More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, October 28, 2016, 12:43 (2946 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: AND YOU KNOW THAT MINE IS A DRIVE TO IMPROVEMENT IMPLEMENTED BY AN AUTONOMOUS, POSSIBLY GOD-GIVEN, INVENTIVE MECHANISM.[/b] 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: What it has to do is that innovation is speciation, or great gaps is phenotype. Darwin has never explained the gaps, thus his theory falls apart, other than he recognized that evolution occurred, but not how.

We have been over this countless times, and it has nothing to do with the subject we were discussing, which was that changes in the environment offer opportunities for innovation, which leads to speciation. We agreed years ago that Darwin’s gradualism was wrong.

dhw: ...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.

DAVID: Back to Wagner and his patterns in RNA forms and in gene changes which allowed evolution to easily create the wonderfully diverse bush of life.

http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution-rp

I won't repeat the massive amount of material in this long and very informative essay, but the author never questions the source of these patterns. They are simply a given and I think God set it all up to make evolution easy and perhaps to allow organisms to make changes. Why not look at purpose? That is where we differ in interpretation.

I'll have to read the article later, but I have no problem accepting patterns and gene changes. You have spelled out your view of your God’s purpose time and time again, as already summarized above: he preprogrammed or dabbled every innovation and natural wonder in order to balance nature in order to provide food in order to keep life going in order to produce humans. As an explanation of the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, parasitic wasps etc. etc., I’m afraid I find it unconvincing, and I have offered an alternative purpose and modus operandi, both of which you reject.