Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, June 19, 2017, 13:42 (2713 days ago) @ David Turell

Several posts deal with the same subject, so I am combining them:

DAVID (under “big brain”): You have again skipped over the part of advanced planning for the large (Gould noted) gaps in the fossil record. God must have given a full planning outline to your style of an IM.
dhw: In my hypothesis, as I keep repeating, there is no advance planning. Innovation takes place as a RESPONSE to opportunities offered by the environment. The gaps in the fossil record are because of saltations. I don’t know what you mean by a “full planning outline”. You can’t even make up your mind to what extent your God controls environmental change, so there is a huge question mark over your own theory that he had everything fully planned in advance.
DAVID: Again you are skipping the import of the giant gaps. The whale changes are so large they require advanced planning to coordinate all the new physiologic changes. You are again using the word 'saltations' as something magical. A saltation is a giant change requiring coordination of new parts and processes. It requires design by a planning mind.
And:
You can't have complex saltations without a crystal ball or a planning mind. The gaps Are too large for chance to accomplish.

I do not question that saltations are too large for chance to accomplish and therefore require design. That is the whole point of my cellular intelligence hypothesis – namely, that the cell communities deliberately cooperate in designing their own restructuring, as opposed to your God reaching down and fiddling around with them, or alternatively fitting them out with a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for each cooperative enterprise. (The cooperation is essential, whichever hypothesis you believe.) I also question the need for planning, if by that you mean in advance of the conditions that trigger the changes. Their intelligent (perhaps God-given) inventive intelligence would only come into play as a RESPONSE to the new opportunities. No crystal ball.

DAVID (under “big brain”): As for environmental changes I've said that God guides evolution. I'm sure the cyanobacteria which have no precursor are one of God's steps. Note my entry. Chicxulub is probably His giant snowball. I keep saying He is in charge. You invent deficiencies in my thinking, because I cannot be sure as to every detail of God's actions.
And under “whale”:
Just because I question the motive for whales doesn't prevent me from believing God is in charge and knows what He is doing, even if I can't follow all of His reasons. You obviously do not understand faith in a believing person.
And:
You have to use my God in your discussion above or fall back on panpsychism which is a wooly hypothesis at best. The point is you have no answers at all as to how evolution works. My God runs the show.

If God exists, I have no doubt that he is in charge, but you have offered us one specific hypothesis about HOW he runs the show, and I have offered you three theistic alternative "answers to how evolution works", which you appear to have forgotten (see below, just to remind you). The dispute here is not over your faith in the existence of God, or over God being in charge, but over your dogmatic faith in one particular explanation of his motives and methods which does not make sense even to you.

4 theistic hypotheses:
1 Yours: God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing and has the one and only purpose of producing humans, to which the whole bush of life extinct and extant is inexplicably related.
2 (anthropocentric): God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing: he is experimenting to work out how to produce a being similar to himself. This explains the ever changing bush of life extinct and extant.
3 (anthropocentric): God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing: he is creating an ever changing spectacle of living things, and eventually he has a great idea: a being similar to himself, so he does a dabble. This explains the ever changing bush of life extinct and extant.
4 God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing. He has created an autonomous inventive mechanism which enables organisms to pursue their own paths to survival and/or improvement. This explains the ever changing bush of life extinct and extant. (He reserves the right to dabble, and may have done so with humans.)