Evolution: frog adaptation (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, September 25, 2017, 13:24 (2614 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is amazing to me that you cannot recognize the need for planning the changes that must occur within the gaps in the fossil record. I'm not glossing. I see the need for intelligent planning. You simply do not. Of course speciation is due to 'challenges and opportunities'. I'm suggesting a portion of the requirements, planning with foresight and then changing. Nothing else will work.

dhw: I’m delighted at your recognition of the fact that speciation is due to challenges and opportunities. It is amazing to me that you cannot recognize that these challenges and opportunities must arise before organisms change. Why would a pre-whale’s legs change to fins before it even found out that life in the water was better for it than life on land? The very idea of your all-powerful God fiddling with it in advance, and then doing seven more fiddles over the next few million years (“Oops, forgot the blowhole!”) as he perfects the process, while all the time actually wanting to produce the brain of Homo sapiens, stretches credulity to snapping point. But NB, my hypothesis is not atheistic, just in case you scurry back to origins. The (hypothetical) mechanism that would enable organisms to respond to (as opposed to prepare for) challenges and opportunities may have been your God’s invention.

DAVID: But I'll stick with the requirement that changes required by challenges and opportunities require foresight and planning to jump the gaps. Thank you for noting God might have helped. And note you have never answered the problem of the gaps as exemplified by the Cambrian animals.

So you will stick with your “explanation” that you don’t know why your God prepared pre-whales for life in the water eight different times over several million years, although his prime purpose was to create the human brain. My hypothesis is not that God “helped” but that if he exists, he provided the mechanism enabling organisms to help themselves. The problem of the Cambrian gaps is solved if the autonomous mechanism for minor adaptations is also capable of major adaptations and innovations in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by changes in the environment. I accept that this is the big “IF”. The problem is also solved if there is an unknown, sourceless, intelligent mind that preprogrammed every single environmental change, major adaptation and innovation 3.8 billion years ago, or kept popping down to Earth to do the necessary. That is also a big “IF”.