Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 16, 2016, 10:20 (3051 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: But this does not explain why he needed to design the weaverbird's nest in order to fulfil his purpose of producing homo sapiens. See below as regards your various dislocated arguments.
DAVID: You keep equating two facts that are not necessarily related to any great degree. Complexity for complexity's sake may be a method God used to drive evolutionary complexity so that it reached the end result of humans.-It is you who keep linking the two ideas, as if somehow the vast array of life forms and natural wonders, extinct and extant, was designed to produce humans. At least you are now qualifying this with “not necessarily”…”to any great degree”. Perhaps eventually you will even acknowledge that the “balance of nature” and your God's enjoyment of creating pretty patterns for their own sake - or in my hypothesis his enjoyment of watching the autonomous inventive mechanism at work - offer no support for your claim that evolution was geared to the purpose of producing homo sapiens. (That does not preclude the possibility that your God later dabbled.) -dhw: All I ask is that you acknowledge the possibility that the inventive mechanism is autonomous, and so it is possible that God DID give the weaverbird the intelligence to design its own nest. Thank you.
DAVID: Not at all likely in my view.-You have every right to believe that 3.8 billion years ago your God preprogrammed the very first cells to pass on the design for the nest, along with all the other millions of natural wonders and innovations, or that he popped in to give the bird lessons in nest-building, and that this has some vague connection with his method of producing homo sapiens. But I have to echo your words: “not at all likely in my view”. -dhw: You keep switching your focus from humans as God's purpose to complexity for its own sake. Yes, the evolutionary mechanism, whatever may be its nature and source, entails a drive from simple to complex, which explains the existence of every single multicellular creature that ever lived: there was no requirement for ANY of them, so there is no point in saying there was no requirement for humans as if that supported your anthropocentric interpretation of evolution.
DAVID: But you are basically agreeing with me in the beginning of your comment. Humans are logical endpoint of the drive to complexity.-I am pointing out to you that the non-requirement for humans applies to all multicellular organisms, and is therefore no justification for your belief that humans were the reason for your God's creation of all the life forms and natural wonders in the history of evolution. I have no idea what evolution will produce in the next 3.8 billion years, but I agree with you that humans are the most complex organisms so far. That does not mean we are the logical endpoint or that your God started out with us in mind (he might have hit on the idea later, and dabbled), and it certainly doesn't mean that he preprogrammed or dabbled every life form and natural wonder for our sake.
 
dhw: You still have no evidence whatsoever for your claim that speciation may occur “solely from a loss of information, which means all the info needed for evolution was present from the beginning,” (my bold) and you still haven't explained what you mean by “all the info”. 
DAVID: The evidence I have is that I read over and over again from all researchers, Darwin-types and ID folks that innovation is the result of a loss of genes. If I run into another article I'll give its source.-“Another” article? The article you gave us did not present any such argument: “gene loss can be an evolutionary strategy that allows the adaptation of species to biological situations in a beneficial way…”; “a scenario of regressive evolution, in which the lost functions were not essential for the organism” (my bold). The only mention of innovation is: “Biological innovation is not necessarily linked to an increase of functional complexity or number of genes”, and it goes on to mention other possible means. Even you said that the argument only applied to adaptation, not innovation (which remains a mystery). Why do you continually refuse to define what you mean by “all the info needed for evolution”? And why do you not respond to the logical argument that adaptations and innovations will inevitably involve the gain of new information both external and internal - bearing in mind that external information is likely to be the trigger for both adaptation and innovation - and this may well be accompanied by the loss of old internal information that is now redundant?