Extinctions: Massive eruptions (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, August 28, 2016, 16:04 (3009 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If we believe in common descent, evolution only shows us that humans descended from apes, just as every other organism descended from preceding organisms. Or are you telling us that there was a strong drive for earlier organisms to produce weaverbirds, elephants and duckbilled platypuses?
DAVID: The only strong drive I see is for humans. See today, convoluted human evolution entry.-If you believe in common descent, every species is the result of convoluted evolution. I don't know what is the difference between a strong drive, a drive and a weak drive. I would suggest that evolution is the consequence of an in-built drive (possibly built in by your God) for survival and or improvement, and somewhere along the evolutionary line interbreeding may well have played a role in the production and survival of most new species (broad and narrow senses).
 
DAVID: Their [human] physical and mental capacities are different in kind from apes… 
dhw: So if they are different in kind, how does that make them predictable?
DAVID: I'm looking retrospectively at how we appeared.-If prediction was the art of looking retrospectively at what has already happened, we would all be infallible prophets! However, knowing what has happened does not mean that it had to happen that way - only that it did happen that way.-DAVID (under “Convoluted human evolution”) DNA has shown that our evolutionary tree is very bushy and more like a river delta with streams in every direction:
https://aeon.co/ideas/human-evolution-is-more-a-muddy-delta-than-a-branching-tree?utm_s...-I like the image, and can see a clear parallel, as the streams simply make their own way from the delta, as conditions dictate. If your God specially wanted to create homo sapiens, why could he not simply have created homo sapiens (as he did in Genesis)? Ah, but your hindsight powers of prediction tell us that this is what happened, and so this is the predictable way God must have wanted to do it. We should not even suggest that this is the way organisms followed their own paths to survival (Sapiens) and extinction (Neanderthals and Denisovans). God - see your next comment - had to guide the latter to oblivion.-DAVID's comment: Looks like a guided evolution to me since the pattern is so unusual compared to other primate species.-Most species (general sense) evolve into different species (specialized sense): a quick google reveals that there are 13 species of crocodile, 18 species of bat in the UK alone, and 88 species of cetaceans, all presumably descended from a common ancestor, and millions of species (both senses) have become extinct. Other species of human also became extinct, which proves…what? The duckbilled platypus, you will be fascinated to hear, is “the sole living representative of its family (Ornithorhynchidae) and genus (Ornithorhynchus), though a number of related species have been found in the fossil record.” (Wikipedia) I wonder why God would have guided evolution to produce the duckbilled platypus. But then I keep wondering why God would have specially guided the weaverbird to build its nest. We should not ask such questions, should we? Whatever is here was meant to be here, so God must have guided it to be here.