Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, May 15, 2017, 13:02 (2748 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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?
DAVID: Your proposal is a very simplistic 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.

I’m sorry it makes no sense to you, but I’m surprised you can find sense in a theory that the pre-whale entered the water for no conceivable reason (except that your God guided it), and God specially designed eight different stages rather just create the whale he wanted, and you don’t know why he wanted the whale in the first place when all he really wanted was humans.

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.
DAVID: 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.

Under “new review of epigenetic studies” I pointed out that your advance planning scenario meant that your God must have given fish their animal legs and lungs before making them leave the water, and he designed the monarch’s metamorphoses and navigation before forcing it to emigrate. As opposed to rejecting this interpretation, you commented: “Perfectly reasonable scenario”. On 12 May, you wrote: “the evolution of the conditions on Earth and the evolution of life obviously co-evolved”. So how can fish become land animals and land animals adapt to aquatic life “separate from environment”? Invoking God does not mean that God must personally have designed every species and lifestyle and natural wonder, or that he did so in order to produce humans.

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

Nobody can explain speciation. We can only hypothesize, but speciation is the result of cell communities combining in different ways. The idea that they do so in order to improve their chances of survival makes perfect sense to me, though apparently not to you. Similarly, organisms might develop different lifestyles through migration, symbiosis, parasitism etc. All geared to survival and/or improvement.

dhw: You have acknowledged that my alternatives make perfect sense, but you prefer an explanation that makes no sense even to you.
DAVID: 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.

As above: you don’t know why the whale entered the water, or why your God needed eight separate attempts at designing it, or why he wanted whales in the first place when all he really wanted was humans, so how does it all fit together?