Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, May 13, 2017, 09:12 (2750 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: So what happened? Did the poor old pre-whale have to hang around on land till your God shifted its nostrils? What an amazing turn-around in your thinking! One moment you have your God fully equipping fish with all the bits and pieces necessary BEFORE they step onto dry land, and the next you have your God doing an itsy-bitsy job on the heading-for-water pre-whale, with each stage exquisitely planned until at last he produces the whale he wants – although, wait for it, the one thing he really wants is humans.
Here’s another theory: maybe the fish that stepped onto land, and the animal that stepped into the water, gradually made adjustments to themselves until they had reached the optimum form to suit their new environment.

DAVID: As usual you've skipped the entire point. A land animal goes through eight or nine stages to become an aquatic animal hugely complicating all aspects of its phenotype with gaps between the stages, not tiny steps. For example, sex requires a specialized vagina, suckling milk with specialized adaptation. I was not supporting the tiresome quoted Darwinism. Difficult transitions require advanced mental planning with an imagination of the future requirements.

Your “entire point” is that ALL species, lifestyles and natural wonders – including whales, weaverbirds’ nests, monarch butterflies’ metamorphoses and migration – required advance planning by your God in order to supply the energy to keep life going until he designed the one thing he wanted to design, which was humans. But I know you prefer to separate all these elements of your “entire point”, because taken together they don’t make much sense. You have now added the hypothesis that whenever environmental change was involved, your God changed the structures before changing the environment. And so fish were fully equipped before they stepped onto the land, and the monarch was fully equipped and instructed before God changed the climate and forced it to emigrate. However, this doesn’t quite fit in with the pre-whale, which apparently took to the water and needed a succession of dabbles before God got what he wanted (faulty programming perhaps, or experimenting, or making mistakes, or forgetting certain bits and pieces?), although what he really wanted was humans. There is no denying the complexity of the adaptations you have mentioned, but there is no logic to link the above collection of disjointed “guesses” you have made to explain the process.