Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 30, 2017, 18:51 (2489 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Planning means to design for an advance. My point is the gaps in fossils require advanced design (planning) to be viable and work in the newly advanced form. I think you are playing with words. Speciation is a gap. Adaptation is the same species, slightly changed.

dhw: I am fully aware of the difference between adaptation and speciation, and keep emphasizing that my proposal is that the same mechanism is responsible for both: namely, that the intelligent cell communities are able to change themselves. Adaptation (which often has to be rapid) is proven, but saltatory innovation is not, which is why it remains a hypothesis.

You are again avoiding the issue of advanced planning for major changes, which the gaps represent. Your committees must be able to envision the future form to make the plans. That requires a mind which does not exist in clumps of cells. Your hypothesis has no basis.

DAVID: "Autopilot": fully planned from the beginning, the 3.8 billion year old blueprint.

dhw: Thank you. In that case, you did not answer my question, and now you have left out all the comments that followed. You wrote that “God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation”, in which case he is perfectly capable of organizing speciation in response to environmental change and without advanced planning. If he can do it, I suggest he is capable of creating a mechanism that can also do it.

We've agreed on this except, with the one difference that He provides the guidelines for the planning. Imagination of the future requires a mind who provides guidelines.

dhw: 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. […]

DAVID: ...it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith!

dhw: I can hardly forbid you to have blind faith in a theory you consider senseless, but by the same token you will have to allow atheists to have blind faith in their theory too, and yet you’ve written two excellent books in an attempt to tell them why they’re wrong. Are you now saying that we should not question anyone who has blind faith in a theory? Or is it only someone with blind faith in YOUR theory that shouldn’t be questioned?

I'm not going to change my conclusions. You have a perfect right to object to them, even though you cannot accept that God exists and has managed evolution to produce humans.