Convoluted human evolution: H. naledi branch (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, July 10, 2016, 13:12 (3059 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All I can do is look at the existing historical evidence. God uses evolution and flurries of complexity patterns. Perhaps He is not in full control. After all that is religion's guess. He may simple stimulate the evolutionary process until He gets humans. Humans are a most unusual result, which means to me that is what He desired to happen. I can't go further than that.-dhw: But until now you have always gone a lot further than that. You have had God preprogramming or dabbling every innovation and natural wonder in the history of life on Earth, all in order to produce humans. However, “perhaps he is not in full control” is the concession I have been asking for. In my theistic hypothesis, he CHOOSES not to be in full control. And that choice may extend to the whole process of evolution, with the concession to you that he might sometimes dabble, e.g. to produce humans.-DAVID: I can't go as far as you do. I suspect He watches over evolution quite closely but takes a hands off approach, and I would especially favor that thought if we could find a speciation inventive mechanism in the genome. That would allow for a variety of complexity and survival competition.-A “hands off approach” is a far cry from the “full control” you have been advocating for so long. An autonomous inventive mechanism would not just allow for the variety of complexity and survival competition (which I call the higgledy-piggledy bush), but would actually cause it. And you would no longer have to scrabble around to find reasons why God had to design the weaverbird's nest in order to balance nature in order to produce humans (see the insect thread). But of course you are right to point out that such a mechanism has not been found. Nor has a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme. We are hypothesizing.