Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 28, 2017, 13:11 (2704 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is either pre-programming, dabbling or both. Pre-programming is massive, dabbling less intense since it is an adjustment.
dhw: 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: I started by thinking pre-planning at 3.8 billion years is one way, and stepping in for speciation by dabbling fits the history. But I see another kind of change that is obviously a minor change/preparation as in the change in a monkey skull position showed 37 million years ago. That certainly is a dabble in the true sense of the word. I start with God in charge, whatever the terminology.

Starting with God in charge doesn’t alter the fact that your “dabbling” means direct intervention, as opposed to preprogramming (your 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme). I shall have to repeat the question I asked under “gaps are very real”: are you now saying your God is incapable of intervening without pre-planning in order to make major saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change?

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.
dhw: 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.”
DAVID: Not gratuitous. It shows God set up patterns in advance to make the process of evolution easier to manage. I had to answer 'godless nature' which is just as gratuitous by your reasoning.

Of course “godless nature” is gratuitous. That was my point. When a scientist tells us neutrally about patterns, there is no more reason for you to say “God did it” than there is for an atheist to say “Godless nature did it.”