By FRANS de WAAL on animal cognition (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 12:27 (3145 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Thank you for making my point. There is a drive to complexity which appears to exist in the evolutionary mechanism for no good reason! Where does it come from, naturally?
Answer, it is not natural. - dhw: Why is it unnatural for living organisms to wish to stay alive, or to find new ways of exploiting the conditions under which they live? We humans take this for granted, but some humans believe that only large organisms think this way. - DAVID: I remind you bacteria are still here, with the new ones found that are even more simple than the ones we knew about. They did not complexify. For life to continue, multicellularity did not have to appear. That is a step natural pressures do not explain. It is an event as mysterious and unexplained as the origin of life.
 - If the new ones are simpler than the ones we knew about, then maybe they did complexify!
 
I admire the boldness of your latest counterattack. Over and over again, and as recently as two days ago, you have emphasized that humans and their great minds appeared “for no apparent reason in nature's pressures”, and over and over again, and as recently as two days ago, I have reminded you that “nature did not require any advance beyond bacteria. EVERY innovation is therefore the result of a drive towards improvement.” (I would include multicellularity among the innovations. Wouldn't you?) And over and over again, and as recently as yesterday, I have said that nobody knows how innovation happened. That makes it mysterious and unexplained. So what are you reminding me about? And how does it prove that the drive for survival and/or improvement is unnatural?