Evolution: frog adaptation (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, September 21, 2017, 12:58 (2618 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Once again you are skipping over the issue of gaps in the fossil record. Even the few intermediate forms are giant leaps in form and function. You do not answer how this is covered. My answer is foresight and planning to look at a current goal.. No crystal ball fuzziness required.

dhw: You can’t plan unless you know what you are planning for, i.e. future conditions. That is crystal ball gazing, unless you are arguing that your God preprogrammed every environmental change in the history of evolution.
The gaps are saltations, i.e. major adaptations or innovations with no known intermediate stages. These are the great mystery of evolution. Your hypothesis is that your God preprogrammed every single one 3.8 billion years ago, or dabbled them personally, even though his primary aim was to produce the human brain. My hypothesis is that cell communities have the intelligence (possibly God-given) to design their own major adaptations or innovations. You’ve heard all this a hundred times over, so why you regard it as “skipping the issue” of gaps, i.e. of saltatory major adaptations or innovations, I don’t know.

DAVID: You skip over the point as usual. Please look at the whales. We both know exactly what conditions have to be planned for to have an air breathing mammal enter water as a full time environment. You constantly overlook the issue of purpose. Darwinism doesn't know where it is going. Evolution is either chance or knows where it is going. Whether you realize it or not, you start your thinking from a chance approach.

You start with the assumption that the whale entered the water fully equipped for aquatic life (although incomprehensibly for you, it took your God eight stages and millions of years to perfect the equipment). From my perspective, this is the wrong starting point. Pre-whale would have entered the water to explore. From then on, each stage would have been an improvement, as it adapted to life in the water, which was its purpose. You yourself keep admitting that you don’t know the purpose of the eight-stage whale, let alone how it links up with what you keep saying is God’s primary purpose, the production of the brain of Homo sapiens. As for my thinking, it starts with the unknown factor of how life originated, and I cannot believe in chance or in God, which is why I remain agnostic. From the moment living forms appear, I regard them as pursuing the purposes of survival and/or improvement, and the only chance element is environmental change. If God exists, I suspect that his purpose was to produce a show for himself (but this need not mean detachment – he could have feelings just like ours). If he does not exist, the universe has no purpose, but organisms have their own purposes, as above. I don’t think I can express it any more clearly.