Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, May 22, 2017, 12:40 (2741 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: …The drive is for survival and/or improvement, which you call complexity. Both must interconnect with the environment, and if environmental change INITIATES new species (which I think is “most likely”), it is a contradiction in terms to say that speciation appears BEFORE the environmental change.
DAVID: You totally miss the point. A change in environment offers an opportunity for speciation changes but does not require it.

You are now telling me what I keep telling you! Sat. 20 May: “environment change offers new challenges (to survive) and/or new opportunities (to improve, or to complexify).” As above, it is the drive for improvement (your “complexity”) that causes organisms to exploit the new opportunities, i.e. opportunity first, followed by exploitation of opportunity for the sake of improvement (your “complexity”). And if, in your words, environmental change “initiates” speciation, speciation doesn’t precede environmental change.

DAVID: An animal cannot suddenly enter the water as a lifestyle without prior change. Speciation first to adapt to the new lifestyle environment brings.
dhw: The answer to that is that it doesn’t enter the water as a lifestyle. It enters the water to see if it can improve its lifestyle. And when it finds that its lifestyle improves, step by step it improves its adaptations – precisely as the video illustrates. No need for “prior change”.
DAVID: Wrong. There is no step by step if you study the whole series, one at a time. […] Just consider that sex underwater requires pudendal changes in both. Giving birth underwater requires the newborn get to the surface very quickly when he is barely alert. Suckling underwater requires other alterations. To be successful each of these major adaptations must be present all at once, or there would be no whales. […] No little steps have been found. There is no getting around speciation first.

You asked us to watch the video, which illustrates how legs, tail, snout and body gradually (in tiny steps) became more and more streamlined for life in the water. However, it doesn’t show the jumps required for reproduction, giving birth and suckling, so why bother with the video in the first place? What you are now telling us is that major changes not shown in the video must be saltations. We would need a whale expert to explain the theory, but I have always agreed that saltations must occur in evolution. That doesn’t mean they must precede environmental change. (Before you reply, please see “bacterial intelligence” re planning and hypotheses.) Your hypothesis offers us a 3.8-billion-year programme for each pre-whale saltation, or the male and female lying on the beach with their land-animal legs, tail, snout and genitalia as God dabbles, and…then what? He sends them off into the water - for no reason you can think of - brings them back or does the next dabble while they’re still in the water….one separate dabble after another for the next few million years…can’t do it all in one go…must do it, though, in order to keep life going until he can produce humans?