Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 30, 2017, 20:19 (2732 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You have completely skipped over my examples (recently minor spine changes within a species) without demonstrable 'improvement'.

dhw" We discussed the spinal change in detail under “bacterial intelligence”, and I asked what you meant by no “real” improvement, which strangely you explained as meaning no “real speciation”. You have now changed “real improvement” to “demonstrable improvement”, which means even if there was an improvement, we can’t demonstrate it. Nothing proven either way.

I have trouble finding the right descriptive terms. There was a small spinal change which did not change the species in any major way, but is interpreted as a preparatory alteration for later bipedalism. Better?

dhw: You keep telling us how purposeful your God is, and yet you think he designs complexity only for the sake of complexity. The whale is your prime example, and you refuse to countenance the possibility that it entered and adapted to the water in order to survive or to improve its access to food. Of course there is not the same sense of purposefulness if you refuse to acknowledge the possibility that there may have been a purpose.

Yes, my approach considers the possibility of complexity without purpose. Does each environmental change have purpose or improvement? The history tells us not necessarily.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: We are not together. Speciation can precede environmental change. We just had a discussion about already existing hominins taking advance of climate change in Africa as it happened (less trees, more grasses).

dhw: The discussion was based on the following article:
QUOTE: The dating of the jawbone might help answer one of the key questions in human evolution. What caused some primitive ancestors to climb down from the trees and make their homes on the ground.
A separate study in Science hints that a change in climate might have been a factor. An analysis of the fossilised plant and animal life in the area suggests that what had once been lush forest had become dry grassland.
As the trees made way for vast plains, ancient human-like primates found a way of exploiting the new environmental niche, developing bigger brains and becoming less reliant on having big jaws and teeth by using tools.

Although I agree that the phrasing is slightly elliptical, I take this to mean that tree-living primates left the trees when the trees began to disappear, and as they exploited the new environment, they developed bigger brains and became more human-like. I don’t think it means that God made them more human-like and gave them bigger brains while they were still sitting in the trees, and then he took the trees away.

Of course, if you accepted my theory, you would be forced to accept God.