Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, July 22, 2016, 10:36 (3045 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Once again: you claimed there was no natural explanation for improvement/advance - which means what happened AFTER the origin of life. So why you do consider the scenario I offered to be unnatural?-DAVID: By inference. Bacteria are still here unchanged. Obviously some became eukaryotes with nuclei and some then joined up as multicellular sheets which then further differentiated into specialized areas. I have presented this article previously. (Wednesday, July 20, 2016, 14:03) It encompasses my thinking completely:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-highly-engineered-transition-to-v...
QUOTE: I will state now in advance the point that I am trying to make here: each of the transitions described requires tons and tons of new, original, highly specific functional information.-Exit your theory that innovation is caused by loss of information.-DAVID: The advances are totally unexplained, not understood and require mental planning to coordinate all the new parts.-So why would it be unnatural for sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings to design and coordinate their new parts (allowing for your God giving them these powers)? You asked for a “natural” explanation and I gave you one. The fact that you prefer to believe in preprogramming/ dabbling does not make my hypothesis “unnatural”.-dhw: So when you said that research has found that a new structure can be created without adding “new information”, you actually meant science has found that some adaptations lose information. There is a difference. 
DAVID: I agree. But these adaptations are the only advances that we have to study. They contain the suggestion that possibly speciation may involve loss of information. -Possibly involving loss of information is far, far away from the suggestion that speciation can occur without additional information, let alone that it is CAUSED by loss of information.-DAVID: Antibiotics have been around forever, in some organisms, in soil, etc. Bacteria have been battling them forever. Antibiotics are a new human discovery, not a new invention, and bacteria are naturally resistant to some of them.
dhw; How much simpler it would all have been if only God had given organisms the wherewithal to do their own adapting and inventing!
DAVID: But He did give them alternate pathways to choose from! You seem to want simplicity. The h-p bush is not simple. You don't like my explanation, but complexity seems the rule. The particle zoo is complex. Quantum mechanics is very complex. But you want simplicity and we are surrounded by things we cannot explain. How about accepting what you see as the normal result of complex planning?-You are playing games. You know perfectly well that my hypothesis does not deny the complexities of life! It does away with the complexities of your God having to preprogramme the first cells with billions of adaptations, innovations and natural wonders to create a bush to balance nature - or satisfy his liking for complexity - while being geared to producing human beings. My hypothesis offers the simpler explanation that organisms have an autonomous ability (possibly designed by your God) to do their own “complex planning”, of which the higgledy-piggledy bush is the “normal result”.
 
dhw: I know you can only think in terms of a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme plus dabbling, but I am querying your statement that “genetic studies of adaptations suggest all the info [needed for evolution] could have been present at the beginning.” ...... How could these plans and instructions have been present at the very beginning if the external information requiring adaptation or allowing for innovation was not present? If you now accept that all the information could NOT have been present at the beginning, and so your God had to dabble, we shall have cleared up that particular issue, and I hope we can also forget about the illogical hypothesis that evolutionary advances are CAUSED by loss of information.-DAVID: I'm still stuck with what is known: adaptations do/can result from loss of information. With that fact inevidence, it is still possible that God pre-loaded all the information in the beginning, and since He also was running the evolution of the universe He knew what environmental pressures would be brought to bear on developing organisms and set up preparatory changes for them. That or He dabbled. I'm stuck.

So he wasn't in control of all the environmental pressures - he merely gazed into his crystal ball, and provided the first cells with every single adaptation and innovation to cope with or exploit every single change. Alternatively, when the crystal ball got it wrong, he intervened to help some lucky critters to cope, or create new organs, while the rest went extinct. With preprogrammed loss-of-info, human beings were present in the first cells, along with the duck-billed platypus and the elephant, and as evolution proceeded, all the other different species dropped their platypusness, elephantnesss, humanness etc. - no, that would be too much even for you, I think. So you must go back to speciation being the result of your God dabbling, i .e. adding rather than subtracting information. Therefore all the information required for evolution cannot have been present at the beginning, and evolutionary advances cannot have been caused by loss of information. Agreed?