Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, May 29, 2017, 14:02 (2517 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course they cohere. their separation is recognized.
dhw: If they cohere, there is a linked process of cause and effect, e.g. drive for improvement/complexity, triggered by environment change, leads to production of improvement/complexity. What’s the problem?
DAVID: My further thought from yesterday: Sunday, May 28, 2017, 02:47 I don't think 'improvement' and 'complexity' carry the same theoretical implications.

I have listed the three stages in order to stop you once and for all harping on about speciation not being required. We have agreed that it is the drive for improvement/complexity that leads organisms to take advantage of new opportunities. Whether it is one or the other makes no difference to that particular argument. However, it does make a difference to our concept of your God’s approach to evolution. You also harp on about your God’s purposefulness, and if he exists I too would expect there to be a purpose behind his actions. Complexity just for the sake of complexity does not seem as purposeful to me as complexity for the sake of improvement. But so long as we agree that there is a drive which explains why speciation took place though it was not required by environmental change, I’m not that bothered.

dhw: The illogicalities and contradictions arise from your guesses at his motives and methods, not from your belief in evolution or from the choice between chance and design!
DAVID: They are just guesses. My principal thoughts about God's goals are firm.

I know they are firm, but they are still just guesses, and it is those firm guesses that lead to all the illogicalities and contradictions.

DAVID: You misunderstand. No contradiction. I view 'initiate' to be approached as a word in its causative sense and also in its allowing opportunity sense. In the Cambrian the new oxygen level allowed a speciation process to create new ones, but did not demand it. I've never changed, Speciation was not required to happen.
dhw: So now your original “yes” apparently meant that environment both caused AND allowed speciation! And for the hundredth time, we know speciation was not REQUIRED to happen, and that is why we have said there must be a drive for improvement/complexity.
DAVID: No. my Cambrian example is the correct interpretation. Environmental change offers an opportunity nothing more, and in that sense is an initiator.

Precisely the meaning that I proposed from the very start of this discussion. It was you who first denied the link between speciation and environment, then said speciation preceded environmental change, and then mistakenly offered the meaning of “cause” (as opposed to “cause to begin”), which you have again accidentally repeated in the first quote above! Just in case you have forgotten, your final version and mine now reads: the drive for improvement/complexity is set in motion by environmental change (the initiator), and then uses the new opportunity. Let’s leave it at that before you get into even more of a tangle.