New Oxygen research; abundance and Cambrian (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 14:50 (2979 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: However it happened once the necessary level of oxygen appeared, the Cambrian animals popped up, which fits right into my theory that there is a deliberately implanted drive to complexity in the whole process of evolution.-dhw: It fits right into my hypothesis that there is a drive to improvement as well as survival in the whole process of evolution. That drive may have been deliberately implanted, and your God may have given organisms the wherewithal to implement it by themselves, as opposed to his personally preprogramming or dabbling every single new development, extant and extinct, in order to balance nature in order to provide food in order to keep life going in order to prepare the way for humans. (I hope I've got that right.)-DAVID: Improvement is not required if the organisms at a less complex level are surviving just fine. Bacteria happily existing unchanged for 3.5 billion years are proof of this. Developement of complexity is not required if survival is working! 3.5 billion years of changing and challenging environments on Earth notwithstanding. You insistence about survival is a holdover from your previously pure-Darwin days of thinking. Survival of the fittest is still a tautology.-You have totally misrepresented my hypothesis, which is that there is a drive for survival AND inmprovement. Read the opening statement above: THERE IS A DRIVE TO IMPROVEMENT AS WELL AS TO SURVIVAL. You call it a drive to complexity, but unless you do not regard the appearance of limbs, the senses, brains etc. as improvements, this amounts to the same thing.
 
DAVID: An afterthought about survivability as a factor in evolution:
Again starting with bacteria, they are here easily permanently. On the other hand once multicellularity appears, species come and go as complexity advances by the process of evolution. That means that multicellularity as a condition of living requires much more involved adaptability, i.e., large complex phenotypic alterations when survival is challenged. If that statement is accepted, what evolution does really show is what is required for survivability , i.e., punctuated equilibrium, the huge gaps in speciation. My conclusion from this viewpoint is that multicellularity's complexity drives the organisms to evolve more complexity until there is a perfect solution to the problem, H. sapiens.-Now who is harping on about survival (my bold)? Multicellularity was not REQUIRED and was not a condition of living. But it led to colossal improvements. When you say “perfect solution to the problem”, what is the problem? If the problem is survival, bacteria appear to have the perfect solution.