By FRANS de WAAL on animal cognition (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 17, 2016, 13:06 (3141 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And I'm sorry, but your reasoning still doesn't explain why it's OK for God to hang around for 3 billion years waiting for the right conditions, but it's not OK for my buddies the bacteria. 
DAVID: Note today's entry on tree of life and why it took so long.-I have no problem understanding why it took so long, or in understanding the vital role played by bacteria. That is not the point at issue. This is the exchange we are discussingAVID: Either life comes with a drive to complexity built-in, which means bacteria waited about 3 billion years to use it, or complexity appeared as a saltation. The Cambrian is an extreme jump in complexity, more than the wait for enough oxygen can be used as an excuse that 'the conditions were not right'.
Dhw: Nobody knows why multicellularity appeared. Why did your God wait 3 billion years to do his complexifications? Do please answer.
DAVID: Waiting for enough oxygen is one answer. High levels took a long time to appear, and God seems to like evolutionary processes. 
Dhw: …So it's OK for God to hang around till conditions are right, but it's no excuse for Baccy & Co not acting sooner. It also suggests that God had no control over the environment (“waiting…took a long time to appear”) […] *(My bold)-You ridiculed the idea that it took bacteria 3 billion years to implement the drive to complexity, and waiting for the right conditions was no excuse, and then you went on to tell us that God waited 3 billion years to implement the drive to complexity because he waited until conditions were right!
 
DAVID (under “Tree of Life”) A rocky Earth had to be prepared to be fertile Earth to give us plants as a major source of energy. This 3+ billion years of preparation for the multicellular seems like a good plan for me. God, after all, has all the time He wants.-Agreed, but that does not tell us whether God controlled all the environmental factors or left them to chance, and it does not mean he could not have given cells/cell communities the intelligence to do their own inventing. Like God himself, they could hardly have produced their innovations until conditions were right.-dhw: He likes the evolutionary processes, so - yet again - how does that explain why he creates the duck-billed platypus, guides the monarch to its destination, and instructs the weaverbird on how to build its nest so that humans can arrive and be fed? It just doesn't make sense, does it?
DAVID: You just don't like the concept of balance of nature as a supply of energy. Makes perfect sense to me.-I just don't see how the weaverbird's nest and the monarch's migration and the duck-billed platypus and every extinct species, lifestyle and natural wonder, and every shift in the balance of nature since the year dot were all geared to the production and feeding of humans.