More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 27, 2016, 10:23 (2737 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

You asked what I meant by “opportunities enabled improvement”, and I explained that environmental change may provide the opportunity for innovation. You commented that stress drove the need for adaptation, and I repeated that I was talking about innovation, not adaptation. Your reply takes us all round the mulberry bush to nowhere. My responses are in BOLD CAPITALS.

DAVID: Back to definitions. Any adaptation, is by definition, an improvement. The improvements you are touting imply they are at the level of speciation. YES. Fine. Favorable changes in environment offer the opportunity for new form to develop. YES. However, opportunity does not imply 'must happen'. I NEVER SAID IT DID. It only implies 'now it can happen'. YES. AND IT DID 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. YES. 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. I KNOW THAT IS YOUR HYPOTHESIS. AND YOU KNOW THAT MINE IS A DRIVE TO IMPROVEMENT IMPLEMENTED BY AN AUTONOMOUS, POSSIBLY GOD-GIVEN, INVENTIVE MECHANISM. Gaps, abhorred by Darwin, who said that unless they would disappear, his theory would fall part. AND YOU AND I HAVE AGREED, AS DID SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES, THAT HE WAS WRONG. FORTUNATELY THIS DOES NOT MAKE HIS THEORY FALL APART. WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH THE HYPOTHESIS THAT CHANGES IN THE ENVIRONMENT OFFER THE OPPORTUNITY FOR INNOVATION?

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.
DAVID: 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.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that our enhanced consciousness has given us abilities that are not necessary for survival. But as we keep repeating ad nauseam, if evolution was only driven by what was necessary for survival, it would not have gone beyond bacteria! Hence improvement through multicellularity, and the unanswerable question for you: if God’s goal was humans, why did he have to teach the weaverbird how to build its nest? I doubt if I am the only person who fails to follow the logic of the claim that the nest was essential to the balance of nature so that there would be enough food to enable life to continue until humans arrived. Hence my (theistic) alternative: God gave the weaverbird the intelligence to build its own nest. Multiply the weaverbird example by as many million as you like.