Natures wonders: bacteria can spear amoebas (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 30, 2017, 12:13 (2640 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Do you really want me to ask you yet again how the complexities of the 8-stage whale, the monarch’s lifestyle and the weaverbird’s nest have contributed to the evolution of the human brain?
DAVID: Again, to provide food sources for evolution to take time to do it.

According to you it isn’t evolution that does it but your God, via preprogramming or dabbling. So back we go: your all-powerful God’s primary purpose was to produce the human brain, and that’s why he preprogrammed or dabbled the higgledy-piggledy bush, so that he would be able to take his time over producing the one thing he really wanted to produce. And you find that logical.

dhw: Once multicellularity had occurred, and more and more new organisms came on the scene, survivability would have been a crucial factor, though not the only factor.
DAVID: We have no proof that survivability is a major issue due to population density, as you imply. Density is only an issue since WWII when we are displacing animal habitats.

I do not imply population density at all! Where did you get that from? The obvious example, as you keep reminding us, is that all organisms must eat. Carnivorousness alone would have spawned innovations for catching prey or avoiding being preyed on. Or the environment changed, and organisms had to find new means of acquiring food, which = new means of survival, e.g. by leaving the land and entering the water. Nothing to do with population density, but everything to do with survival and improvement (which frequently go hand in hand).

dhw:Once and for all: bacteria have survived, so NO further evolution was necessary for survivability. Multicellularity happened, and then there were new ways of exploiting the environment, new threats to survival, new means of surviving those threats…etc.
DAVID: See my comment re population density. Survival of the fittest is an unproven conjecture.

So how do you explain extinction, if not through the “conjecture” that extinct organisms were unable to cope with conditions at the time, whereas the survivors did cope?

DAVID: More and more complexity led to the brain, the most complex object of all.
dhw: So how does that make it logical for your God to have designed and redesigned and re-redesigned pre-whales, although his primary aim was to produce the human brain?
DAVID: I will stick with a balance of nature in the oceans.

You have admitted that you don’t understand why your God had to design and redesign the pre-whale, and you have admitted that balance of nature simply means life continues, regardless of the human brain.

dhw: Neither you nor I know where the borderline exists between adaptation and innovation.>
DAVID: Major phenotypic changes, as you describe, produces new species. that is the dividing line.
dhw: Phenotype simply means characteristics determined by genes or modified by the environment. Of course major changes produce new species. So if an organism moves from land to water, and its legs change into fins, enabling it to adapt and improve its lifestyle in the water, what is the dividing line between adaptation and innovation?
DAVID: I agree that major adaptations of the kind you describe are innovations. I use 'adaptation' as minor alterations of existing species, and major 'innovations' as speciation. Just semantics.

It’s not just semantics. You are confirming the point I keep trying to make: if major adaptations are innovations that lead to speciation, the SAME mechanism may be responsible for minor adaptations AND for innovations. You seem to accept minor adaptations as autonomous (i.e. without your God’s intervention), but you think your God must preprogramme or dabble major adaptations. That is why the dividing line is important. To put it in concrete terms, if finches can autonomously change the size and shape of their beaks, why shouldn’t pre-whales autonomously change the structure of their legs, or monarchs autonomously organize their migration, or weaverbirds autonomously design their own nests? The (perhaps God-given) mechanism I am referring to is, of course, cellular intelligence.