Evolution and human: having proper feet (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 00:41 (3222 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Not for the first time, I am very uncertain about your use of language. A “speciation layer preprogrammed for giant leaps in phenotypes” does not sound quite the same as my hypothesis. The lead-in to these comments was as follows:
> YOU: Chance or advanced planning? If God guided evolution this shows how He might have engineered it.
> ME: It also shows how the cell communities that comprise every organism “might have engineered it”. Not advance planning, but improvement as they cooperate in response to environmental conditions....
> 
> So once more, let us clarify. Your hypothesis is giant leaps preprogrammed by your God; my hypothesis is giant leaps engineered by the autonomous inventive intelligence of the organisms themselves. The “compromise” is that this autonomous intelligence may have been invented by your God, which is far, far away from your God preprogramming a layer of DNA with the giant leaps! I remain hopeful that you are indeed prepared to accept the possibility of my hypothesis as phrased by me.-No. It is a matter of the size of the 'leap'. I can certainly accept an inventive mechanism at the level of epigenetic variations within a species, but speciation itself with a major variation in phenotype, as I pointed out, I feel is beyond an IM unless that IM is a so-far undiscovered God-given complex layer which controls the giant leap to a new species. I view your proposal as equivalent to the current known abilities of organisms through epigenetics. That method is advancement through small modifications and trial and error stages. The fossil record is not equated with that.