Natures wonders: blind walking cavefish (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 29, 2016, 13:32 (3159 days ago) @ David Turell

David: These tropical fish can climb waterfalls and are shown to have a pelvic girdle-like anatomy similar to tetrapods: - http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23711 - David's comment: One might consider the point that in the evolution of fish a tendency to develop walking is built in. Pre-planning? - Alternatively, one might consider the point that in evolution organisms work out their own methods to survive and/or improve. Every example of these natural wonders - and I cannot thank you enough for this truly fascinating thread, which is providing us all with an ongoing education and source of wonderment - seems to me to illustrate the astonishing inventiveness of living things. But the more there are, the less convincing (to me) becomes your theory of divine preprogramming and/or intervention. There is simply no need for those first cells to have been loaded with programmes for every imaginable twist and turn in evolution's history, or for personal dabbling. The theist can marvel simply at the ingenuity of the divine engineer who created a mechanism to produce all these wonders. Meanwhile, the atheist can marvel at the (literally) unbelievable stroke of luck that produced the mechanism. And the agnostic is left marvelling at the marvels produced by the mechanism, and mumbling “yes, but…” at each attempt to explain it.