Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 14, 2016, 20:18 (3052 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: It only appears “too complex” if you do not believe organisms have the intelligence to work out their own designs, strategies and lifestyles for themselves. You flounder in your attempts to explain why God, whose purpose was to create homo sapiens, should take all the trouble to design a particular nest. Of course God can do anything you or I think he wants to do.-I'm not floundering, I repeat. I feel my theory that microcosms of environmental balance provide the energy for evolutionary processes to advance is right on, and complexity in design appears to be God's choice. Original life had a 'drive to complexity' written in. Very obvious to me from the evidence. That you are repeating yourself ("floundering")indicates you really have no good answers for my observations-> dhw: Giving the weaverbird enough intelligence to design its own nest gets rid of your impossible task of explaining why God should create millions of such natural wonders when his aim is to produce homo sapiens.-Balance of nature to provide food for all.-> DAVID: Yes, God might have to do it all. And always working backward from what we observe, God must like complexity.
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> dhw: Working backward from what we observe, there is a free-for-all, and God is capable of creating an autonomous mechanism that would produce such a free-for-all, and God may well like watching such a mechanism doing its own thing.-I agree that is all possible with the dabble theory in action. We still get to the endpoint, humans. God watches and makes sure the course corrections are made if needed.-> DAVID: Again working backward from what we see happening, humans are here, descended from unchanged apes, and we see no requirement from the pressures of environmental challenges to change apes. Why us unless pushed by some force? Try asking why, not how which is your favored approach.
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> dhw: Working backwards, there was no requirement from the environmental pressures to change single-celled organisms to multicelled organisms, and there was no pressure to produce the weaverbird's nest, or the duck-billed platypus. -Exactly!!! But all those odd things happened. Not required, so there must be an underlying drive for complexity for complexity's sake.-> dhw: And I keep asking WHY your God needed to produce all these things if his aim was to produce homo sapiens. By all means cling to the specialness of humans (who might have been “dabbled”), but don't insist that this has any connection with the higgledy-piggledy bush that preceded and still accompanies the existence of humans.-Humans were never required. See the comments above. All occurred without environmental stress. That is fact. The only requirement for the h-p bush is to recognize that complexity rules, therefore is driven in the programming of evolution.->> DAVID: Advances in evolution result from loss of genetic information. That is an accepted fact. Externally experienced stress information received by the organisms is not the same information.
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> dhw: It is not an accepted fact. You have said yourself that the only evidence concerns adaptation, not innovation, and you have agreed that advances in evolution depend on innovation. -But is accepted for mutational changes for adaptations. Since this is the only change mechanism we know, it may well be a part of speciation. -> dhw: “Can advance a new adaptation” is a million miles away from speciation occurring “solely from a loss of information, which means all the info needed for evolution was present from the beginning.” (My bold) If an organism adapts, the “genetic information” may have to change, and change “can” (your verb) entail loss as well as gain. I have asked you to define “the information for evolution”: as I see it, the information needed for evolution relates to external conditions and the internal means of processing the external information and changing the structure of the organism accordingly. Any such change “can” result in both loss and gain. Neither of these is the CAUSE of advances: they are both the result of the process of change.-The problem in your discussion is that the only advances we see are adaptations in existing species, and each time genes are removed! Removal of genes in DNA is removal of information. Stimuli from the environment are forms of external information. Only coding in DNA can respond with epigenetic methylation or gene removal, and that is all internal to the organism.