Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 14:49 (2493 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
Dhw: 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.
DAVID: 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.

I keep repeating that the mechanism is responsive – no complex planning involved. At one point you agreed that your God may have worked through responsive dabbling – again, no advanced planning involved. But you hurriedly withdrew your agreement the next day by claiming that responsive dabbling also meant advanced planning! (See the “whale” thread for your latest variation on the subject.) As regards evidence, I have repeatedly acknowledged that there is no more evidence for my hypothesis than there is for yours, as at the top of this post.

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

My hypothesis says nothing about itty-bitty steps. I accept the concept of saltations. If you say “why not?” to an unbelievable hypothesis, I can say “why not?” to a hypothesis which at least is an extension of scientific fact (there IS a mechanism whereby organisms rapidly change themselves in order to adapt to new conditions), and which draws on the conclusions – albeit controversial – of certain eminent experts in the field, who claim that cells/cell communities are sentient, intelligent, decision-making, cognitive beings.

3)It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness.
Dhw: 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. […] I accept your scepticism, but not your outright dismissal.
DAVID: My outright dismissal continues. Shapiro's bacteria make simple responses in their DNA modifications, and remain bacteria.

And he calls this “large organisms chauvinism”. In any case, your objection was wrong. My hypothesis does not require the mechanism to create consciousness. In my theistic version, your God has already supplied the consciousness.

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

Then the tiny alterations are all the more incomprehensible. I thought you believed in saltations, not the itty-bitty steps you ridicule in your first response. My comment was based on Malassé’s conjectures, as below.

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.
DAVID: 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!

It is you who are tying mind to the physical by insisting that the physical gives rise to mental concepts. Every invention is the result of a mind producing a concept that had not been known before. You are arguing that every new concept resulted from an expansion of the brain. You may be right. But if you believe the mind lives on independently of the brain, the process has to be the other way round.