Evolution: where did cyanobacteria come from? (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, June 18, 2017, 12:54 (2716 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I’d just like to draw attention to another paragraph in this important article:
"It was only with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, that the element began accumulating in the Earth's primordial atmosphere to any major extent. This rise in oxygen stimulated the evolution of oxygen-breathing life, which in turn spurred the origins of the complex multicellular organisms that dominate the world now.”

You could hardly have a clearer statement that environmental change initiated/stimulated/triggered evolutionary change.

DAVID: The is no word of yours that fits the Cambrian ( as the chief example of the explosion). The appearance of oxygen only allowed the explosion to happen. Your words imply causation, and we do not know the cause.

Of course it was not the cause. We have been over this a hundred times, and had a long discussion over your misunderstanding of the word initiate, which means to set in motion, trigger, start something off, cause something to begin, but not to BE the cause of something. The appearance of oxygen presented the opportunity for speciation, and without it the explosion would never have happened. The disagreement between us is over your theory that your God restructured organisms before environmental change, whereas I argue that the restructuring would have been in response to environmental change. The innovative changes take place because environmental change triggers a (perhaps God-given) drive for what I see as improvement or what you see as complexity. The drive is the “cause”, and environmental change is the event that sets it in motion, as explicitly proposed in the article.