More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 01, 2016, 14:26 (2942 days ago) @ David Turell

We are currently running interrelated discussions in different posts, so we may as well put them all together.

dhw: I think my theistic hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously for its reasoning, not rejected because I am neither a believer nor a disbeliever.
DAVID: I've never seen a discussion in books on religion that describe God's purpose as you do. Any references?

Caught me! Offhand, no, and I don’t have time to do the research, but I have no doubt that it’s because of my ignorance and not because no-one’s ever before had the idea that your God might have created the world out of curiosity, experimentation, or for his own entertainment. I’m not that original a thinker! It’s probably an offshoot of Deism. However, you have now tried to dismiss this hypothesis because it doesn’t fit in with your personal image of God, then because I am an agnostic, and then because we can’t think of a reference. Why don’t you just consider the rationality of the arguments themselves? What aspects of my evolutionary hypothesis and of my teleological hypothesis do not fit in with the history of life as we know it?

DAVID: And in the book Natures IQ by believers, they have no problem in accepting the logic that God did it. Faith vs. the picket fence.

Nothing to do with faith. We are not talking about the logic that God did it, but the illogic of the weaverbird’s nest etc. that provides food to keep life going till humans come, plus the contradictory claims summarized below:

DAVID (under “sapiens”):…if God made the universe, then He could manage the environment as He wished.
dhw: Of course. Therefore if God made the universe, all we have to do is decide how much he planned, how much he left to chance, and how much he left to the organisms themselves. And on that decision depends our theistic interpretation of how evolution works!
DAVID: Good review of possibilities. I come down on the side of God under tight control.

Fair enough. So God was in tight control of all the environmental changes you previously described as accidental, and the extinction of organisms had nothing to do with Raup’s “bad luck” – as previously explained by you – but was tightly controlled by your God, and he ensured that certain organisms were inadequate to cope with the changes, in contrast to your earlier claim that he did not create inadequate organisms. I’m glad all that has been straightened out. Perhaps, though, to prevent future confusion, you would just confirm that in all these cases, tight control is now your belief.

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dhw: ... but I have said over and over again that the two purposes “related to evolution” that are clear to me are survival and improvement.
DAVID: And I have emphasized a drive to complexity as the main force in evolution.
dhw: I regard innovations such as the senses, sexual reproduction, brains etc. as improvements. You may disagree. Of course such things involve greater complexity. However, I have no idea why your God or organisms themselves should create complexity for no reason other than complexity.
DAVID: Answer, the only road to humans is increasing complexity.

The only road to the duckbilled platypus is also increasing complexity. The only road to every single multicellular organism you can think of is increasing complexity, since life is believed to have begun with single cells. That doesn’t mean that they evolved because they or God wanted them to be more complex just for the sake of being more complex. Instead of them all saying, “I wanner be more complex so one day I might be a human”, I suggest they might have said, “I wanner try adding this bit to see if I can improve my way of life.”