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

by dhw, Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 13:12 (2902 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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: You have again side-stepped the issue of the necessity of huge physiologic change required to enter the ocean. It makes no sense because it is so difficult to accomplish through mutations. Why did life's evolution try it? It is the dumbest improvement I've seen if viewed logically, but it is complex.

You have again sidestepped the issue of purpose. Why did pre-whales enter the water? Are you telling us that your God made them do so just because he wanted them to be more complex? Of course I accept the necessity for huge physiological changes, but what do you mean by “difficult to accomplish through mutations”? Mutation means change! If the land mammals entered the water because food was plentiful there (and maybe there was a shortage on land), the changes according to my hypothesis would have been the result of their entering the water to get it, though in this case I would suggest that the changes need not have been immediate, since the earliest versions could have returned to land after their fishing expeditions. I don’t know the details of each change any more than you do, but if organisms found the water provided a better living than the land, I am not surprised that their bodies would have changed in order to make them more suited to the new environment. What does surprise me is that you seem to think the changes are all perfectly feasible if your God wanted pre-whales to be more complex for the sake of being more complex, whereas they are not feasible if your God gave pre-whales the means to make their own changes once they discovered how to improve their way of life.