Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 16:51 (2711 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

Advanced planning as in the whale series is ALWAYS required. The changes are too complex for any other method. In the Cambrian new complex species appeared. God planned them also.

dhw: 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?

God is in control, no matter what method we think might be used.

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.

dhw: 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.

I'll stick to my decision to have faith in God.