Life's biologic complexity: Automatic molecular actions (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, December 12, 2016, 15:49 (2903 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Why do you say the aquatic environment was “hostile”? How do you know it was more “hostile” than the land environment they decided to leave, perhaps once conditions had changed? Just as fish may have explored the land as offering new opportunities, pre-whales may have explored the water. “Wow, nice yummy fish here, and so easy to catch…This is the life, boys and girls!” What exactly is your theory?

DAVID: How much swimming have you done in your life. If you and your wife decided to play house in the water, how would she give birth or nurse? This is some of the simple stuff land mammals had to reconfigure their bodies to do. Simple decision? Fish are yummy? Sounding whales can do so because of enormous changes in their lungs. The conversion from land to sea makes no sense to me unless evolution is a drive for complexity. Evolution certainly found it here.

So if evolution is a drive for complexity for the sake of complexity, all these changes are no problem and make perfect sense to you, but if evolution is a drive for improvement, which involves greater complexity, they are a problem and make no sense? The changes will be the same whatever the purpose.

DAVID: What makes sense to me is an evolutionary drive to complexity, that didn't care about what whacky branch evolution created. And have you noticed, human did arrive? I'm only theorizing from historical facts.

So now we have God wanting to produce humans, but deliberately designing all these "whacky" branches for reasons you can’t explain. I did notice that humans arrived, and so did mosquitoes and the duckbilled platypus and the killifish. And I asked you:
dhw: How does that explain why your God had to specially design the great bush of different species, 99% of which disappeared? You have admitted you don’t know (“Why He didn’t just start at the Garden of Eden, I cannot explain”), so why do you pursue this line of argument?
DAVID: Because I look at historical facts and try to make some logical sense of it.

So do I. And if a theory cannot make logical sense of the facts, as you have admitted, perhaps it’s because there‘s a flaw in the theory. The rest of your post can be summed up by the following exchange:

dhw: I am aware of your theory, but not of the “known research findings” that support it. All you have come up with here are the layers of genome complexity, which fit in just as well with my cellular intelligence hypothesis as with your preprogramming/dabbling theory.
DAVID: And you have no idea how a rocky planet invented intelligent life. God is obviously required. The evidence is well beyond a reasonable doubt for us who have come to believe. You don't want to accept the sum of the evidence.

I simply objected to your claim that your beliefs were based on “known research findings”, which clearly they are not. I accept that you have good reasons for your faith, just as I hope you can accept that I have good reasons for my doubts.