Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 20, 2016, 21:59 (3046 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: But you claimed there was no natural answer to the question of improvement/advance. Once the first merger took place, I have offered you a natural explanation. Why do you consider the above scenario to be unnatural? -Just as Darwin skipped origin of life you've skipped how he first combination took place. Remember it is all a continuum from start of lie to now.
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> dhw: I was responding to the following exchange:
> ME: How a new structure can be created without adding new “information” is beyond my comprehension.
> YOU: But that is what research has found. Accept it if you believe science can advance our knowledge. (My bold)
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> No, research has not found that, and so I will not accept it! But thank you for proving my point for me.-I have always said either evolutionary advances were coded from the beginning or God dabbles. God dabbling is adding new information. But adaptations, which are minor advances, may often lose information.
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> dhw: But you believe bacteria to be automatons. This can only mean your God must have dabbled, or preprogrammed the first cells to provide some bacteria with special metabolic pathways to deal with the invention of antibiotics 3.8 billion years later, and those bacteria passed on (horizontal transfer) the metabolic pathways to other bacteria who had not been provided with them. Or could it be that some bacteria were able to work out for themselves how to deal with the new threat, and passed the information on to others?-I'll try again. Many bacteria have a multiple choice on board for metabolic processes that antibiotics might interfere with. In fact some antibiotics are tailored to do just that. If A won't work anymore, they simply shift to B. Research shows this. Nylon use was simply an adaptation of an existing pathway, as an example. Otherwise resistance is naturally present in an alternative available pathway, or horizontal transfer takes place.
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> dhw: Not explained above. Antibiotics were a new invention. An invention by definition will contain new information. You said that an organism's internal information is the instructions or plans it uses to “run life” (your words). How, then, is it logically possible to say that a new threat (new information) does not require new instructions/plans (new information)?-Because of a fact of nature. Antibiotics have been around forever, in some organisms, in soil, etc. Bacteria have been battling them forever. Antibiotics are a new human discovery, not an a new invention, and bacteria are naturally resistant to some of them.
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> dhw: But your argument might become clearer if only you would explain what you mean by “all the information needed for evolution”.-I did above, but repeating, dabbling is new information. Since we don't understand speciation pre-programming or dabbling is all I have to suggest.