Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 28, 2017, 15:14 (2706 days ago) @ dhw

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?

dhw: 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.

Adaptation is not speciation, which is the core issue about gaps, and I'm not discussing environment, since speciation can occur with or without it changing. The giant phenotypic changes seen in speciation require advanced planning to coordinate all the new different parts. That is design!

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.

dhw: 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?

It is my God, not your non-existent God, who produces new species with or without environmental change. Yes, it an be on autopilot.

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.

dhw: 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!

Twisting my concept again! The brain operates using my consciousness during life, releases it at death where consciousness continues to operate on its own. Example: In NDE's when the brain revives it learns what the NDE contained as experiences from the returning consciousness.