Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, June 26, 2017, 13:45 (2487 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: OK, I've studied your question again of organisms in full control of all advances in evolution. I've admitted it possibly is true, but it has enormous problems for the agnostic.

dhw: Thank you for this reasoned approach. I will begin my reply by acknowledging as always that it is a hypothesis for which there is no more evidence than there is for your own.

1)If God gave a complete mechanism for evolution to all organisms, then God is really in control and exists.

I am not proposing a “complete mechanism” for evolution, but an autonomous, inventive intelligence potentially enabling individual cell communities (organisms) to restructure themselves in accordance with environmental demands or opportunities.

You have avoided again the complex planning to explain the gaps in evolution. All existing evidence does not find the capacity to plan to that degree.

dhw: 2)From a practical standpoint it implies an enormous software available from the beginning of life to accomplish eh complex planning for the gaps in evolution and its necessary responses to environmental challenges.

dhw: This criticism is applicable to your own hypothesis, but not to mine! Yours is the unbelievably enormous software for all species, lifestyles, saltations, environmental changes for the last 3.8 billion years. In mine there is no complex advance planning, but an endless sequence and variety of individual responses (successful or unsuccessful) to environmental conditions.

Back to itty-bitty steps, no evidence just gaps. Unbelievably enormous software, from God, why not?

dhw: 3)It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness.

No, consciousness is an essential component of the mechanism which in my theistic version has been supplied by God, but this must not be equated with human self-awareness. We KNOW that other cell communities (organisms) are sentient, react to the environment, take decisions, communicate etc. These are all attributes of consciousness, and the big unanswered question is to what extent the cell communities are capable of using their consciousness to create something new. I accept your scepticism, but not your outright dismissal.

My outright dismissal continues. Shapiro's bacteria make simple responses in their DNA modifications, and remain bacteria.

dhw: 4) It ignores the obvious teleology presented by the history (Nagel). There is no need for humans to appear. The historical tiny preparations for bipedalism go back 37 million years and offer no survival advantage to explain them, but teleology does.

I do not accept your “obvious” anthropocentric teleology. There was no “need” for ANY multicellular organism to appear, since bacteria have done very nicely. There is no evidence that early “tiny preparations” for bipedalism offered no advantages.

Did you carefully look at the tiny alterations? It is the same animal living the same lifestyle!

dhw: Malassé conjectures that even early hominins “may have been capable of conceptual and creative innovations”. The history shows hominins – just like pre-whales – developing stage by stage towards an optimum form.

The 'stages' are huge gaps in brain size and bipedal alterations of the skeleton. Of course early hominins had concepts and innovations. You are again tying mind to the physical. The hominins did not will themselves into something better. They did not know what they did not know!

dhw: However, the theistic form of my hypothesis also leaves room for God to dabble. I do not deny that our extraordinary degree of consciousness sets us apart from our fellow animals, and I could imagine your God deciding to tweak a bit here and a bit there to get something really special. But I can’t imagine him preprogramming the first cells with the whole of evolution, including itsy-bitsy “preparations” for the one species he wanted all along.

As a non-believer, thank you for the concession to dabbling. It must be pre-program or dabble.