Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, October 16, 2017, 15:07 (2593 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You speculate that your God’s prime purpose was to produce the brain of Homo sapiens so that we would think of him. (Earlier, it was so that we could have a relationship with him.) You attack my suggestion that he created a spectacle for himself as “humanizing”. It is no more “humanizing” than your own suggestions.

Spectacle is pure humanizing. Look at our history: from gladiators in ancient Rome to cricket to soccer today we create sports for entertainment. What if God is pure purpose. More logical than your humanizing approach.

DAVID: Not so. As stated before the 'survival of the fittest' concept is circular reasoning.

dhw: I agree, but that was not the point we were discussing. You quite rightly wrote that “evolution requires responses to challenges for survival”. Of course it does, and I added the drive for improvement, which can mean improving chances of survival as well as taking advantage of new opportunities provided by environmental change. What is "suspect” about that?

What I see in the history of evolution is over-improvement. First multicellularity. The in humans such as our hand ability, our brain. Therefore a drive to complexity. If 99% of all have disappeared, survival is not a major point, just Darwin's supposition.

DAVID: I mean inanimate. I view early living cells as inanimate. You are again offering God in charge, but in a secondary way. Fudge factor.

dhw: Inanimate means without life, so I don’t know how living cells can be without life. There is no fudge in my hypothesis that your God deliberately created a mechanism that would enable organisms to improve themselves.

I used inanimate in the sense of mentation. You are strictly right. The fudge is God's secondary mechanism in your hypothesis is still God in control.

DAVID: I'm the guy who presented the whales. I see what seems unreasonable, but find what I think are reasonable answers, such as balance of nature in the oceans. Balance of nature is feeding homeostasis, a continuous process as you admit. Life itself in all organisms is a continuous homeostasis or it can't continue. It requires a continuous biochemical mechanism of struggle to maintain everything in a body in upper and lower limits of a normal range.

dhw: You are merely repeating what I have said above: all forms of life require some sort of balance (homeostasis), or life can’t go on. The balance constantly changes. That is true whether there are humans or not. If there had been no whales, there would have been a different balance. Nothing whatsoever to do with God’s prime purpose being the production of Homo sapiens’ brain. You know “balance of nature” does not answer the questions thrown up by the illogicalities of your hypothesis, and that is why you keep admitting that you have no answers.

Of course without whales the balance would be different, but still balanced. But the whales are HERE. We are dealing with an evolutionary history presented to us to interpret. Should we get rid of great apes in discussing how humans appeared? I logically interpret history as I see it. It tells me it needs a planning brain, which you, illogically , can't accept. You overuse the word 'logic', amazingly, as a supposed defense.