Explaining natural wonders (Animals)

by David Turell , Friday, September 16, 2016, 14:52 (2989 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: But my proposal is that they were designed by the minds of the organisms themselves, and yet you keep insisting that my proposal DOESN'T work: your God has to guide every innovation and natural wonder.-Just as you don't believe in God, I don't believe simple organisms without brains had minds. -> 
> dhw: There is no doubt that evolutionary saltation requires coordination, though “advanced planning” is open to definition. How advanced is advanced planning - not just in terms of complexity but also in terms of time? If innovation is triggered by changes in the environment, the changes must come first, and the innovation will be a response to the new conditions. The whole point of my hypothesis, and of BBella's response to your post, is not the origin of consciousness but the existence of consciousness, i.e. a crucial part of the unknown mechanism is the conscious intelligence of organisms which enables them to work out their own innovations, without God having to set up an undiscovered 3.7-billion-year-old computer programme for everything, or to take “time out of his busy schedule”.-My concept totally differs: a new species has new parts or new mechanisms which are coordinated. This must be planned in advance. If punctuated equilibrium is the rule, there is no other way. I firmly believe your concept of conscious intelligence to create new species resides in God. As an example the current compliment of 200 dog types don't look like wolves, but they really still are, and human intelligence did that. No one knows how new species happen naturally.