Natures wonders: amphibious centipede (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 12:55 (3068 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: This shows that there are many undiscovered species, but also more significantly, whatever mechanism that exists to create new species is highly inventive and adds complexity. This guy can live under water, which raises the issue of how amphibians develop. It must be in one step or they would drown, or if coming out of water, they must immediately be able to breathe on land. Darwin doesn't help, does he?-Thank you for yet another stunning example of the ingenuity of cell communities. No, Darwin's gradualism doesn't help (though his common descent stands firm). Nor does Turell's theory that every single wonder has been divinely preprogrammed or dabbled so that humans can walk the Earth. This little marvel suggests to me that organisms (cell communities) do indeed possess a highly inventive mechanism which creates new ways of coping with or exploiting the environment; these new inventions would obviously entail “adding complexity”, but always with a purpose. Once again, I can only ask what on earth would be the point of adding complexity just for the sake of complexity? It may be that your God preprogrammed the very first cells to pass on every single invention and variation throughout the history of life (apart from those he dabbled), and at some point in time a few centipedes blindly turned on programme XYZ million(multiple choice No. 2099), to make themselves amphibious, just as your God had planned. Or it may be that they used the intelligence your God had given them to devise a new way of exploiting the environment. The latter hypothesis, however, apparently has too many complexities for you to accept as a possibility, whereas you cannot see any complexities in the former.