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

by David Turell , Monday, November 02, 2015, 14:10 (3307 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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).-Inexplicable is a wonderful word. At least I look for reasonable explanations. Accept God and everything fits.
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> dhw: I don't know why failed strategies or lifestyles would leave fossil evidence.-But that is exactly what dead animals do, leave fossils, good strategy or bad.-> dhw: 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”.-Your comment does not explain the gaps in complexity which in the Cambrian is enormous. Darwin recognized the problem, but his hoped-for fossil intermediates have never appeared. To make these leaps advance planning must understand the challenges to life that will exist in the new environment with many new challenging organisms to contend with. 
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> dhw: It makes no difference: the soft tissue they do find will still be fully formed. -You miss my point. The excuse for gaps is that soft tissue won't fossilize, but it does and it doesn't close the gaps.-> dhw: 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, -Absolutely a PD. Didn't you ever hear of trial and error? That is how Edison made most of his inventions. Darwin's theory is the same thing. In your view first life arrived and began thinking how to make itself better. And survives to this day without change, so change was not required.-> dhw: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.-No-nothingism.