Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 17, 2017, 11:13 (2867 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: 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.

Your claim that “evolution advances to the most complex survivors” has nothing to do with intelligence! Complexity is not confined to the brain or to intelligence! Your focus on intelligence is symptomatic of your desire to prove that your God preprogrammed or dabbled the whole history of evolution to culminate in humans, but you always leave out the fact that evolution so far has also “advanced” to the mosquito, the duckbilled platypus, the parasitic wasp and barnacle, the camouflaged cuttlefish, the migratory monarch etc. etc., all deliberately planned or dabbled by your God. All more complex (and more intelligent) than the dinosaurs?

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?
DAVID: 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.

My hypothesis (not supposition) IS a methodology for speciation, as is your divine computer programme plus dabbles for all the organic and environmental changes noted above. No proposed method is “known” from scientific research. You accept your own, which has not been found, and reject mine because it has not been found. A prime case of double standards. My hypothesis allows for your God to have invented evolution and to have invented the DNA code and to fiddle with it.