Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, May 18, 2017, 13:28 (2745 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: We know cells/cell communities can adapt, so maybe instead of your God personally designing every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder (in order to produce humans), he also enabled them to design their own. It’s a hypothesis.
DAVID: A hypothesis without any merit. You are, once again, glossing over the fossil gaps. they require advanced design planning, well beyond the capacity of cells which can arrange for simple adaptation.

Two unknowns: 1) what causes speciation? 2) What is the full potential of cells/cell communities? We both offer unproven and probably unprovable hypotheses for 1). You insist that you know the answer to 2). Stalemate.

dhw: These designs may have been triggered by environmental changes, as opposed to being planned and designed in advance of environmental changes – a scenario which a couple of days ago you said you had never advocated […] because you are “convinced speciation is separate from environment”.
DAVID: Environment triggers adaptations, but speciation probably does not relate to environment with evidence we have in relation to the development of H. sapiens.

Nobody knows what triggered speciation, including that of H. sapiens. There is no “probably” except in your wishful thinking. Hence the astonishing intellectual somersaults you are trying and failing to perform, as follows:
dhw: Your God’s eight-stage design of the whale therefore apparently had nothing to do with the pre-whale moving from the land environment to the water environment. Does this really make sense to you?
DAVID: Turn your idea around. Prior speciation changes allowed an early stage to try out the water.
And under “genome complexity”:
DAVID: As I've explained today the link is the other way around than your thought: prior speciation allows the animal to enter a new environment.

Sunday 14 May:
DAVID: I don’t look at animals’ structural changes and environmental shifts as occurring in any special order.
Dhw: Good. So now we can discard your theory that your God planned innovation, 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…

Three days later, your God plans speciation in advance so that the animal can enter a new environment. Somersault after somersault, and I shan’t mention where you land.

dhw: …so when you say that your explanation is an “overall view” which provides “an overall perspective that fits everything together”, you don’t actually know how your view fits everything together. […]
DAVID: I've explained over and over how it all fits together. It is not my fault that you don't accept the parts.

You don’t know why the whale entered the water, why your God designed it in eight different stages, or why he designed it at all since the only thing he wanted to design was humans. With regard to lifestyles and natural wonders – which apparently he also designed individually – their function was to keep life going, but again that has no explicable link with the focal point of your theory, which is that all he wanted to produce was humans. The problem is not that I don’t accept the parts; the problem is that the parts don’t fit the theory. And a theory that does not explain the parts simply isn’t credible.