Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 28, 2017, 00:28 (2735 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Sunday, May 28, 2017, 01:03

DAVID: My point remains the same. Alternative pathways have always existed, stronger in some than others due to individual variability. The lucky ones with stronger pathways survive, cleverness not involved. Clear?

dhw: I know you reject cleverness. That leaves you with your 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every alternative pathway in the history of life on earth, and some lucky bacteria will accidentally hit the right switch, while the unlucky rest either don’t have the programme or hit the wrong button. Your only alternative apparently is that God pops in to give instructions to the lucky few. I find it all rather hard to believe.

You don't seem to want to believe individual variability or the presence of alternative pathways, all shown by current science. Please re-read my above statement. Accept facts. They explain how bacteria survived since the beginning of life.

DAVID: Have you forgotten that evolution requires steps of improvement? Preliminary alerations are usually required before big changes. I don't undertand your comment.

dhw: You wrote, concerning the early spinal changes, that they offered “no immediate environmental advantage, since the change is only a step in a process, but a major complex phenotypic change, allowing eventual bipedalism”. I see no sense in the special creation of something useless, merely as a preparation for something that will be specially designed a few million years later. Nor do I think it would have survived if it had not provided some kind of advantage over the old form. It would make more sense to me if each change were designed (whether by God or by the cell communities themselves) for the sake of improvement at the time.

You are back to pure Darwin. Things don't have to appear only because they offer a current advantage. In The Atheist Delusion, on page 258, to which I have referred before, Dr. Filler is described as having found a early vertebral change toward bipedalism in a 21-million-year-old monkey. He thinks like I do. The changes are so enormous in the gaps, certain small preparatory changes have to occur early on, with no relationship to demonstrable current improvement at that time. Just as with the big brain. As early humans learned to use it, their survivability markedly improved. The only concept Darwin proved to me is common descent. His guesses as to mechanism are never supported by subsequent findings. But the findngs of minor anticipatory changes such as the ones described fit with the concept of a designing force making pre-planned early beginnings for major speciation later. The gaps are what undo Darwin. He recognized the gaps, and hoped they would be filled to support his theories. They never were.