Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 04, 2017, 13:09 (2728 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your same response to look for an internal organismal drive, instead of an external force.

dhw: Your same response to look for an external force instead of an internal organismal drive possibly implanted by your God. When you talk of a drive to complexity, you offer us two possibilities: 1) a 3.8-billion-year programme, and 2) dabbling. The programme would be an internal organismal drive implanted by your God. Only dabbling would be external. So are you now saying that your God personally dabbled every single complexification in the history of life?

DAVID: We are at the end of the line on this issue. From the beginning I've said God controls evolution by either or both mechanisms. Your suppositions about internal drives to cover the gaps in the fossils never explain how the mental planning is done. I firmly state God is the cause. You suggest he might be.

You keep trying to pooh-pooh the idea of an internal drive, so just to clarify: your divine 3.8-billion-year programme for all innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders would be an internal drive, with God having done all the mental planning. My hypothesis is that the internal drive is a possibly God-given intelligence to implement the possibly God-given internal drive for survival and/or improvement or complexity. That is the source of the mental processes necessary (but these take place in response to threats and opportunities, and not in anticipation of them). Only dabbling would be an external drive. I know we disagree, but at least we can agree on what we disagree about!