EVOLUTION AND PURPOSE (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 25, 2015, 22:16 (3284 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: 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:-You should just stop here and recognize that it takes a sophisticated intelligence to foresee problems in a new body plan. Evolution jumps with new plans. No one just adds lumber to build a house. There is an overall plan first which tells the constructor just where everything is supposed to go.-> dhw: 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).-Don't you think the ant instinct developed slowly, possibly by trial and error? Ants planning a bridge mechanism in advance? Beyond ridiculous. And you are welcome.
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> dhw: That is progress. You now appear to be giving my hypothesis an equal chance of being correct. Thank you.-Not a 50/50 chance, a smidgeon of one.
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> dhw: 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?-Why do I have to cover every one of the possibilities to reach a conclusion? I've found enough reasons for me to reach my conclusions. You want an 100% answer to every observation and nuance. What is wrong with reasoning to the best solution, a standard philosophic technique.