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

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 19:52 (2902 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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.

The purpose is complexity. Not skipped. The importance of considering mutations is that the different forms in the whale series are each so different, it would require many thousand changes, each planned to coordinate with other changes to create a useful new species on the way to today's whales.

Your statement about the way change occurred harks back to Darwin:

"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."

Again the suggestion of itty-bitty experimental adaptations, which the fossil record denies. There are only big gaps! The remainder of your statement simply expands upon the same approach. Trial and error. We don't know how speciation occurs but each form is very different until we get to Humpbacks and Orcas.