Evolution: frog adaptation (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, September 22, 2017, 13:15 (2617 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Again skipping over the clear problem. Your pre-whale wishes to live in water. He has purpose. Now he needs to design some changes so he can achieve his goal. He has to understand what is required in order to modify. He needs to see needs in his future role.

He, or rather his cell communities, must design changes, and they have to understand the problems, but this does not relate to the future. To put it in concrete terms: legs are not as useful in water as fins. The pre-whale is in the water. The cell communities work out a way of changing the legs to fins, just as cell communities work out ways of changing short beaks into long beaks (your epigenetic changes). This is not future planning. It is adjusting to present conditions.

DAVID: You gloss over this entire problem of how " [they] pursu[e] the purposes of survival and/or improvement". Something must be acting with foresight to cover the large gaps in form and physiology that the fossil record shows. Your cover your nebulous concept with the word "pursue" or "pursuing".

There is no glossing over. We know from minor adaptations that organisms react to their present circumstances, and change accordingly. They do not look into a crystal ball and forecast the conditions that will require them to change. You accept this for minor but not for major changes. What we don’t know is the mechanism that enables them to accomplish the latter. You say it is a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or direct dabbling by your God. I propose that it is the same cellular intelligence that enables them to accomplish the minor changes.

DAVID: We know that only a mind can plan. This is the basis of the ID philosophy. You could accept that and not include God.

I accept that only intelligence of some kind can produce the minor and major adaptations and innovations that have resulted in the great evolutionary bush of life. I also accept the possibility that this intelligence was invented by your God. I do not accept that these adaptations and innovations must be planned in advance.

Meanwhile, you continue to gloss over the dislocation between your God’s so-called prime purpose and the higgledy-piggledy bush, which includes the story of the whale, plus the problem of why your all-powerful God needed eight stages and millions of years to come up with his final version of the whale, as well as the huge problem of the extent to which your planning God plans all the environmental changes, local and global, that trigger organismal change.