Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 28, 2016, 12:16 (3039 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:What would you say are the logical flaws in the hypothesis that your God might have created an autonomous mechanism that enables organisms to acquire and process new information with which to create the innovations that lead to speciation?

DAVID: As I've noted before, perfectly logical if it is semiautomatic with limits set by God.-I said “autonomous”, and your personal “ifs” do not constitute a logical flaw in my hypothesis. You clearly can't find any, whereas even you have acknowledged that your own defies logic. Doesn't that suggest that mine must at least be worth consideration?-dhw: Any innovation will require a recombination/rearrangement of some sort, if only to accommodate all the new information. How does that mean that the LUCA contained all the information, internal and external, necessary for the platypus and elephant, and the platypus had to lose the elephant information in order to become a platypus?-DAVID: Same repeat: the only advances we know are adaptations and many of them lose information. This is the ONLY evidence we have.-Not much of a basis for your theory, is it? Many adaptations lose unnecessary information, and that suggests that innovations are caused by loss of information? Logic suggests to me that innovations can only come about through the acquisition of new information. Why turn your back on logic?-dhw: …if information has to be added by a dabble, it cannot all have been present at the beginning of evolution. Your different theories contradict each other. DAVID: Of course they contradict. I've always said one or the other, since there is no way of knowing at this point in our knowledge.-Your new “loss of information causes innovation” hypothesis was meant to bolster your preprogramming hypothesis, which in the past had indeed been supplemented by dabbling - a bit of both. But the new hypothesis led you to the idea that ALL the information needed for evolution was already present at the beginning, and that is how you lost hold of your dabbling lifeline and landed in this particular logical quicksand.