Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 13:27 (2712 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: None of your illusions to cell intelligence dissuade me from the point. You cannot avoid the need for design to plan for the large changes in each new species form.

I have not avoided the need for design. That is the whole point of the cellular intelligence hypothesis: that the cell communities that comprise all organisms do their own designing. I dispute the need for advance planning, since I see innovation as a response to opportunity, not an anticipation of it. Environmental change first, speciation second, as you have acknowledged is the case with the Cambrian explosion.

DAVID’S comment (under “punctuated equilibrium”): The gaps are not entirely proven but supported. The gaps mean your fanciful cell communities must do advanced planning to coordinate all the anatomic and physiologic changes required. The whale series is the best example of the necessity for advanced anatomic planning to make the changes needed. Multiple exact mutations must occur all at once. They must all work with each other.

Same point ad nauseam. The whale series is the best example of how organisms respond to environmental change by restructuring themselves. Of course the cell communities must cooperate to ensure that the “mutations” work at once – otherwise the organism would die. What is your theory? That for reasons you do not know, God personally fiddled with the anatomy of a succession of pre-whales (before they entered the water, except that the later ones had already entered the water) until he did a final whale fiddle? Or he equipped the first cells with a programme for all these sequences of “multiple exact mutations” to switch itself on when, after a few thousand million years, a land-dwelling mammal would enter the water, which he knew would happen, though he may or may not have engineered the environmental change?

dhw: 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 […]. 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.
DAVID: You have presented all of this before. It is a good summary. My reply as always is the last three are humanized inventions of what God might be, not what He is.

All our concepts of God are humanized inventions of what he might be. None of us know what he is (if he “is” at all). By dismissing the last three theistic explanations of the evolutionary process, you appear to be claiming that only you know the truth, and your explanation is therefore the only valid one, even though it makes no sense to you. But then in the next breath, you will acknowledge that your version too is just a guess. So you simply know that all my alternative guesses are wrong and yours is right.