Convoluted human evolution: Tattersall's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 17:55 (3202 days ago) @ David Turell

I am putting this under “Convoluted human evolution” as the two arguments link uphw (under "Nature's wonders"): you are allowed to read his mind for purpose and impose it on the apparently contradictory process (which you can't understand), but I am criticized if I base my reading of his mind for purpose on observation of the process!-DAVID: I can still see purpose even if I don't understand the intricacies of the process. I'm standing in a Ford automatic car factory. I know what is coming out but I don't understand the robotic process in detail. What is your problem with that reasoning?-I suspect that there is a general consensus that a Ford factory has been designed by humans for the purpose of producing Ford cars. Sadly for your reasoning, there is no general consensus that the universe was designed by God for the purpose of producing humans. If you wish to argue that the product proves the purpose behind the design, then I shall have to point out that the current product is billions of solar systems coming and going, mosquitoes, monarch butterflies, the duckbilled platypus, human beings, the weaverbird's nest, famine, flood, earthquakes, deadly viruses, the skylark's song, the peacock's tail, the camel's hump, arthritis, all things bright and beautiful, all things dark and horrible...need I go on? Yeah, humans are in there somewhere.
 
This leads to your usual point about humansavid's comment: Until this is settled, they look a lot like us, and therefore will remain Homo. With all the branches of Hominins at the start, it looks like convergence, with humans a definite purpose of the process.
dhw: I agree that it looks like convergence - different varieties evolving at the same time, often under different conditions - each of them with the “definite purpose” of surviving and/or improving. Homo sapiens has proved to be the most successful. That is how natural selection works: success = survival. -DAVID: Natural selection is the active judge for survival only after it is presented with choices. I'm still asking why humans were presented at all. They weren't necessary from the ape/chimp point of view. Something drove that special brain and intellectual capacity, when it wasn't necessary to appear.-We have both answered this a thousand times. Nothing was “necessary” from the bacteria point of view! The something that drove the special brain and intellectual capacity can only have been the something that drove every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder that has led from bacteria to us. You think they were all preprogrammed or personally supervised by your God, Darwinists argue for random mutations followed by natural selection, and I have suggested that they were all the product of an autonomous inventive mechanism (origin unknown) within the cells/cell communities themselves. I'm afraid if you ask the same question, I can only come up with the same answer.