Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, June 22, 2017, 18:13 (2492 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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: I presume that by “advanced” you mean very complex, which I accept, but why “planning”, which means working out in advance? This must obviously be the case with your God’s amazing 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme for all non-dabbled innovations (not to mention lifestyles and natural wonders), but why do you think it is impossible for his dabbles to take place in response to a change in the environment, as opposed to his planning them in advance? […]

DAVID: Because of the gap size in the changes as evolution advances. Eight/nine whale stages are each gigantically different in form and function. You never looks at the size of the gaps in our discussion. Putting your nostrils on top of your head as one blowhole is a giant step. By dabbling I mean small changes, but more than epigenetic adaptations. As for hominins, they have large skeletal changes for bipedalism and a giant jump in brain size with each gap. Requires advanced architectural planning to allow for the phenotypical gaps in form and function.

This is a big surprise. Last Saturday I asked "Are you saying that at regular intervals, your God dabbled with the brain, increasing its volume by 200 cc (average)...." and you answered yes. In the past you have told us your only dilemma has been whether evolutionary innovations were preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or dabbled. Now you are telling us that all the major innovations and the brain jumps were preprogrammed. For reasons you simply do not know, 3.8 billion years ago your God, whose only purpose was to produce homo sapiens, specially designed eight/nine stages of pre-whale to whale, plus presumably every new species (broad sense) extant and extinct (they all require big changes, don’t they?) plus all the homo brain jumps. And this sudden new definition of dabbling, hatched between Saturday and Thursday, has come about because the idea of your God RESPONDING to environmental change (as opposed to anticipating it) would bring us perilously close to my hypothesis that speciation may not be the result of advance planning!

DAVID: God is in control, no matter what method we think might be used.
dhw: If God exists, of course he will be in control if he wants to be. But according to you, he gives us free will, which means he deliberately cedes control. He could just as easily have ceded control of evolution to organisms by giving them the intelligence to do their own designing – though always with the option of doing a dabble.
DAVID: Free will is at the mental level, a side issue.. Why drag it in? It doesn't fit. We are discussing God at the evolutionary level of form and function.

We are discussing God’s motives and methods, and free will is an example of God’s willingness to cede control. If he is willing to cede control in one area of life, why not in another – namely, by allowing organisms to work out their own ways of survival and improvement?