Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 14, 2017, 22:05 (2748 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: We have no idea why a land animal decided to go into an aquatic environment with all the biologic complications associated with it. It must be God's guidance.

dhw: You have no idea why it entered the water, or why your God would “guide” it into the water and design all its complicated adaptations when all he wanted to do was design humans (see below). How about the possibility that the land animal decided for itself (without God’s guidance) to enter the water because at that particular time and place there was more food in the water than there was on dry land? And as its move into the water was successful, stage by stage it adapted itself to life in the water (using its perhaps God-given intelligent, structure-changing, adaptive, inventive mechanism), until its whole body had reached an optimum form? Does this make sense or not?

Your proposal is a very simpli8stic view of what must have happened. Polar bears hunt in the water but they don't change into aquatic animals. The physical changes to the body are enormous in the eight stages to convert to whales. Each gap from one fossil to the next are giant jumps of change. We do not see tentative experimental forms. Your theory makes no sense to me from the evidence we have.

DAVID: I don't look at animal's structural changes and environmental shifts as occurring in any special order.

dhw: Good. So we can now discard your theory that your God planned innovations, lifestyles etc. in advance of the environmental changes that they countered or exploited.

I never theorized that way. I'm convinced speciation is separate from environment and even competition between animal types. I reject most of Darwin theory. Gould pointed out the huge gaps. They are not filled. Speciation occurred, but we don't know why, except to invoke God.

DAVID: I view changes in species as purposeful, and think Darwin's view of struggle for survivability as a minor point.

dhw: I also view them as purposeful, and to survival I add improvement, both of which I regard as supremely important, because once we have multicellularity, we have organisms both competing and cooperating, partly no doubt in order to improve their chances of survival.

You haven't explained speciation with the above. Bacteria compete and cooperate just as much as multicellular.

DAVID: I haven't been disjointed in demonstrating the complexity of this animal's evolution. It requires God's planning. Why He wanted whales is beyond my reasoning.

dhw: Of course there is nothing disjointed in your account of the whale’s complex evolution. What is “beyond your reasoning” is why God “wanted” the whale and every other species, lifestyle and natural wonder in order to provide energy until he designed the one thing he wanted, which was humans. You have acknowledged that my alternatives make perfect sense, but you prefer an explanation that makes no sense even to you.

My explanation is an overall view. Your alternatives can fit the history but don't end up in an overall perspective that fits everything together as I view mine does.