Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 13, 2017, 20:11 (2871 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: God is behind all of the evolutionary process. I've agreed that organisms can make some changes through epigenetic mechanisms. But God is in final control.

dhw: In order to avoid all future misunderstandings, do you accept that the changes made by these “epigenetic mechanisms” are neither programmed nor dabbled by your God but are made autonomously, even if your God set up the mechanism in the first place, and even if he can change the changes?

I agree to this interpretation.

dhw: “The balance is always there” is meaningless to me. It is life that has always been there since it started. The balance is always shifting, and evolution does not advance to the most complex survivors, but to the survivors that are able to find enough food to stay alive. These survivors include the least complex organisms, such as bacteria. I would define evolution as the process by which all organisms except the first have developed from earlier organisms.

Yes. Present organisms developed from past ones. Didn't evolution advance to multicellularity and extreme complexity, or not? Evolve implies change, and the change we see is more and more advanced complexity. Bacteria can adapt to anything, which continuously raises the issue, why did evolution bother to advance beyond them? My answer still is there is a built in drive to complexity. No other explanation is possible.

DAVID: The weaverbird is part of a niche ecosystem, in balance in nature, nothing more.

dhw: All organisms are part of their “niche ecosystem”, and it is the nest not the bird that constitutes the natural wonder, and I don’t know what you mean by “in balance in nature”. However, your response makes it clear that you cannot find any connection between the nest and the provision of “food for all” so that humans could evolve.

You are confusing the home the weaverbird lives in with the birds' place in natural balance. The nest has nothing to do with the arrival of humans. The bird lives in an eco-niche and happens to have an unexplained nest pattern. Your home has no influence on the fact that you are a renowned playwright and children's book author. We both cannot explain the complexity of the nest or why the bird uses that particular style. But the bird is part of its niche in nature.

dhw: In other words, since you can think of “nothing more”, you cannot find any reason at all why your God should programme or personally instruct the weaverbird to tie its complicated knots. So why not allow for the possibility that he didn’t do it, but that he gave the weaverbird, the wasp, the barnacle, and our now famous plagiorhyncus cylindraceus the wherewithal to do it themselves?

Because the complexity implies the need for planning beyond the apparent capabilities of the animals involved.