Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, June 29, 2017, 13:12 (2705 days ago) @ David Turell

I am juxtaposing various posts here and elsewhere in order to fit them under more appropriate headings:

DAVID: 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!

Once more, the alternatives are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. An action can be purposeful (by design) without being planned in advance, as is the case with adaptation. I am not saying that speciation is the same as adaptation. My hypothesis is that the same mechanism may be able to innovate. NOBODY knows how speciation took place, and so any explanation – including your divine 3.8-billion-year computer programme for every innovation - can only be hypothetical.

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

I don’t know what you mean by “it can be on autopilot”. You gave me a slightly different answer on the “whale” thread:
DAVID: God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation, and it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to environmental change. Saltations are planned design.

I’m happy to accept that saltations don’t have to be tied to environmental change. But I’m focusing on when they are – e.g. in response to an increase in oxygen. You presumably agree, then, that your God is capable of producing a species change in response to environmental change (though it doesn’t have to be). My point, which I made in a previous post, is that the matter in dispute is therefore not whether saltations must be planned in advance of environmental change. If God can do it in response, the question is whether cell communities have the know-how to do it too. You say they haven’t, but that is not the same as saying the changes have to be planned in advance. I suspect that very few naturalists would insist that the movement of pre-whales from land to water with its eight stages of saltations had to be preprogrammed by God 3.8 billion years ago.

DAVID (under “big brain size”): But you don't want to accept God. If you accepted what I present as 'evidence' you would have to accept God. So be it. We'll continue the debate.[
dhw: Irrelevant when our discussion is not over the existence of God but over his motives and methods. You constantly try to divert attention away from the self-confessed senselessness of your anthropocentric evolutionary hypothesis. (“If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense.”)
DAVID: It doesn't have to make sense if one is blindly faithful. I'm trying to make some sense of it with you, but you are blinded to the faith side of the issue.

Of course blind faith dispenses with sense. I am trying to make sense of it, but now you are telling me that it doesn’t have to make sense if one is blind, and somehow this makes ME blind!

DAVID: Creation of consciousness in the pinnacle of evolution (H. sapiens) is an obvious purpose. Its development is not explained otherwise. And you deny chance! God might want to be able to communicate with His creations.

Nice to see you humanizing your God again as you search for a motive, and I don’t have a problem with that, or with human consciousness being some kind of pinnacle, or with the denial of chance. I have even allowed for all this in my own hypothesis of cellular intelligence, with the possibility of a divine dabble. What bothers me is your blind faith in your theory that 3.8 billion years ago your God planned in advance every single species in the history of evolution, all for the sake of just one species, and he stuffed all these programmes into the very first cells. Now you’ve even dispensed with the alternative of dabbling!