Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 16, 2017, 08:40 (2747 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: No, I don't know how God's mind works. My point is simply that changing a large land animal to an aquatic animal is a master challenge of evolution. Simply, why bother. But that is my reaction. God bothered.

According to you, every innovation, individual lifestyle and natural wonder is a “master challenge” that only God can meet. But I can understand why an organism might “bother” to go from land to water: for instance, the choice might lie between starving on land and finding food in the water. However, I can’t understand why a god whose only wish was to create humans would bother to design eight different stages of transition from a land animal to a water animal. I’d better remind you, though, that this is not an argument against the existence of God – only an argument against your interpretation of “how God’s mind works” (i.e. he preprogrammed or dabbled the whole of evolution’s history, including the eight stages of the whale, because that was his chosen way of producing humans).

dhw: 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.
DAVID: You tell me that nobody can explain speciation and then bring up your mindless cell committees to explain the huge gaps in form between species evolutionary changes.

My hypothesis is the exact opposite: that cell communities are not mindless, even if they do not have human brains. Your ironic switch from my “communities” to your “committees” shows that you are only willing to think of intelligence in human terms. Organisms ARE cell communities, and I don’t know why you should find it so difficult to believe that they might want to survive and might possibly look for new ways of doing so.

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.
dhw: 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?
DAVID: Don't you realize the eight steps are giant evolutionary changes in each form? This is evolution of an animal, not eight desultory vague attempts as you imply. And it all fits together as the bush of life, part of the econiches of the ocean balancer of life for a food energy supply.

All you are telling us now is that the whale evolved in eight stages and is part of the bush of life. The answer to how this fits in with the rest of your theory is the above string of “don’t knows”!