Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 14:55 (2705 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Total misinterpretation. Dabbling requires almost as much planning as a totally new species.
dhw: First you agree that there's no need for advanced planning, and RESPONSIVE DABBLING is possible, and next day you disagree! Dabbling is your alternative to preprogramming as your God’s means of producing new species!
DAVID: It is either pre-programming, dabbling or both. Pre-programming is massive, dabbling less intense since it is an adjustment.

Why? You have always presented the two as alternative modes of speciation, and choosing between them was your “dilemma”. Adjustments or modifications are the terms you have previously used for adaptation. In any case, you agreed to responsive dabbling as a possibility, and a response does not take place before the conditions it responds to. Out goes “advanced planning”. If you think your God is incapable of making innovative changes in response to changed conditions, then by all means say so, but then you are limiting his powers.

DAVID: This book review covers the patterns of animals and plants in nature suggesting 3.8 billion years is correct:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-nature-scales-up-1498239216
QUOTE: Unsurprisingly, evolution keeps nudging organisms toward those properties, which again are similar for every species, because they depend on physical laws that are independent of biology. (DAVID's bold)
DAVID’s comment: Note the bold and the fractal patterns, all given by God to guide the process of evolution. And in bold God knows logarithms!
dhw: Seems to me like confirmation of common descent. Can’t see any mention of God.
DAVID: The patterns reflect the pre-planning that God employed. I didn't say God was mentioned.

Then the comments you make are gratuitous. How would you respond if, after every discovery relating to evolution, someone commented: “The patterns reflect the manner in which godless Nature has produced a sequence of organisms arising from a common ancestor.”

xxx
DAVID: That is why I choose God as the ultimate consciousness. Logical faith again.
dhw: You have left out my comment that I do not see any logic in claiming that the source of consciousness is consciousness.
DAVID: I don't think life invented consciousness. I feel it had to pre-exist life in God.

I know you do. I am simply pointing out that one can’t explain consciousness by saying it was the product of consciousness. Or one doesn’t solve a mystery by proposing another mystery.