Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 15:13 (2753 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I am asking you if you think your God’s preprogramming/dabbling went straight from fin to tikki-“leg” to fully formed leg or also filled what you have called the gaps with more transitional forms of his own.
DAVID: I keep stating the same thing and you keep misunderstanding. Clearly there are only large gaps, with great changes with fish from sea to land, fins to legs, gills to lungs. With large gaps as our only evidence, God had to manage the evolutionary advances.

Once again: our starting point on this thread was the origin of human language, which entailed the range of animal sounds being vastly expanded by a readjustment of all the vocal organs. You insist that God did this with a dabble, and THEN humans learned how to use it. I suggest that with their enhanced awareness (= exploring new territory), they needed new sounds and, in trying to make them, they initiated the changes. By analogy, when fish first explored dry land, they needed an improved method of locomotion and in trying to walk they initiated the changes. In both cases, we do not know how long the processes of change took, and how many (if any) transitional stages there were.

Now to answer your post: Since we have great changes and large gaps, what exactly were the “evolutionary advances” your God managed, if they were not transitional forms? As you have said yourself, either there were transitional forms, or there weren’t, in which case there was a giant leap (saltation) from fin to tikki leg to fully formed leg. What difference does either scenario make to my proposal that the switch from fins to legs was the result of need arising out of new conditions, as opposed to the prior provision of new structures which organisms must learn how to use?

My hypothesis, however, depends on organisms being able to change their own structures (using perhaps God-given cellular intelligence). Several of your posts today deal with the same topic, so I’ll bring them all together:

Dhw (under “smart animals”): And according to your concept of evolution, the same very first cells were also provided with every single innovation and natural wonder in the history of life on Earth (apart from those that were dabbled). THAT is what I find so hard to believe, not to mention that it is a totally unnecessary strain on credulity when there is the far simpler option of God providing the first cells with a form of evolvable intelligence.
DAVID: Your 'form of evolvable intelligence' is the original provision of alternative pathways. Bacteria can solve problems of survivability on their own.

Alternative pathways are simply all the potential solutions to all the problems. It takes intelligence to work out which one fits. You appear to accept this, unless your second sentence is a misprint.

David’s comment (under “viper”): It certainly does raise questions as to how it evolved. Did this snake watch real vipers and learned how to change pupil shape? Not likely. When they evolved did they share common genes from a common ancestor? But this is a separate species, and this commonality is not mentioned in the article. Back to God stepping in? No clear explanation.

Unless of course what you consider unlikely is in fact likely: namely, that as well as changing in order to adapt to new conditions, organisms can change in order to protect themselves against predators. No need for God to keep stepping in if he simply gives organisms the ability to organize their own ways of survival.

David’s comment (“Underwater caterpillars”): Again it is difficult to see how this developed in step by step evolution unless there was enough initial variation in the insects and the longest breath holders in floods survived and bit by bit descendent survivors developed the capacity.

Yes, all variations and innovations must take place in individuals, and it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that each “improvement” originates in a few and is then perpetuated “bit by bit” as the few become the many. No need for God to keep stepping in if...(as above).

David’s comment (under “engulfing photosynthesis”: The same process that resulted in mitochondria being made from engulfed bacteria. Could God have provided this mechanism to help evolution advance. Less dabbling for Him as a result.

It was precisely this process of endosymbiosis that formed the basis of Margulis’s theory of evolution, and the further we take the concept of intelligent cooperation, the less dabbling and preprogramming your God has to do. Like Shapiro and others, Margulis had no doubt that microorganisms are intelligent.