Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 19, 2017, 17:50 (2590 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Why are the human brain and hand “over-improvement”? I find mine quite useful actually.
DAVID: Of course you do. But the apes have survived with all their clumsiness.

dhw: And bacteria and whales and the duck-billed platypus have also survived. How does that make my brain and hand an “over-improvement”?

I was comparing them to the apes, who started as we did but have not changed, yet survive. A different view than yours.

DAVID: 'Possible dabbles' are watching, guiding and correcting. God in control.

dhw: Of course possible dabbles would be God in control. Those would be individual events (like Chixculub), not every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder. One of the great advantages of my hypothesis is precisely that it leaves room both for God and for dabbles, but it also accounts for the uncontrolled (i.e. higgledy-piggledy) bush.

How do you know it is uncontrolled? You assume it.

DAVID: You got rid of whales in your discussion so I suggested imagining evolution without apes.

dhw: We both believe humans and apes descended from a common ancestor, but I can easily imagine evolution without apes AND without humans. If it hadn’t been for Chixculub, there might never have been any primates. Stroke of luck? Your God doing a dabble? Who knows? But I’m not disputing evolution! I’m disputing the relevance of your “balance of nature” argument to your insistence that the whole of evolution was geared to the production of humans.

Evolution takes time and our brain is a surprise result, in my view.

DAVID: I logically interpret history as I see it.
dhw: ...you keep acknowledging that my hypothesis fits the history and answers all the questions you cannot answer. Why are you so afraid to acknowledge the possibility that your God wanted to create the ever-changing spectacle of life’s history, which he watches with interest?
DAVID: Explained above. He is a more serious personality in achieving His purposes.

dhw: I’m envious of your personal acquaintance with him, but so far the only serious purposes you have come up with are that he wants us to think of him, and he wants to have a relationship with us (although he remains hidden), and so he had to create/preprogramme eight stages of whale and the weaverbird’s nest and the duck-billed platypus, because how else could an all-powerful God have kept life going until he produced the one thing he really wanted to produce? And you claim that this is a logical interpretation of history.

I certainly think it is perfectly logical. You don't. All of this refers to balance of nature to supply the energy for evolution to continue.