EVOLUTION AND PURPOSE (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 02, 2015, 18:07 (3277 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Not “of course brains appeared”, but new conditions enabled existing organisms to use their intelligence inventively. The sticking point is whether they have that kind of intelligence. ...If organisms used the new chance conditions inventively, their innovations were not by chance. .... it's a case of organisms using the new environment for their own purposes.-DAVID: You are now proposing, perhaps inadvertently, a sort 'drive to complexity theory' like mine. Darwin proposed changes or adaptations due to challenges. Many Darwinists still view evolution this way, but we have discussed fossil series leading to current organisms for no apparent reason than advancing complexity. -I have pointed out over and over again that my hypothesis is NOT a response to challenges, which would be adaptation, but the quest for improvement (the same as your drive to complexity) which leads organisms to find new ways of exploiting their (changed) environment.-dhw: So if horses were free to work out their own unidactyl variation, let's see how far we can go. 
DAVID: I don't know if hoofed animals did this on their own. Deer use two fingers. it is part of a developmental pattern, as other patterns I've described.
-I asked if by “partial” you meant that “your God stuck the first limbs on the protowalker and then gave all subsequent organisms the freedom to develop their own versions”. You replied “Yes, that is my concept. For example the horse walks on one toe on each leg.” I took your “yes” to mean yes. But perhaps you are playing hard to get! I then gave more examples, including my buddy the weaverbird, and suggested they may also have had such freedom. You replied: ”I've accepted the possibility of individual inventiveness to some degree, but not to the extent you are proposing.” This is a very evasive reply.-And I must say in all honesty that it is both expected and accepted. We tend to goad each other, which is fun and sometimes illuminating. But we can stop beating about the evolutionary bush for a moment and face the brutal fact that while I can afford to be direct, because I have no faith at stake, you need such evasions. Individual inventiveness means autonomous intelligence, the very thought of which is anathema to you. It would mean accepting the claims of Margulis, McClintock, Buehler, Shapiro & Co that cells/cell communities are intelligent beings, and if for argument's sake we agree that God exists, it would also mean that your God did not control the course of evolution and gear every innovation to the production of a single species. That is all integral to your faith, and I respect it. In response to my point that dead dinosaurs etc. did not fit in logically with your anthropocentrism, you have responded: “They are illogical to you, not to me. That is a major difference. You want everything neatly as you would have planned it. However, you are not God.” Quite right. I need hardly point out to you that you are not God either, and so each of us with our blinkers (you) or myopia (me) can go on groping through the darkness and goading each other!