Why sex evolved; no one knows (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 26, 2016, 15:48 (3074 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Correct. The balance OF nature is only a mechanism to let the necessary energy supply continue to provide energy so life can continue to evolve.
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> dhw: It therefore provides no explanation whatsoever for the course evolution has taken.-Correct. It supplies energy for the process. -> DAVID: God used evolution as a process to produce humans. The weaver bird fits into it own balance of nature in its ecologic niche. Tying the bird to us is a straw man argument. The bird is small part of an overall process.
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> It is anything but a straw man, since you insist that your God specially designed it, even though his aim was to produce humans. Previously you clung to the “balance of nature” explanation, which we now agree is irrelevant.-See above. not truly irrelevant, but not a driving force for evolution.--> dhw: The colossal variety of life, with 99% of species going extinct, clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with the production of humans, and so if your God exists, there has to be another reason for his special design of the nest and the millions of other natural wonders.-God provided a drive to complexity, which is what evolution shows.-
> dhw: If you can't find one, perhaps you will consider the possibility that he did NOT specially design the nest, but gave the weaverbird and all its fellow miracle-workers the means of devising their own wonders. -I still doubt that. Somehow He helped them design the nest.-> dhw: And if his final target was homo sapiens, what do you mean by “we need to consider” a scattergun hominin group? Again I would ask why your God created “multiple choice” programmes for all the different hominins if he just wanted homo sapiens.-Because the example we see is that all of evolution is scattergun.-
> DAVID: Again the process He seems to prefer: what I have described as shotgun advances of complexity. Complexification is an overarching principle of the evolutionary process we observe.
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> This is the process that happened. If he exists, then of course it's the process he prefers, but it clearly runs counter to your hypothesis that he has preprogrammed it to produce homo sapiens.-Why don't you like His obvious method? Because you like your way of doing things which is logical. God's logic, from the evidence is to complexify and scattergun resultant creatures.-> 
> dhw: I agree with you completely, however, that complexification is an overarching principle when we consider the development from single cell to ourselves. That is why, in passing, I cannot make head or tail of the “front end loading” gene-loss article, which suggests the exact opposite.-Front-end loading with all possibilities on board allows for all sorts of results, just as we've seen in the h-p bush.
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> dhw: I wish you did look at the overall impression of ‘process'. Your vision seems to me to focus on humans and to offer no explanation of the seemingly chaotic comings and goings of life's history, with its vast variety of species and natural wonders that have nothing to do with humans. If you really want to be a ‘lumper', you need to find a reason for the whole higgledy-piggledy, and that means finding a reason for the weaver bird's nest as well as for the human brain.-I don't need to find reasons. That is your problem. I look at process and the resultant end as the basis of my position. If I can't read God's planning process in His mind, I can't fill in reasons that satisfy a human mind.