Evolution: frog adaptation (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 27, 2017, 10:56 (2612 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Yes big IF's. But those are the only two choices. The Cambrian gap was Darwin's biggest bugaboo. The sudden appearance of such complex organisms require enormous elements of foresight and planning. Within our experience we know that only a planning mind can accomplish such developments. That mind must exist.

dhw: We have no experience of such developments. None of us were around at the time, and so we do not “know” anything. We speculate. Why should it be beyond the bounds of possibility that your all-powerful God could invent a mechanism capable of autonomous innovation? Besides, we should not forget that your hypothesis is not confined to Cambrian gaps, or are you now withdrawing your insistence that only your God could have designed the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, the parasitic wasp etc.?

DAVID: I think God stepped in at many levels. I've not changed. I don't know why it is so important to you that God gave organisms an inventive mechanism. It is just an other way for God to be in control. I use God's control as signifying a purpose in how evolution plays out. Are you trying to get rid of purpose?

We have spent years discussing your proposal that your God’s prime purpose was to create the brain of Homo sapiens – a hypothesis that throws up so many illogicalities in relation to the higgledy-piggledy bush of life that even you admit to not understanding much of it. I am proposing that instead of your God controlling every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution, he set the wheels in motion by creating an autonomous inventive mechanism (though he could dabble if he wished to). We have just devoted several posts to discussing my suggestion that by doing so he created a show that he watches and is interested in. That is a purpose to which you have agreed (with the strange proviso that you don't know what watching and interest mean to God). It also explains the higgledy-piggledy bush. At last you have recognized that my hypothesis does not exclude your God or limit his powers other than when he decides to let organisms (including humans) control themselves. What it does do is offer an explanation of evolution that eliminates all the illogicalities and unanswered questions that bedevil your own hypothesis. To echo your post: I don’t know why it is so important to you to have your God designing the weaverbird’s nest.