Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take; more on gaps (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 20, 2016, 07:37 (2957 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: To my knowledge we have only one example of fish with primitive lung that made the transition as the authors careful analysis of walking fish tells us. Their point was to attempt to make it sound easy, which they admitted in the article.

I think they do refer to the only one that made the PERMANENT transition. For me the crucial point is that primitive lungs and legs already existed as organisms tried to cope with different environmental conditions.

dhw: Again, this is such a logical process that one really can’t dismiss the idea that it was the starting-point for the all-important permanent switch from water to land.
DAVID: Of course a lung had to appear. We should be discussing the actuating cause of the lung.

We are. My hypothesis, in line with the cases we know of, is that environmental conditions caused organisms to make the changes. Here’s a website explaining the advantages of primitive lungs, which obviously have a long history.

1. How did fish evolve lungs? - Quora
https://www.quora.com/How-did-fish-evolve-lungs

dhw: The source of consciousness generally remains the great barrier to all of our hypotheses. But in the context of your dualism (see the sapiens thread), for this awareness to be of any use, our pre-sapiens ancestors needed a larger brain to improve means of expression and of materially carrying out the instructions issued by consciousness. Hence the need gives rise to physical change, as opposed to physical change creating the need.
DAVID: And again I look at the physical gap you lightly jump across. Each brain is much bigger as we go from 400 cc to 1,200 cc. Requires complex planning of bone skull shape, brain interconnections building a bigger frontal lobe, blood circulation pathways, lymphatics pathways, larynx dropping, etc.

Same argument as usual: just like the weaverbird. It’s all too complex for organisms (cell communities) to have organized, so God must have preprogrammed it 3.7 billion years ago or he dabbled. Occasional dabbling is, however, an option in the theistic version of my hypothesis. It is the sheer scale of your own that beggars my belief, in which you claim that every individual innovation and natural wonder is only possible through your God’s personal planning.