Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 28, 2017, 13:06 (2706 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
dhw: 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.
DAVID: I have idea what your concept is, but it makes no sense. You have declared that you accept design as a requirement and it stops you from being an atheist, but you deny the need for planning. What is design but advanced planning?

The alternatives that you rightly present are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. If an organism adapts to a changed environment (response) it does so by design and not by chance and not by advanced planning. I am proposing that innovation proceeds in the same way as adaptation, by responding to the needs or opportunities presented by the environment, and not by planning before the environment changes. I agree that there is no evidence they are capable of producing innovations, and that is why it is a hypothesis, like your divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme and dabbling.

DAVID: Back to itty-bitty steps, no evidence just gaps. Unbelievably enormous software, from God, why not?
dhw: My hypothesis says nothing about itty-bitty steps. I accept the concept of saltations.
DAVID: Saltations are full-blown actuated designs, from plans! As I interpret it, the only way your concept might work is by tentative tries, some success and some failures until it is gotten right and working.

Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?

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!
dhw: 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.
DAVID: You are again equating life/brain/ consciousness and afterlife/consciousness. That is two different circumstances. I view them as separate circumstances, with different conditions.

They are different circumstances, because when you are dead you no longer have a brain. That does not mean the brain does the thinking during life and the mind only starts thinking when you are dead! (See the “big brain” thread.)