternative explanations for the absence of intermediates? A computer programme devised by some unknown intelligence 3.8 billion years ago, placed in the first cells and containing every single evolutionary innovation, suddenly switched on its “fish-out-of-water” device inside Freddy Fish's genome, and lo and behold he did walk out of the water flexing his thigh muscles and breathing in the fresh air through his brand new lungs. Or this unknown intelligence somehow reached inside Freddy Fish and said, “I really want to create humans, but here, Freddy, let me give thee two pairs of legs and some lungs, and then thou mayest step forth onto dry land.” No one has an explanation for the Cambrian, or for life, or for consciousness, and all the hypotheses so far are “pipe dreams”. Not a bad reason for agnosticism.