about how evolution works; with no challenge (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, November 22, 2015, 13:04 (3071 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: ...What I am claiming is that it is obvious some changes and advances are not due to stress, but simple innovation. The whale series is another example. The changes only served to complicate the physiology of the animals as they progressed from land animals to sea-dwelling whales. Natural selection played a role but initial stress didn't as far as can be told.-dhw: You have missed out the argument that I have put forward throughout this thread: namely, that what you call stress or environmental challenge leads to adaptation, but environmental change also offers opportunity for what I call IMPROVEMENT, and it is improvement that advances evolution. That is why I keep quoting the image of the fish leaving water when suddenly confronted by dry land. The land animal that entered the water reverses my example. My whole argument is based on the claim that innovation is not required but is the result of intelligent organisms exploiting new (for them) conditions in order to better themselves....-DAVID: Now you propose that organisms have an innate will to better themselves. You have talked your way around my proposal that improvements can and do appear with no stress at all. The whale series created more physiologic stress by attempting to enter the water than maintaining the status it had. And there are many examples of stasis for 350 million years or more. So some are dangerously inventive and some are not? Why would a fish struggle to get up on land? My solution to your proposal is a God-given drive to complexity, because the lifestyles we know developed required intense planning to accomplish them. Again eight distinct very different species from land animal to whale with no intermediates to fill the large gaps in phenotype.-The stress you referred to earlier was “advances due to stress”, i.e. the challenge of a changed environment. That relates to adaptation. Now you are switching to stress caused by innovation for the sake of improvement. Are you suggesting, then, that your whale didn't suffer any stress because God organized its transition, whereas my whale went through agonies? How do you know? If I said that God gave organisms an “innate will to better themselves”, it would be exactly the same as your “God-driven drive to complexity”. Otherwise there would be no species apart from bacteria. As you so rightly say, the wonderful article about acorn worms makes it “hard to deny an evolutionary process”. “Human arms, birds' wings, cats' paws and the whales' flippers are classical examples of homology, because they all derive from the limbs of a common ancestor.” Some fish left the water, and some pre-whales left the land, but other fish stayed in the water and other land animals stayed on the land, so of course some organisms are inventive and some are not. In your scenario, some organisms inherited your God's make-yourself-into-a-whale-via-eight-different-species programme, and others did not. And that's just one of the billions of programmes that had to be passed down selectively by the very first cells so that birds and cats and whales and dinosaurs and the duck-billed platypus could fulfil your God's purpose of creating humans. Ockham will be squirming in his grave.-Xxxxxx-Thank you for the intriguing article on “Quantum weirdness”, which I need time to digest.