Cambrian Explosion: best illustrated guide (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 14:09 (3140 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: Certainly enough time had passed for preparation of an Earth with the proper concentration of elements and soil, 3.5 million years, but the drive to complexity is not explained by the article, only a Darwinian appeal to survival.
dhw; He does link the two: the need to survive resulted in more and more complex forms of attack and defence. But that doesn't explain the formation of “mouths, nerves and guts” which I think you and I would regard as the real mystery of complexification. How the heck did vulnerable animals “land on” these innovations? My suggestion is that the cellular intelligence (perhaps God-given) which first invented the mouths, nerves and guts also invented the shells, spikes, camouflage, claws etc.
DAVID: Your "perhaps God-given" tells us it is an equal possibility to my approach, "God-guided". The issue of complexification as always involves the necessity for design planning and then finding the right organic molecules to fit the design, since the gaps in the fossil record deny the Darwin tiny-step approach.
-Yes, I have always allowed for the autonomous inventive mechanism to be your God's creation. The dispute between us is over your insistence that God “guided” every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder for the sake of humans, and that organisms themselves are incapable of doing their own inventing. This is illustrated by your comment on ant rafts: “I'm sure the instinct developed by necessity”. (See my response to that post.)
 
dhw: No doubt your suggestion is that every one of these inventions was preprogrammed by your God 3.8 billion years ago, or was the result of his personal intervention, because every single one was necessary to provide the energy needed for the eventual production and feeding of humans.
DAVID: One cannot tell the difference in our two approaches from the history of evolution, just as one cannot tell the difference in a beautifully programmed bacteria from one that has some independent decision-making ability.-Agreed. And so when eminent scientists inform us that bacteria are cognitive, sentient, cooperative, decision-making beings, one should perhaps take their findings seriously.