More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 15:07 (2733 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Unfavorable stress, not favorable environment, drives the need for adaptation. More oxygen does not require new evolved forms. More oxygen will not act as a suction pulling evolution forward.

dhw: But I am not talking about adaptation! Adaptation can be witnessed even today. Please re-read what I wrote. The problem we have been dealing with year after year is INNOVATION, and that is why I suggest that the two driving forces behind evolution are survival and improvement: survival requires adaptation to unfavourable stress, improvement entails exploiting new opportunities, e.g. a change in the atmosphere such as increased oxygen. This is precisely the argument put forward in the important article you have just posted on the role of the Earth’s magnetic field – changes in the environment provided the opportunity for new forms of life (the Cambrian Explosion).

Back to definitions. Any adaptation, is by definition, an improvement. The improvements you are touting imply they are at the level of speciation. Fine. Favorable changes in environment offer the opportunity for new form to develop. However, opportunity does not imply 'must happen'. It only implies 'now it can happen'. The gaps must necessitate planning for the complexity of a new form, the creation of new proteins, and often new enzymes which are of giant size in the population of protein molecules. My conclusion. Only a drive to complexity (complex planning) is part of evolution, either performed directly by God or by an inventive mechanism implanted in organisms by God with guidelines that lead to humans. Gaps, abhorred by Darwin, who said that unless they would disappear, his theory would fall part.

DAVID: Multicellularity is highly complex and raises all sorts of complex biochemical issues to be solved. Why not sticking with simplicity? Because only multicellularity leads to humans, which is the goal. Clear?

dhw: Stating that humans are the goal is certainly clear, but that doesn’t make it true.

Agreed. But we did arrive with all the unnecessary baggage for survival we were given. Apes survive without calculus or true consciousness, or wonder about why we apes are here.