Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by dhw, Monday, June 05, 2017, 13:06 (2727 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: We are discussing whether your God controlled the environmental changes or not. Your theory is that he restructured organisms before the environment changed. I have suggested that the organismal restructuring took place as a response to environmental change. The fact that both whales and hominins underwent transitional stages suggests to me that they were responding to the new environment rather than having been prepared for it in advance. But if they were indeed prepared in advance, that would mean your God must have organized the environmental changes. He would hardly have rejigged the pre-whale or the pre-human if he didn’t know the whale was going to enter the water or the human was going to descend from the trees. Or did he look into his crystal ball to see what chance events were on their way?

DAVID: Local environmental change would relate to the ice ages. Note my entry today. I'm sure God created the fine-tuned universe which gives us life. He controlled Earth's evolution and life's development. The ice ages appear to have probable natural causes due to Milankovitch cycles and for civilizations sake hopefully high CO2 levels will keep a new one at bay. I know how to compare the whale/human environmental changes. Entering water is a deliberate transition for pre-whales. Trees to savannah is a slow local change. Salam looks to be prepared for the change to come, as do the pre-whales. God undoubtedly know of the change as He got animals into the water. And He undoubtedly anticipated the savannah. Not by chance!

Sorry, but none of this quite answers my question. You say ice ages probably had natural causes, and I’m sure one can find natural causes for trees giving way to savannah and for dry land giving way to water. So when you say your God “controlled Earth’s evolution and life’s development”, do you mean that he organized all the environmental changes, including these three, or that he simply “anticipated” them (infallible crystal ball-gazing), and they actually occurred by chance?

DAVID’s comment: the last ice age ended about 11,700 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period Survival concepts are described in this article. Little else occupied our brain at that point. It must have become more complex faced with this degree of environmental adversity.

An important observation, as it suggests environmental change initiated brain change, just as it may well have initiated other responses that led to speciation. In this case, it would have activated the internal drive for survival, and the lucky few were able to come up with concepts that enabled them to give the requisite instructions to their brains and bodies.