Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 16, 2017, 16:25 (2868 days ago) @ dhw

Still doesn’t explain why your God had to preprogramme or personally dabble each one. I’m happy with “some” intelligence. My point is that we really don’t know HOW intelligent these organisms might be.

DAVID: Mammal brains are more complex than any of their other organs. Dinosaur brains were little more than large ganglions, collections of neurons without many circuits.

dhw: This doesn’t mean that “evolution advances to the most complex survivors”. And so I repeat: the brain is not the only complex organ, we don’t know how intelligent dinosaurs were, and not all surviving organisms are mammals.

Brain power is a consequence of neuron count and network complexity. Based on their ganglion size, the dinosaurs were dumb. They had one in the head and one back at the base of the tail. Most other survivors of Chicxulub are not as complex as mammals.

dhw: So let me once more try to get this clear. Are you saying that your God put millions of individual, personally designed nest-building, zombifying, migrating, camouflaging, parasitizing, adapting, innovating pieces of software in the very first cells, and/or personally updated the software as new problems or new opportunities arose? And also that your God preprogrammed or updated the software to delete 99% of all these in order to “balance nature” as and when his preprogrammed or personally updated cosmic and earthly environmental software made the necessary changes to conditions? And all these millions of programmes and/or updatings of organisms and of the environment were designed (and/or deleted) for the sake of humans? And it is not possible that the perfect continuum from the origin of life to all the products of evolution extant and extinct is the result of a single piece of software enabling reproduction and variation through an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism?

We haven't found the inventive mechanism beyond epigenetic modifications of existing species. I work with what we know from scientific research. I cannot accept your supposition until a methodology for speciation is found. As far as I am concerned God invented and is in control of evolution. He invented the DNA code and it is His to fiddle with.