EVOLUTION AND PURPOSE (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 25, 2015, 14:11 (3284 days ago)

Various threads are overlapping, so I am combining them on this new thread.-dhw: The disagreement between us is not over chance v. design, but over how jumps may have happened. The jumps in the whale series are "a prime example of my viewpoint": that existing organisms invent new ways of exploiting their environment. Each innovation results in a new “species”, but that species may also innovate. Hence eight “jumps” from land animal to whale.-DAVID: You are assuming that large physiologic and phenotypic changes in each jump can occur without advanced planning and understanding of the problems involved in making such jumps. Even Darwin knew that logically it should occur by itty-bitty steps.-And it appears that Darwin's logic was faulty. Logically, if an innovation doesn't work straight away, there is no reason why it should survive. I would not expect advance planning at all. When organisms adapt I believe they respond to (not predict) environmental change, and the adjustments must be rapid or the organisms will not survive. For innovation, I suggest the same mechanism goes one step further, and USES the environmental change to its own advantage. Of course it will have to understand all the problems involved, and that requires intelligence: your God's preprogramming or dabbling of every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder, or the cell communities possessing the same sort of autonomous collective intelligence described in the wonderful article on ant bridges (for which many thanks).-dhw: Which of these two scenarios [I have telescoped different posts here] seems to fit in more logically with the history of life on Earth?
DAVID: You are the one who wants to question each scenario. I've admitted I have no idea if each or both are correct.-That is progress. You now appear to be giving my hypothesis an equal chance of being correct. Thank you.-dhw: Restrictions do not offer guidance on how to create something new... -DAVID: Once again, we see an inventive approach in epigenetic adaptations, which are responses to stress. We have suggested that for simple innovation, an IM might exist in the genome with guidelines, that may well be restrictive and limiting in the extent of the innovation. Again, all guesswork, awaiting more research.-We agree that no organism can invent an innovation that exceeds its own natural limitations or will set it in conflict with its environment. If the guidelines are the 3.8-billion-year computer programme or God's personal intervention, what “degree of initial freedom” (“Cambrian Explosion", 22 Nov.) can organisms have?
 
All our hypotheses are guesswork, awaiting more research, but I asked if, instead of your 3.8-billion-year programme, you might consider the hypothesis “that God gives what I call an autonomous inventive mechanism free rein, but dabbles when he doesn't like what's going on, or when he wants evolution to take a particular direction?” Wouldn't that offer a way out of the dilemma posed by the problem raised below?-DAVID: Is God logical or purposeful? This universe is fine tuned for life. We are here. We are discussing. You are questioning how God did it, and I'm content with seeing why God did it. We come from two completely different viewpoints in the discussion.-How can the whole universe be fine tuned for life, but the zillions of solar systems that make up the rest of the universe are not fine tuned for life? Yes, we are here. And you say that's why God did it. So I ask why your God made zillions of solar systems not fine tuned for life, and why he made the duckbilled platypus and the other billions of species, lifestyles and wonders, 99% of which are extinct, when all he wanted was to make humans. That is not “how”; that is “why”. (You've told me how: preprogramming and/or dabbling.) And if you can't think why, then might it perhaps, maybe, possibly be because your reading of his purpose is...um...not quite right?