Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, October 20, 2017, 17:01 (2589 days ago) @ David Turell

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

I can hardly disagree that apes are apes and humans are humans and both have survived. What I don’t understand is why my brain and hand are an “over-improvement”. I consider them to be an improvement, in keeping with my argument that evolution develops through a drive for survival and/or improvement. (But that does not mean all apes should have turned into humans.)

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

Agreed, since none of us “know” anything. However, I can see absolutely no evidence that every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct has evolved in accordance with an overall plan of any kind other than the production of the vast variety of innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct. In particular I’m disputing the relevance of your “balance of nature” argument to your insistence that the whole of evolution was "controlled" so that it would lead to the production of humans.

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

Of course evolution takes time. That simply means life has been evolving for 3.8 billion years. Looking at the history, starting with single cells, I regard every animal, insect, bird, fish as a surprise result, though I would agree that human intelligence is an especially surprising result.

dhw: [...] 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.
DAVID: 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.

It is perfectly logical to say that life needs energy to continue. That has nothing to do with your anthropocentric interpretation of life’s history. But if you really and truly believe that your God could not have produced humans and could not have had his relationship with us (while remaining hidden) if he hadn’t taught the weaverbird to build its nest, so be it.